Read Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly” and you’ll never eat brunch in this town again.
Nor will you want to. And for that matter, you’ll probably never request your meat well-done, order fish on Mondays – or order mussels anywhere where you don’t personally know the chef.
Still, that shouldn’t stop you from dining out, says Bourdain. “Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park,” he says. “Enjoy the ride.”
Bourdain sure is. More than 25 years after scrubbing pots in some Provincetown tourist trap, the tall, skinny 43-year-old is not only an executive chef at New York’s Les Halles, but a best-selling author with a three-book contract. New Line has just bought the rights to “Kitchen Confidential” (Bourdain’s hoping Gary Oldman plays him in the movie), and his life’s looking as rosy as the well-marbled steaks in the glass case at Les Halles.
He’s clearly thrilled about the reaction “Confidential” has garnered – the phone calls from line chefs and busboys applauding him for telling the truth over the sounds of banging pots in the background.
“I thought I was writing a cult memoir for line cooks and chefs,” he says. “I’m not George Orwell, but I remember what it was like to read him when I was bearding mussels and peeling potatoes and see how little had changed, that my struggle was part of a continuum.”
Not that there hasn’t been angry mail, too – mostly from vegetarians (“the enemy of everything good and decent and an affront to all I stand for”), Emeril Lagasse fans and foodies, whom Bourdain suspects feel “betrayed” by the thought that their favorite restaurants might have been recycling bread or melting down table butter – all practices he says he’s witnessed in his checkered culinary career, along with the “three-second rule”: If you drop something on the floor and pick it up within three seconds – on the bounce – it’s good to go.
“Not everyone would admit knowing about it,” he says, “but it’s true.”
What he hasn’t seen, he says, are cooks spitting in the soup.
“Sabotaging the food isn’t something you want your peers to see,” he says. “We may not like it when you send your food back, but we know you have to give the customer what he wants. It’s foolish not to.”
And what customers want, Bourdain knows, is food that won’t make them sick. Hence his warnings about well-done meat (cooks, he claims, immolate only the worst cuts) Monday’s fish specials (they’ve been there since Thursday) and brunch (Saturday night’s leftovers en vinaigrette).
Bourdain also tells readers to be leery of any restaurant with a dirty bathroom, a sullen or unkempt-looking waitstaff, and sushi, pasta, hamburgers and nachos all on one menu.
The recent Web postings of board of health reports seems to amuse him. “We’re a gossipy bunch, chefs, and we take pleasure in the misfortune of our peers, even if we like them a lot,” he says. “So if we read that a really good restaurant has rodent infestation, it’s funny. We know what it’s like.”
Les Halles, he’s told, is on the Web, too – having been cited recently for storing cold food at temperatures above 45 degrees.
“Oh yeah?” he says. “Cool.”
When he goes out, Bourdain says, he wants nothing more or less than the freshest meat and fish in town. He likes the restaurant Sushi Samba and the ceviche at Chicama, braised beef shoulder at Indigo and almost anything at Veritas, whose chef, Scott Bryan, he clearly worships.
“The last thing I want to do is scare people away from restaurants,” he says, lighting up another cigarette. “If the food looks good, looks fresh, tastes good – it is good. Eating out should be an adventure.”
Just skip the mussels.