When the Black Hoof – a restaurant specializing in charcuterie – first opened its doors in Toronto a couple of years ago, I ended up there one night with a bunch of kids in their early 20s. They were hip. They were cool. They knew how to work the no-rez system and had strong opinions about the off-cuts scrawled on the blackboard. They were jonesin’ for the Hoof’s tongue sandwiches and the bone marrow soup. Dinner quickly became a pissing contest about who had eaten more nasty bits in their short dining careers – the off-cuts their immigrant grandparents probably spent a lifetime trying to avoid. A few companions were also Jewish; for them, pig’s feet and chicharrones scored even higher points.
Whether or not they knew it, they were living proof of Anthony Bourdain’s influence on North American culinary culture, and of a seismic shift in our dining culture over the past decade. Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s gritty tell-all memoir of life in New York’s culinary underbelly catapulted the chef to fame 10 years ago and made working the line in a professional kitchen seem cool. The disgruntled cook pulled back the Wizard of Oz’s curtain, exposing the industry’s tricks of the trade and forever ruining any pleasure a “civilian” could take in discount sushi or a Sunday eggs Benny.
Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, by Anthony Bourdain, Ecco, 282 pages. $28.99
Along the way, he dished out stories of sex, drugs and the kind of antics that might even make Keith Richards blush. His new-found celebrity won him a second career as a popular television host (A Cook's Tour, No Reservations). Suddenly, Bourdain was loose on the streets, searching out the craziest, wackiest, tastiest foods around the globe. The cook had left the kitchen. And we all wanted what he was having.
Medium Raw, Bourdain’s sequel, takes stock of both the changes in his life and in the culinary world he inhabits. Which are quite a few. Bourdain kicked his heroin habit, got divorced, remarried (spending time in between with a coked-up heiress, some plastic surgery victims and the Gadhafis on an island in the Caribbean). He is now a doting father – and blissfully uncool. The essence of cool is “not giving a fuck,” he writes.
Despite all his rock ’n’ roll trappings ... Bourdain’s book is really an old-fashioned morality play
Around the same time, fine dining started to feel less relevant. Seemingly overnight, New York chef David Chang became the standard-bearer for a new zeitgeist in dining: small, casual places that served seriously adventurous food – the kind of stuff chefs like to eat, like tripe. Here at home, the trend has been promulgated by the Black Hoof and Montreal’s Au Pied de Cochon, where the cooks look more like skateboarders than the country’s most talented kitchen staff. As Los Angeles Times columnist Jonathan Gold has written: “While nobody was paying attention, food quietly assumed the place in youth culture that used to be occupied by rock ’n’ roll – individual, fierce and intensely political.”
Despite all his rock ’n’ roll trappings, his trademark expletives and po-mo hand-wringing over whether he has now joined the ranks of the hypocrites, Bourdain’s book is really an old-fashioned morality play, where the protagonist meets personifications of various moral attributes along the way. There are Heroes: the defenders of the faith of good food and hospitality. And there are Villains: people who waste food, or disrespect it. For Bourdain, the cardinal sin is doing this knowingly, like the Guy Fieris and the Cargills of the world. It’s “a violation of a basic contract with decency, with the world and its citizens. In a word: evil.” He even has chapters titled Virtue and Lust.
