With celebrity chefs and chic eateries enjoying unprecedented cultural cachet in American life, Chicago Tribune staff reporter Marja Mills caught up with New York City chef/author Anthony Bourdain and waitress-turned-author Debra Ginsberg and prevailed on them to reveal a side of the restaurant business that most of us never see.
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Restaurants are their own brand of theater, and what goes on behind the scenes can be as tense and chaotic as any backstage on Broadway. Except backstage at restaurants means crowded, chaotic kitchens where chefs have to pull off their performance every night amid knives, steam and a kitchen staff swearing in any number of languages.
New York Chef Anthony Bourdain is emerging as an irreverent tour guide for those kitchens and what he calls the “culinary underbelly.
Lean, funny, and plenty profane himself — imagine a George Carlin type riffing on restaurant life — Bourdain is executive chef of Manhattan’s Brasserie Les Halles and author of last year’s best-selling “Kitchen Confidential.”
Bourdain depicts hard-drinking, drug-taking characters, himself included, working the punishing hours of restaurant life. He also divulges unsavory trade secrets, such as the way certain restaurants sneak stale leftovers into Sunday brunch buffets.
Having sold the film rights to “Kitchen Confidential,” Bourdain is to be technical adviser on the movie, which tentatively has been titled “Seared.” Variety reports that “Seared” will again bring together “Fight Club” director David Finch and star Brad Pitt.
Meantime, with book contract in hand and film crew in tow, Bourdain is off on a foodie’s fantasy. He is eating his way around the world in search of culinary thrills for a book and TV Food Network program, both tentatively titled “A Cook’s Tour.”
Bourdain spoke with the Tribune recently by telephone from his New York apartment and later from Melbourne, Australia.
Q. How are restaurants different, in terms of what goes on in the kitchen, than what customers might imagine?
A. The public might be surprised that it’s not Emeril in the kitchen, going “Happy, happy.” It’s a bunch of foul-mouthed, very hot, brutish-seeming people working under extremely hard, hot conditions doing the same hard, difficult function under incredible pressure and heat over and over and over. It resembles, even at a high level, factory work more than a lot of people would like to admit or understand.
Q. So what’s the attraction for you and other chefs you know?
A. It’s a creative outlet for people for whom finding that kind of creative satisfaction might otherwise be difficult. It’s instant gratification. You make something with your hands that people enjoy. There’s a very rigid, traditional, centuries-old hierarchy. You know where you are in the chain of command.
There’s the sense that you’re part of a subculture with its own language, its own tribal customs. You know, like being in organized crime or a secret society. That always feels good, to be part of something that’s centuries old.
Q. These horror stories you hear of how restaurants sometimes prepare food; what is the real deal with that in your experience? Do people ever spit in the food?
A. No. I don’t know what it’s like in the world of short order but in quality restaurants and even mediocre restaurants now things are better than they have been at any time in my career. I haven’t seen anybody spit in food or willfully adulterate it in well over 20 years. You would make yourself very unpopular among your peers if you were to do something like that.
Q. What is the worst thing you’ve seen happen in a kitchen in the last five years?
A. Lazy cooks microwaving food, cooks dropping food on the floor and picking it up on the bounce, cooks working really sick with the flu, you see a lot of that. . . . Cooks and waiters tend to work when sick.
Q. How do you and other chefs and cooks you know view the dining public?
A. Frequently as an abstraction. You want to make the customer happy. But the perfect moment of happiness for the chef — for me, anyway — is those few seconds when a well-made plate of food is assembled and put in the window. It’s almost a personal moment. You find yourself almost cooking for yourself and your peers in the kitchen.
Q. You mentioned tensions when a chef gets the seasoning just the way he wants it and then right away the salt shaker is in the customer’s hand. How do you deal with that?
A. The customer’s paying for the food. If they want to tear it up, overseason it, pour ketchup on it, it may hurt me a little bit but I’m not going to let it drive me crazy. I think these people who are depriving their customers of salt and pepper shakers need a reality check. This is the food service business and we are not Picassos.
Q. What about drug use in kitchens?
A. The amount of cocaine use, in particular, in kitchens has really shrunk. But it’s still pretty wild, particularly with alcohol, because it’s so readily available. . . . I don’t do any white powders anymore and I don’t tolerate it in my kitchen. Drug use is a lot less accepted than it was in the past.
