Let’s not think of a depressed Anthony Bourdain. Instead, let us see him as a happy boy who had just had his first oyster.
The family had gone out to sea with Monsieur Saint-Jour, a fisherman, on an oyster boat. Young Tony, all of nine, was hungry. Monsieur Saint-Jour asked if any of them would care to try out an oyster.
“My parents hesitated. I doubt they’d realized they might have actually to eat one of the raw, slimy things we were currently floating over. My little brother recoiled in horror. But I, in the proudest moment of my young life, stood up smartly, grinning with defiance, and volunteered to be the first,” he writes in Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly .
He took the raw oyster in his hand, tilted the shell back into his mouth as instructed by the now beaming Monsieur Saint-Jour, and with one bite and a slurp, wolfed it down. “It tasted of seawater… of brine and flesh… and somehow… of the future,” he says.
Spoon fed
We now know of the end, but that then was the beginning of a great chef’s food journey. Bourdain, who took his life on June 8, knew as a fourth-grader that there was no turning back: “The genie was out of the bottle. My life as a cook, and as a chef, had begun”.
This passage propelled me to re-read a book called How I Learned To Cook , edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Meehan. I went back to the piece about Ferran Adrià, the man known the world-over for experiments in molecular gastronomy.
“I was not one of those children, who at the age of six or seven, discovers an enthusiasm for baking cookies. I did not watch, ablaze with curiosity, as my grandmother stirred the family broth,” he says.
All that he wanted to do was play football and party. It was to collect money to go to Ibiza — which he saw as a mega party place — that he began working as a dishwasher in a restaurant. He went from one restaurant to the other, fed the men in the Spanish Navy and headed the admiral’s kitchen — all by chance. In 1984, he joined the kitchen staff at El Bulli — and went on to become one of its owners.
Sushi story
I like the story of Masaharu Morimoto, who introduced sushi to the world. On the day the father got paid, he took the family out for sushi, he writes.
“While we were at dinner, my parents were relaxed, even enjoyed themselves,” he says. They would resume their fights the morning after, but they were a happy family at the restaurant.
“Is it any wonder that I thought becoming a sushi chef was a noble and worthwhile pursuit,” he asks.
Let’s also recall the story of Heston Blumenthal, of the iconic The Fat Duck. For him, it all began with a meal in L’Oustau de Baumanière restaurant in France.
“I had never seen anything like this before,” he writes. There were perfectly-appointed tables with immaculate linen, silver, china and crystal. The family sat outside as the scent of lavender wafted in.
Young Heston ate red mullet fillets sauced with a light vinaigrette and paired with tomatoes, basil and green beans; meat and kidneys from a baby lamb baked in puffed pastry; gratin of potatoes and aubergines. “There was something about the experience, something so fantastic yet so tangible, that I knew this was what I wanted to do,” he says.
And, indeed, they all did what they wanted to do. As in ‘Author, author’, it’s time we coined a new phrase — ‘Chef, chef!’
The writer likes reading and writing about food as much as he does cooking and eating it. Well, almost.
