THENASTYBITS (4 page)

I wouldn't really care what they put in those burgers—if they tasted good. And though I
do
care that the rivers of Arkansas are clogging up with chicken shit to satisfy the world's relentless craving for crispy fried chicken fingers, I don't believe that we should legislate these cocksuckers out of business. My position is kind of the Nancy Reagan position on drugs: "Just Say No." Next time you find yourself standing slack-jawed and hungry in front of a fast-food counter—and a clown is anywhere nearby— just turn on your heels and head for the lone-wolf, independent operator down the street: a pie shop, a chippie, a kebab joint, or, in New York, a "dirty-water hot dog,"
anywhere
that the proprietor has a name. Even that beloved British institution, the chippie, is preferable to the clown's fare; at least you are encouraging individual, local business, an entrepreneur who can react to neighborhood needs and wants, rather than a dictatorial system in which some focus group in an industrial park in Iowa decides for you what you will or should want. Deep-fried cod or plaice with vinegar, haggis with curry sauce; these may not be the apex of healthy eating, but at least they're indigenous to somewhere—and, washed down with enough beer or Irn-Bru, they're quite tasty. The kebab shop makes food that is at least fresh, and a beef shawarma does not require the addition of beef flavor to make it taste like food.

Whenever possible, try to eat food that comes from somewhere, from somebody. And stop eating so fucking
much.
A little portion control would go a long way in slimming down our herds of heavyweights in their tent-like T-shirts, Gap easy-fit pants, and baggy shorts. (Apparently taking body-sculpting cues from some of our more humungous rappers, these guys ignore the fact that many of their heroes probably have to wash themselves with a sponge at the end of a stick.)

You may as well stop snacking on crap while you're at it. You don't
need
that bag of chips between meals, do you? You're probably not even enjoying it. Save your appetite for something good! Take a little more time! All that rage and frustration, that hollow feeling so many of us feel—for so many good reasons— can be filled up with something better than a soggy disk of ground-up assholes and elbows. Eat for nourishment, yes, but eat for pleasure. Stop settling for less. That way, if we ever
do
have to get in there and "smoke evildoers out of their holes," at the very least, we'll be able to squeeze in after them.

A COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS NOBODY ASKED FOR

if you can catch
a chef in a quiet, reflective moment over a drink, and ask what the worst aspects of the job are, you will probably get the following answer: "The heat, the pressure, the fast pace, the isolation from normal society, the long hours, the pain, the relentless, never-ending demands of the profession."

If you wait awhile, maybe two more drinks, and ask again— this time inquiring about the
best
parts of being a chef—more often than not, the chef will pause, take another sip of beer, smile . . . and give you exactly the same answer.

This is something you might keep in mind at the very beginning of your cooking career, chained to a sink in a crowded sub-cellar, doing nothing more glamorous, hour after hour after hour, than scraping vegetables or washing shellfish: It doesn't really get any better. In fact, I know a number of accomplished chefs and sauciers who suffer from what we call "dishwasher syndrome," meaning that at every available moment between delicately spooning foamy sauces over pan-seared scallops and foie gras, or bullying waiters, they sneak over to the dish station and spend a few happy, carefree moments washing dishes. This is not as bizarre as one might think. Many of us yearn for those relatively carefree days when it was a simple matter of putting dirty plates into one end of a machine and then watching them emerge clean and perfect from the other side. Similarly, I have seen owners of multiunit restaurant empires blissfully sweeping

A
COMMENCEMENT
ADDRESS
NOBODY
ASKED
FOR

the kitchen floor, temporarily enjoying a Zen-like state of calm, of focused, quantifiable toil far from the multitasking and responsibility of management hell.