Q. What are the occupational hazards?
A. It’s an extraordinarily high-pressure task. They have to let it out one way or another. People get pretty jacked up, still. There’s ephedrine sports drinks being consumed, and multiple cappuccinos, that sort of nonsense.
It’s a very high turnover business because people crack. They throw tantrums. . . . I imagine we share a lot of the same problems that air traffic controllers do.
You’ve got your cuts, burns. Alcoholism is a real risk. There’s always a risk of getting involved with drugs. It’s a constant temptation because if you get off work and there’s still a big bar [scene], drugs are always accessible so there’s always that invitation open and liquor is almost always free.
Q. You have the caveat at the end of your book that this is your experience and not all kitchens necessarily resemble the ones you’ve worked in.
A. That’s certainly true. But I have to say on the other hand, I’ve been traveling all over the world and talking to chefs and cooks. And at the end of the shift they all have that evil glint in their eye and seem to be in a real hurry to behave badly.
Q. You’re not a great fan of brunches.
A. Cooks see it as a punishment shift for people who aren’t trusted to work Friday and Saturday night. And we see it as a marketing scam. We’re charging $12.95, $13.95 for two eggs and an orange slice.
And we all live by the French dictum of `Use everything.’ And of course, brunch is an an open invitation to make cute little items that are in fact merchandized leftover odd bits. I’m sure there are places that proudly specialize in brunch. But most places I know it’s the shift cooks hate working. They don’t like to see themselves as egg cooks. They don’t like the customers because they’re not the same as their dinner customers.
Q. What do you make of the celebrity that so many chefs seem to be enjoying these days?
A. I’m happy about it but I’m baffled by it. I was just talking about this with somebody. Why such a mania for chefs and food? Not just here but in England as well.
I’m guessing it has something to do with sexually repressive times. I think it has a lot to do with AIDS. I think it’s a lot less threatening to have Emeril in your kitchen than Keith Richards.
I think that perhaps in some strange way eating and thinking about food and fairly non-threatening, cuddly and adorable chefs is a safer avenue than skinny, junkie rock stars or sort of cultural icons of the past.
Q. Do you think any of that celebrity enjoyed by chefs also is because as a country we’ve become more knowledgeable about food?
A. We definitely have. There’s no question about it. Since I started out in the business, if you just tracked wine consumption by Americans, the sophistication of the American diner has really improved by leaps and bounds.
Q. Why is that, do you think?
A. Maybe it’s a financial thing. A fashion trend thing. I really don’t know. But eating out has become interesting and something that people are interested in doing and interested in talking about and reading about and seeing on TV, which is all for the good. I’m very happy about it, obviously.
Q. Waitress and author Debra Ginsburg talks about the built-in tension between chefs and servers.
A. At the end of day, no matter how much we abuse each other and hate each other in the middle of the shift, the people that we drink with, hang out with, socialize with tend to be other people in the restaurant business, which is to say cooks and waiters do much of their drinking, socializing and sleeping together within the restaurant family. So it’s all one big dysfunctional family in my view.
Q. On your current round-the-world search for culinary adventure, where have you found the biggest thrill so far?
A. I ate the still beating heart of a cobra and then chased it with its blood, in Vietnam.
Q. Chased it with its blood?
A. Yeah. They bring the cobra right out to the table, hissing and rearing its head. They snip out its heart and it’s still beating.
Q. What was that experience like?
A. It’s like eating a hyperactive oyster.
Q. How accurate is the portrayal of chefs at the movies these days?
A. I haven’t seen an American film yet that has done it right. [Except] “Big Night” I thought was terrific. . . . The big food movies for chefs — we talk about this a lot — are “Tampopo,” the Japanese film about really food-crazy Japanese, and “Eat Drink Man Woman,” the Chinese film which was just absolutely wonderful and breathtaking.
Now Al Pacino, in “Frankie and Johnnie” — Mr. Method Actor — should have been pinned to a steak and flayed alive for his completely inaccurate and boobish portrayal of a short order cook. It was horrible. The sporty little red neckerchief alone was something no self-respecting chef would ever wear. His technique in knife-handling was inept and bungling.
