A Lifetime Ago.

(Originally published on Medium on June 14th 2018, before their distribution settings went weird and the story became invisible)

On June 6th 2018 my friend, and previously commissioning editor, mentioned an interview I’d done for her back in 2005 and wondered if I still had a transcript. I sent it to her and took the opportunity to read it again for the first time in probably a decade.

It struck me how much of the subject’s opinions I’d since internalised as my own and how many of my opinions he’d help cement with his authority. I thought about how ill-prepared I was, how on the crest of success he was, yet how treated me as though I were Clark Kent on assignment for the Daily Planet instead of a lucky fan writing for Fiend, a tiny “dark culture magazine” in Australia. I thought about how generous he was and not just with his time — at the end of the interview I mention we shared a cigarette and we did, but it was a cigarette he gave me.

My friend and I discussed putting the article up online somewhere, maybe someone would get a kick out of it.

On June 8th 2018 that same friend texted “Oh fuck Bourdain”.

You can read Bourdain elsewhere, in his own eloquent words, talking and writing about his struggles, about his drug addiction and his depression. He talked about a “dark genie” inside of him and so maybe the “dark culture” connection wasn’t such a tenuous one after all. Maybe he saw sitting across that hotel lobby table in Melbourne someone similar, a kindred spirit. I certainly did.

Re-reading the interview I wish I’d been brave enough to stop talking about food and instead talk about that darkness that’s always there, that can be pushed back, that you hope is pushed back, but that waits for you to drop your guard. I wish I could have articulated how some of us look for role-models in men around us, men we admire, and how cool he was because of and through his flaws — and how bittersweet it is that he continued to be so cool right until to the end.

Most of all I wish I could have told him to persevere. That enduring despite is the most punk rock thing to do.

If you’re reading this, I’ll say the same to you: persist. You matter, we need you, and you are not alone. If there was anything Bourdain taught us, and there was a lot, is that we are more alike than we are different, that our pains and joys are the same. You are not alone in that darkness, even if it so often fells that way.

Lastly, I hope the words below give you in reading a fraction of the joy they gave me in their obtainment.

Anthony Bourdain. RIP. Thank you.

(Apart from the correction of two spelling mistakes this transcript is unchanged from it’s original 2005 version.)

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[Authorial Intrusion: There will be a few of these, mainly to shed light on esoteric terms or references. It’s probably worth noting that the entire interview is backgrounded by the ambient noise of a hotel kitchen.]

[AI: Probably also worth noting that we had some trouble finding each other and that Bourdain was gracious enough to take time out and fit the interview in regardless.]

Jan Napiorkowski: What I’d like to do, perhaps, is get the obnoxious questions out of the way, the stock standard ones.

Anthony Bourdain: Sure.

JN: Like I said, it’s alternative/dark culture so I want to get the, you know, bad boy of cooking out of the way. Worst thing you’ve ever eaten?

AB: Worst thing I’ve ever eaten? Fermented shark in Iceland.

JN: That was terrible? Is that the one where they bury it?

AB: Yeah, they bury it and then they pickle it in lye or lactic acid. Really, really nasty. That being said, that was not the worst meal I’ve ever had. The worst meal I ever had was in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, California, a vegan twelve-course pot-luck meal.

JN: Hated it?

AB: That was fucking hell, because I was surrounded by the most humourless, cranky, squeamish nerdlingers on the face…

JN: Yeah.

AB: You know it was just bad company and not one of these people knew how to cook a vegetable strangely enough, so it was just a terrifying… bad food, ineptly prepared vegetables, prepared by unpleasant people.

JN: I have another question about vegetarians, but by that, you’d rather have some saltine crackers with good company than…

AB: No question.

JN: …a lovely meal.

AB: You know, it’s like, I’d rather eat a Big Mac with some good music playing than… a nice meal with the Billy Joel boxed set. <laughs>

JN: <laughs> Yeah. This leads onto then, are you really as down on vegetarians as your books say?

AB: I think it is extraordinarily rude in this world, where I’ve been travelling all over the place and incredibly nice people from very cool cultures that go back centuries, often very poor, have been feeding me very well and the thought of… Your personal choices are your personal choices, but the thought of me, for instance, sitting in the Mekong Delta and a rice farmer coming out and saying: “Here is the family chicken, we’re very proud of this. This dish is a representation of our culture, my neighbourhood, my family, my country, it’s our best shot, our purest and proudest expression of what we do here.” And I’m going to stick my nose in the air, “I’m sorry, I’m a vegetarian”. That seems extraordinarily incurious. I have curiosity; I think it is my greatest virtue. I will eat things that go against my deeply held precepts of what food is and what a pet is rather than offend my host. To me vegetarians are exactly the same as the ugly American in the ugly shorts who won’t eat anywhere, when he travels, other than the hotel coffee-shop.

JN: Okay.

