He was a chef with a checkered past, a peripatetic career and no writing experience. Then an old college chum in the marketing business offered him a 10-day vacation in Cozumel if, when he returned, he would write a novel, any kind of novel.
It was an offer that appealed to a man with an acknowledged quirky mind. Less than six months after the trip in 1993, a satirical crime thriller called “Bone in the Throat,” was finished. The friend showed it to Random House, and Anthony Bourdain, cook at a small Village restaurant, became Anthony Bourdain, chef-novelist.
“I just knew he was a remarkably talented individual and that he could do it,” said Gordon Howard, the Vassar roommate and friend who started it all.
Bourdain’s second novel, “Gone Bamboo,” is being published this month by Villard, a division of Random House, and a lot of yellow legal pads have been covered with the first draft of his next novel. But, he said, there is still the sense “this is a scam I’m getting away with.”
He sprawled in a chair in his plant-filled apartment overlooking the Hudson River on the Upper West Side, occasionally maneuvering himself into a pretzel-like position. Down the hall, in the kitchen, a whole roasted red snapper, redolent of garlic and herbs, was laid out awaiting lunch.
“There’s a lot of similarity between writing and cooking,” he said. “Both require endurance and consistency, and both are show business in a way.”
But for the 41-year-old author, there’s also a major difference. The assurance he has in the kitchen doesn’t always extend to his writing. “Doubts gnaw at me when I’m writing,” he said. “Doing the actual work is tough.”
Bourdain is now the executive chef at Sullivan’s, the Broadway restaurant next to the Ed Sullivan Theater, where David Letterman tapes his show. Supervising a staff of 10, he is there up to 12 hours a day, six days a week, work he describes, tongue-in-cheek, as “more air traffic controller than culinary.” His staff is aware of his second career but, he said, “to them it’s not honest work.”
“My cooks view my writing career with suspicion,” he said. “It isn’t tangible. There’s something a little shady about it.”
Shady might also be said to apply to many of the characters in his books–gangsters, small and big-time, who leave a lot to be desired morals-wise. As for the two principals in “Gone Bamboo”–think “The Thin Man.”
“I always liked Nick and Nora,” he said, referring to the fun-loving socialite sleuths played by William Powell and Myrna Loy in the movie series of the 1930s and ’40s. He ticked off their appealing features–“lazy, slothful, alcoholic, lustful, all presented in an unapologetic way.”
His ambition in his latest book was to update Nick and Nora, he said, to include all the characteristics he loved plus an extra one–“murderous.” Which is why his principals, Henry Denard, a CIA-trained assassin (and he doesn’t mean the Culinary Institute of America), and his wife, Frances, who knows her way around the barrel of a gun, are “a sinful couple, New Yorkers, with many vices, transplanted to the Caribbean.” Their goings-on are only partly explained by the title, “Gone Bamboo,” a World War II term used to describe British paratroopers who returned after spending time in the jungles of Asia.
Bourdain said he thinks of his characters first–“the plots come later once they start talking to me”–and he’s generally amused when his cast comes together. “Crime as work appeals to me,” he said. “The guy who gets up in the morning and makes his living by crime. I’ve always been a crime buff and a big fan of crime jargon and in the restaurant business, I’ve met a bunch of gangsters.”
Other aspects of his restaurant experience have also come in handy as background.
“The kitchen at best is like a submarine or pirate group,” he said. “It’s very high pressure and a sense of humor is absolutely necessary. The thing I like particularly is the jargon, the affinity for profanity, the creative use of profanity.”
His prose is punctuated with food and cooking references.
One character, Mickey, the owner of a tropical beach bar, gets up to some pretty fancy fare. At one point, he produces “a gleaming mandoline,” making paper-thin waffle slices of sweet potato with “spirits visibly lifting with each slice.” And Mickey’s lobster sauce is, he says in no uncertain terms, “all about reduction.” The passage continues:
“You gotta reduce, reduce, reduce. And you don’t let the brandy flame the shells. That’s the mistake everybody makes. You burn the little hairs the lobster got on his tail there, you do that … you get a burnt taste. And you roast the garlic first, before you use it.”
“You gonna put in some butter?” Donnie wanted to know.
“At the end I put the butter,” said Mickey. “Right at the end. That’s called monter au beurre, you wanta know.”
Despite his literary credentials, his friends haven’t changed, he said.
“The people I know and count on, who find me amusing and who I find amusing, are all cooks,” he said. “I know very few writers.”
What’s ahead? Not “Refrigerators of Famous Chefs,” which he said he considered for a few seconds and abandoned because, “most of them would hold nothing but water and an old carton of fried rice.” More promising is the book he’s actually writing, “Medium Rare,” about a rivalry between chefs that turns violent.
Eventually, he’d like to give up both gangsters and chefs and move on. First to “my dream book, a definitive, foody memoir, a ribald account of my 22 years in the restaurant business that would probably appall and horrify anyone thinking of hiring me.” But by then it wouldn’t matter. He’ll be ready, he said, to burn his bridges in the restaurant business and become a full-time writer.
