4 days ago
Maybe what the world needs right now is another Anthony Bourdain
Like Anthony Bourdain, I am a little bit early. This August will mark 25 years of his memoir, Kitchen Confidential.
But Bourdain was always two steps ahead. He still exists in most people's imaginations as 'the first celebrity chef' (Marco Pierre White or indeed the 19th century's Marie-Antoine Carême might have something to say on that); he pioneered, though didn't invent, the travelogue-cum-food television genre; he showed up for every appointment 20 minutes ahead of time, the New Yorker magazine's
Helen Rosner once revealed.
So it strikes me as fitting to mark Kitchen Confidential's anniversary two months in advance (though this is where mine and Bourdain's similarities begin and end).
This is because it is in keeping with that enterprising spirit (I continue to flatter myself) and because the content of Bourdain's universe – the subject of his memoirs, his novels, his TV shows – is universal, always interesting and perhaps the only thing consistently relevant to every living person.
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There is no bad time to write in tribute to Bourdain because there is no wrong time to think about food.
Take, for example, his 2014 trip to Iran for the television show Parts Unknown. The country was escalating its incursion in Iraq and the social temperature was in flux (some controversially argued the regime was liberalising). Something was definitely changing (weeks after appearing on the show, two Iranian journalists were put in prison).
But as Bourdain made clear, no matter the mutable weather of Iran – the friendliness of its people contrasted with the vitriol of its anti-American rhetoric – food remained the ancient and unchanging universal.
[
Anthony Bourdain: The sceptical outsider baffled by fame
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And that was the soul of Bourdain: whether it was the tahdig he shared with the Iranian journalists, soon to be imprisoned; the cow's foot he ate in a Haitian enclave in Miami as Haiti itself was about to experience a devastating hurricane; or the maqluba he ate in Palestine in 2013.
This was a marrying of the timely (the politics of the West Bank at the beginning of the 2010s) and the universal (the falafel made by everyone in the greater region); the ephemeral (the spectre of a liberalising Iran) and the material (the tahdig). Forget the pre-Socratics, Bourdain more than anyone understood this organising feature of the universe.
I cannot help but think that if food was of central analytical importance, then – I was perhaps just too young to quantify seriously the extent of global upheaval in 2013 and 2014 – it must be all the more central now.
But where is the Bourdain-redux eating borscht (with apologies for the regional stereotyping) with Ukrainians in Kyiv? Sharing a hamburger with Donald Trump just as he shared bun cha in Vietnam with Barack Obama? Proving the truth behind the mawkish and sentimental dreck that there is a culinary universal language?
It needn't be so lofty, of course. In the long swooping arc of history the little things matter too. Yes, there is the goat stew that ties the 21st century Iranian with their ancient Persian forebears, linking ancestors through every political permutation of the country.
Sure we can we think about the potato and its central importance to the trajectory of the Irish people – from the devastating Famine in the mid-1800s to source of a hackneyed and annoying stereotype in 2025. And what about the long shadow cast by Italy's historical Risorgimento movement on the culinary landscape of the Italian-American in New York today? Fine.
But Bourdain was as concerned with the prosaic as he was with all of that stuff. It's not always about the shifting geopolitical sands, but the quotidian life of a restaurant; one not rendered any more or less interesting because of its location within or outside of a war zone.
He struck fame in 1999 with his now-clichéd advice in the New Yorker
that you shouldn't order fish on a Monday (it has been sitting there since Friday, by now cloudy eyed); that the worst cuts of meat are reserved for whoever orders it well-done; that chefs prefer weeknight diners over the fair-weather weekend ones.
Perhaps none of this applies any more. It certainly sounds less original and significantly more pedestrian 25 years on. He was a better writer than chef, something he was willing to admit.
And Bourdain had a tendency toward equivocation (on the one hand Iran ran an oppressively conservative regime towards women, but on the other hand the men on the street were terribly friendly to him). He was an imperfect rhetorician and a troubled man
whose life ended in suicide
.
But there are perennial truths to the world constructed by Bourdain: chefs are mercurial; food is always about more than just food; the daily banalities performed in the kitchen are not incidental to an important life but the source of one; and fish goes off.
Maybe his task was all too easy: ventriloquising things that were as true millenniums ago as they will be millenniums from now. He just happened to be the first to really do it.