AB: That’s what I’m down on them for.

JN: So by that, to you, food is an expression of culture?

AB: It is the purest expression of a culture and of a personality, of a country, of everything. And it’s decided even before you set out on the road, “I’m not interested, I know better. I have a superior philosophy.” It’s imperialism. It’s cultural imperialism. And it’s an appalling arrogance and lack of curiosity and unwillingness to get to know people; it’s just bad fucking manners.

JN: Obviously you’ve been cooking for a long time and eaten many, many meals. Do you find that if you meet someone new and they invite you out for a meal, or invite you into their home for a meal, you can just discern a lot about them from what they eat?

AB: There is no faster way to get to know people, I am absolutely certain. I mean, I’ve dined with the Khmer Rouge, I’ve eaten with the Viet Kong, there’s no question in my mind, I’ve heard first-hand… I’ll be going to Beirut, I’ll be going to Teheran. People are proud of their food. If you go to eat, if your only agenda is: What do you eat and drink for yourself, to give you and your friends and your family happiness? That transcends all political ideology and everything else. If you eat and drink, and keep up especially in the drinks department, their worlds open up for you in ways that would other wise take, a journalist for instance, a long time to get at. You see them at their most unguarded, and their best.

JN: I was going to say that I guess, just from personal experience, over meals, politics, religion, all those things are discussed, so once the alcohol starts flowing…

AB: You’re communicating on a much more… you get right to the heart of the matter. Do I like you? Forget about the ideology and the politics, all of that, it’s secondary to, is this a good person doing the best they can under whatever their circumstances are. That’s my only agenda.

JN: Leading on from that, do you find that palates are really different around the world, and if so, is there one thing you’ve found that people enjoy no matter where they’re from?

AB: Palates are really different around the world. In the English speaking world, we’re at a real disadvantage.

JN: Really?

AB: We grow up… particularly texturally, you know, we think if it’s crispy it’s good, gelatinous we tend to shy away from. What we find is palatable is entirely learned behaviour, it’s not genetic, we’re not born with that it’s something we pick up from our upbringing. Yeah, they are very different around the world, but not so different that it’s not a joy to eat around the world.

JN: Do you find that tastes are changing? Just looking through your cookbook, I bought that, and the sort of food that’s served at Les Halles is really different…

[AI: Les Halles is the restaurant in New York where Bourdain is the head chef. Bourdain’s cookbook is, quite obviously, the “Les Halles Cookbook”.]

AB: It’s retro food.

JN: Yeah, but do you find that people come in and… because there was that period, and obviously Atkins [Diet] and things like that are still around, but you’re serving tripe, boudin noir, things like that, do you find that people will actually come in and try those things for the first time?

[AI: Tripe is the muscular lining of animal’s stomach, usually beef. Boudin noir is a sausage similar to the English Black Pudding. A mixture of pig’s blood and… probably all you need to know, right?]

AB: Yes. Yes. People are becoming more daring and there’s sort of a reaction against a lot of the twee, constructed, pretentious food I think. There has definitely been a sea-change in the last few years. You know, first in the English speaking world there was nothing, you know, we’re all eating crap, we had no food culture at all. Now, with all this attention paid to food I think a lot of people, from sheer exhaustion, are kinda sick of the tropes of fine dining and they’re looking for the good stuff, they’re looking for the authentic, and they’re willing to try tripes and things like that, which are very traditional, but because they’re authentic they’re willing to try it, or because chefs are saying it’s cool.

JN: Yeah.

AB: It’s very much a chef-led thing now, which of course is a good thing.

JN: That was one of the questions I was going to ask. I actually grew up in Poland, so things like tripe and black pudding and, you know, heads and feet, they’re the things that I love.

AB: That’s a huge advantage having that in your background. If your mum told you to eat it, you’d go, “no fucking way! That’s old people shit.” But if chefs are doing it, chefs are telling people this is good, and as a result, to some extent, the public is responding and saying, okay I’ll try it.

JN: And that’s obviously…

AB: Eating habits are changing where you seduce, you cajole, you shame people into eating well. As Malcom X said: By any means necessary,

JN: I was going to ask about your book. Do you think that… Some would say that putting out a book like that would mean that people just stay at home and cook it. Do you find that people will look at the book and think: This sounds great, I want to go out to the real place and try it.

AB: Either/or. I don’t really have an agenda. I would like to think that, instead of reading the book like porn, you know, you’re looking at people doing things in pictures that you’re never going to do any time soon, I’d like to think that people will actually cook from it, there’s no reason they shouldn’t. You know, you’re not born to be a chef, you learn through trial and error. I don’t know, I hope people are cooking at home, I guess I’d like them to, but if they just eat out more and if it raises standards and expectations, it’s good. The enemy is always going to be McDonald’s and the fast-food outlets, what do they specialise in? What is McDonald’s really selling? They’re not selling you a crap burger, really, you know it’s crap when you walk in, okay. But what you’re buying is the absolute assurance that it is the same crap you had last time; it’s selling you consistency. So basically, what they have very successfully done is standardised low-expectations. Okay, you don’t expect a good hamburger, but you know it’s exactly the same thing you had last time in another city halfway around the world. It’s the same great disk wherever you go, and that’s very comforting to a lot of people who just don’t want to spin the wheel.