Cooking is, and always has been, a cult of pain. Those of us who've spent any time in the business actually
like it that way.
Unless we've gone Kurtz-like over the edge into madness, and started believing, for instance, that we are no longer cooks but spokespersons for supermarket chains, or forces of nature responsible for elevating the eating habits of a nation, then we know who we are: the same people we have always been. We are the backstairs help. We are in the
service industry,
meaning that when rich people come into our restaurants we cook for them. When our customers play, we work. When our customers sleep, we play. We know (or should know) that we are not like our customers, never will be like our customers, and don't want to be, even if we put down a nice score now and again. The people in our dining rooms are different from us. We are
the other thing
—and we like it like that. We may be glorified servants, catering to the whims of those usually wealthier than us (I mean, who among us could afford to eat in our own restaurants regularly?), but we are tougher, meaner, stronger, more reliable, and well aware of the fact that we can do something with our hands, our senses, the accumulated wisdom of thousands of meals served, that
they
can't. When you're tired after a hard day in the kitchen, and some manicured stockbroker is taking up too much room on the subway, you have no problem telling the stupid prick to shove over. You deserve it! He doesn't.

Does this sound macho? It isn't. Men, women, anyone who works in a professional kitchen should feel the same way. They work harder, under more difficult conditions, in an often fly-by-night industry with uncertain futures, catering to a fickle and capricious clientele in an environment in which you can do everything right and
still
fail. This environment tends to breed a clannishness, a tribal subculture, a tunnel-vision view of the world where "there's
us
—and there's those
like us"
and screw everybody else. We have to cook as best we can for them, but that doesn't mean we have to
be
them.

So all those hours scraping carrots, scrubbing oysters, pulling the bones out of pig trotters, tourneeing turnips, in the end, pay off. In addition to becoming expert, presumably, at those valuable tasks, you are asserting your reliability, your toughness, and your worth as someone whom an overworked chef de partie or sous-chef or chef might want to take under their wing, invest a little time and attention actually teaching, helping you to climb out of the cellar and up to the next level. You are also coming to an understanding—a
real
understanding—of what the hell it is that we really do in this business, meaning, we transform the raw, the ugly, the tough, and the unlovely into the cooked, the beautiful, the tender, and the tasty. Any cretin can grill a steak after a few tries. It takes a cook to transform a humble pig's foot into something people clamor for. This is the real story of haute cuisine, of course: generations of hungry, servile, and increasingly capable French and Italian and Chinese and others, transforming what was readily at hand, or leftover from their cruel masters, into something people actually
wanted
to eat. And as the story of all great cooking is often the story of poverty, hardship, servitude, and cruelty, so is our history. Like the shank of beef that over time becomes a falling-off-the-bone thing of wonder when slowly braised in red wine and seasonings, so too is the prep cook transformed—into a craftsman, an artisan, a professional, responsible to himself, his chef, his owners, his coworkers, his customers.

A stressed, badly rested, overworked three-star chef is not going to take time out of his or her very busy day training some young
commis
to clarify stock properly if there's any doubt whether that
commis
will still be around, still focused, and still motivated in three months. The very real need for dreary, repetitive functions like squid cleaning serves a secondary purpose in weeding out the goofballs, the people who thought they wanted to be in The Life—but don't really understand or want that level of commitment. If some of these budding culinarians feel that they are not, for instance, comfortable with being

a commencement address nobody asked
 
for

spoken to harshly, or dismissed with an expletive in a moment of extremis, then they usually lack the basic character traits needed for a long, successful run in this greatest of all businesses.

Much is made of the emotional volatility, even the apparent cruelty, of some of our better-known culinary warriors. And to the casual observer, the torrent of profanity likely to come the way of an inadequately prepared
poissonier
can seem terrifying and offensive. And there
is
a line not to be crossed. Bullying for its own sake, for the sheer pleasure of exerting power over other, weaker cooks or employees, is shameful. If I verbally disembowel a waiter during a busy shift for some transgression, real or imagined, I sincerely hope and expect that at the shift's end, we will be friendly and laughing about it at the bar. If a cook goes home feeling like an idiot for trusting me, working hard for me, and investing time and toil in pleasing me, then I have failed in my job. Good kitchens, however hard the work, and good chefs, should breed intense loyalty, camaraderie, and relationships that last lifetimes.

