Professional level cooking is not all about the “best recipe, the most innovative presentation”.It is “economy of movement, nice technique and, most important, speed”.They’re probably not even American.” Tony Bourdain on who cooks. “If the chef is anything like me, the cooks are dysfunctional, mercenary lot, fringe-dwellers motivated by money, the peculiar lifestyle of cooking and a grim pride. “Monk fish was yet to be called little and make its appearance on Manhattan dinner tables.It looked pretty damn good to me on the other side of the line.”ĭuring the 1970s, food culture was still in its infancy in America. The life of the cook was a life of adventure, looting, pillaging and rock-and-tolling through life with a carefree disregard for all conventional morality. Highwaymen rogues, buccaneers, cut-throats, they were like young princes to me, still only a lowly dishwasher. “These guys were master criminals, sexual athletes, compared to my pitiful college hijinks.He noticed that the chefs were treated like gods. His first job in the restaurant business as a dishwasher. How eating oysters in France’s changed Bourdain’s life.I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life – the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether I was drugs or sex or some other new sensation – would all stem from this moment.”

My parents’ shudders, my little brother’s expression of unrestrained revulsion and amazement only reinforced the sent that I had, somehow, become a man. “This, I knew, was the magic I had until now been only dimly and spitefully aware of.

“Whatever has the most shock value became my meal of choice.”.

A “Mecca for foodies.”Īfter these experiences, he was motivated by spite to understand food in a way that his parents wouldn’t be able to understand.

La Pyramide is one the best restaurants in the entire world.

“Food, it appeared, could be important.

The ride from New York to Cherbourg felt like “riding atop a giant lawnmower.”Īnother landmark moment in Bourdain’s discovery of food: his parents left him and his brother in the car for three hours while they dined in this called La Pyramide.

“I remember everything about the experience: the way our waiter ladled it from a silver tureen into my bowl, the crunch of tiny chopped chives he spooned on as a garnish, the rich, creamy taste of leek and potato, the pleasurable shock, the surprise that it was cold.”.

He ate this soup called “Vichyssoise” that was cold rather than hot. Bourdain’s first experience really enjoying food came aboard a cruise to France.

Kitchen confidential cover