Most reasonably coordinated people with hearts, souls, and any kind of emotional connection to food can be taught to cook, at some level or another. It takes a special breed to love the business. When you pursue excellence
for yourself
—not for dreams of TV stardom or endorsement deals, not for the customer, not for your chef, but for yourself—then you are well on your way to becoming the kind of lifetime adrenaline junkie professional culinarian recognizable in any country or culture.

I can't tell you how many times I've talked about this with chefs and cooks around the world. Whether it's Singapore, Sydney, Saint Louis, Paris, Barcelona, or Duluth, you are not alone. When you finally arrive, when you take your place behind a professional range, start slinging serious food, know what the hell you're doing, you are joining an international subculture in "this thing of ours." You will recognize and be recognized by others of your kind. You will be proud and happy to be part of something old and honorable and difficult to do. You will be different, a thing apart—and you will cherish your apartness.

FOOD AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS

"MAYBE YOU SHOULD DRIVE,"
I
Said.

I yanked the blood-red Cadillac Eldorado onto the shoulder and stomped on the brakes. Ruhlman, sunning himself in the passenger seat, was thrown forward, mashing his folding sun-reflector into the dash and spilling beer all over his lap.

"You filthy pig, Bourdain," he screeched, "that was the last beer!"

Ruhlman is a big man, six-foot-four like me, but wider, with big corn-fed Midwestern shoulders—and when he gets those thick forearms and meat-hook paws around your neck, it's already too late.

I had good reason to be afraid. He was in an ugly mood. I'd dragged him away from his wife and children, from the relative calm and civility of his beloved Cleveland, all the way across the country to this godforsaken desert, to
Las Vegas
no less—the Ugly Shorts Heart of Darkness—to assist me in the production of a television show (and the writing of this article) on the burgeoning celebrity chef scene. As coauthor of the Bouchon and French Laundry cookbooks, and as a respected writer on the subject of chefs, he was uniquely placed to help me. He'd been to Vegas before. He knew the histories of the personalities and operations I was interested in—and his reputation and deceptively innocent aw-shucks manner and preppy good looks might, I hoped, make me (a vicious interloper if ever there was one) more welcome in town. My plan had been to get him liquored up, then piggyback on the research he'd spent many months if not years assembling. If nothing else, I knew he could get me a good table at Bouchon.

But he'd turned on me. And not without reason.

In the past few days, in the interests of television entertainment, I'd induced him to wear the same loud, electric-blue Hawaiian shirt every day. I'd repeatedly shot (and badly bruised) him during a ferocious game of indoor paintball; fed him beer and liquor from sunup to late night; then, when he was vulnerable, remorselessly interrogated him about Vegas culinary history. I'd watched him lose terrible sums at blackjack—all this while being regularly force-fed gargantuan, two-time-a-day tasting menus as the cameras rolled and I jotted down his every comment.

Now, we'd been driving back and forth for hours in the scorching desert sun—so the television crew could get that perfect
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
"homage" shot—and it wasn't going well.

He
had
to drive. I was in much worse shape than he, my head pounding from the previous night's mile-high frozen margaritas, my heart racing with terror in my chest. What
had
I been thinking?
Six
days to research, cover, write, rewrite, edit, and deliver an article for a respectable major publication—while
simultaneously
making an hour-long episode of a show that would (and did) require every variety of bestial, excessive behavior. Even now, there was a Sammy Davis Jr. impersonator waiting for me in the Neon Boneyard, an accordion convention to attend, and more food—always more food, more meals to eat—before I was due, on the last day, to jump out of an airplane at two miles over the desert with the Flying Elvi skydiving team.

"Pull yourself together, Ruhlman," I howled over the blaring radio. "Pouring beer on yourself is good. Helps avoid sunstroke. And having an open receptacle in the car is, I'm pretty sure, illegal—even in this state. Now snap out of it. And drive us to Bouchon!"

*
     
*
     
*

Las Vegas: a bright, hopeful land of opportunity for chefs—or the elephant graveyard for cynical cooks-turned-restaurateur/ entrepeneurs? A well-deserved final score for celebrity chefs, after a lifetime of toil; a last cash-out before knees fail entirely and brains cook—or just a soulless extension of The Brand? Was it
possible
to serve truly good food; maintain one's standards, one's integrity; do
good works
in Vegas's mammoth, air-conditioned Xanadus, this neon-lit theme park, these Terrordomes of twenty-four-hour beeping, bleeping, and jangling slots? Were these names of recognizable and respected chefs, these distant outposts of empire, simply far-flung knockoffs, expensive reproductions of what were once the soulful, heartfelt expressions of their strengths and dreams—now only farmed out cookie-cutter versions? Or were they just as good as their flagships, the same, only subsidized by the shattered hopes and dreams of the hapless souls two floors down, feeding their disability checks in increments into the endless banks of blinking, uncaring machines?

These were the serious moral issues I was grappling with as Ruhlman crushed his size-thirteen foot onto the gas pedal and powered the eight-cylinder red beast off gravel and onto asphalt, toward Thomas Keller's Bouchon, the place I hoped would provide an answer.

A few days earlier, we'd visited some usual suspects. Inevitable, really, that we'd hit Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill first. I figured that a purer example of branding could scarcely be found. I was looking for an easy hatchet job. A clear case of reptilian regeneration, a restaurant group expanding unthinkingly, like a chameleon grows back a lost tail. The story arc appeared classic: New York chef becomes fantastically well known on the Food Network, widens operation, opens in Vegas. It's easy, so easy, to dismiss Flay's whole Vegas enterprise with a New York sneer. It certainly does no serious restaurant much help in the gravitas department to locate in the Mega-Coliseum of Uber-Kitsch, Caesars Palace, among the Italianate statuary, the staff in togas, the gurgling fountains and Celine Dion gift shop. Flay's mug looks down on diners and punters alike from a giant JumboTron over the slots—in a continuous loop of clips from his television shows. The restaurant itself looks, from the exterior, like an over-designed coffee shop; only a layer of slightly tinted glass separates the light, modern, vaguely Southwestern dining room from the killing floor.

As we took our seats in the dining room, Ruhlman pointed out an old woman in a wheelchair being pulled reluctantly away from a slot machine on the other side of the glass.

"That's not putting me in the mood."

Over an open kitchen, a satellite-size rotisserie twirled chickens in slow rotation.

"First night they opened, that thing was roaring red at like . . . nine hundred degrees," said Ruhlman. "Would have looked cool if it was red. Or if you could see flames now. But the thing was so hot it would have cooked the customers if they'd kept it cranked. They had to turn it way down, or they would have had customers bursting into flames, running across the casino floor with their hair on fire."

"That wouldn't be good for business," I said.

"You think that would stop these people from gambling?"

Perhaps sensing the general mood of skepticism at our table, a wary-looking flack from the casino's food and beverage department quickly—and sensibly—plied us with novelty margaritas.

"Just let the kitchen cook for us," suggested Ruhlman. "Do what you're good at. Nothing that's not on the menu."

Our very competent server began to lay on the food, making frequent mention of the Maximum Leader.

"Bobby Flay's Spicy Tuna Tartare" tasted like everybody else's tuna tartare these days, which is to say, perfectly respectable, in a south-of-the-border kinda way. A "Smoked Chicken and Black Bean Quesadilla" was a gussied-up smoked chicken and black bean quesadilla. Our margaritas were replenished. Our server presented "Bobby Flay's Tiger Shrimp and Roasted Garlic Corn Tamale" as if repeating the name would add