JN: Which goes back to what you were saying before about the people who are only going to eat in thew hotel café, in the hotel lobby because that weird thing on a stick from the vendor outside is going to be foreign.

AB: Snobbery, squeamishness, those are terrible, terrible things.

JN: Crimes?

AB: They’re not crimes, they’re just terrible, there’s enough of that in the world. Fear, squeamishness, snobbery, contempt.

JN: Okay. What is your favourite food?

AB: Well, my favourite country for food is Vietnam, my favourite country in general.

JN: I got that from the book.

[AI: The book in question here is Bourdain’s “A Cook’s Tour”. I use book interchangeably to mean any one of the three non-fiction books he has written, with the last of the triad being “Kitchen Confidential”.]

AB: I love, I’m passionate about sushi. I’m a French cook, my own roots, I like cooking French, I like cooking Italian, though Italian’s not my speciality. I mean, if I were to die tomorrow it would be roast bone-marrow, that would be my death-row meal.

JN: That was going to be my next question.

AB: My death-row meal would be roasted bone-marrow with toast and a little sea-salt.

JN. And that’s it. Simple.

AB: Simple.

JN: Okay, what is your favourite thing to cook, then.

AB: I like old style, country-ass, French, one-pot dishes. Stews, Cassoulet, pot-au-feu, coq au vin. Country food. Simple food. No steaks.

[AI: Cassoulet is a mixture of duck confit (see AI later on), beans and pork, cooked for hours and hours. Pot-au-feu is a combination of leeks, cabbage, celery, beef, oxtail and veal. Coq au vin is a whole chicken cooked with wine and various vegetables.]

JN: The biggest recipe, the recipe that jumped out at me from your book was the duck cassoulet, the thing that I read and thought, “I really want to try that.”

AB: It’s fun. Just take three days, be casual, you do a little bit now, a little bit tomorrow, a little bit later. It’s a lot of fun.

[AI: I did end up cooking the cassoulet and it was absolutely fantastic.]

JN: Okay, leading on from that, if you had one tip you could give the home cook, what would that be? The most important thing…

AB: Prior preparation prevents piss-poor performance, pin dick, that’s what I’d say.

JN: That’s the biggest difference between home cooks and chefs?

AB: Meaning you think through what you’re going to do. You arrange your mise-en-place; you arrange your stuff beforehand. All of the ingredients, all of the equipment you’re going to need, and by virtue of setting up your area, you’re thinking through the dish: When will I need this? Will I need it now, or will I need it later? How far can I take this dish before the guests arrive? What can I save til last minute and what should I save til last minute. That’s important, just thinking it through, planning ahead. What am I capable of? What are my expectations? What can I reasonably be expected to pull off under pressure when the guests are over? And just, where is my stuff, where is it, physically in the world and at what point in preparation… can I cut the carrots ahead of time, that sort of thing.

JN: Okay

AB: That, and a willingness to try and fail, you know, a good heart.

JN: I got that from your book as well, actually, where you say that the first time you’re going to do this you’re going to fuck it up…

AB: Yeah.

JN: …the second time you do it you’re going to fuck it up, the third and fourth maybe you’ll start getting close to…

AB: The restaurant business, the cooking business has always been about mentoring, about taking people who know nothing, essentially starting at ground zero and through trial and error… you know, all my cooks, half of them came out of Mexican prisons, I don’t need French cooks in my French restaurant, they’re the best French cooks in New York.

JN: Really?

AB: Absolutely.

JN: And you’re finding that you’re taking people who have no skills…

AB: Character, it’s a character issue.

JN: I think I found that most interesting in the book where you talk about, I think you sort of answer that question, where you say that there’s are Mexican cooks and you answer the hypothetical question of, “well, obviously they cook for themselves at home” and you say, “well, no, their mothers did.”

[AI: Book = “Les Halles Cookbook”]

AB: Yeah, they don’t cook at home. But they come from a culture where food is important and a joyous event. And they have a sense of humour and a rich culture that’s conducive to the kind of insanity, squalor, absurdity and inequity of the restaurant business. Meaning, they’re not going to freak out when they see how… it is not a surprise to them that the world is a cruel and unfair place, but there’s a culture, there’s a tradition… I mean, you write beautiful songs about how unfair and fucked-up life is: La puta vida; this bitch of a life. It’s a sense of humour that fits very well in the restaurant business. <laughs> As I said, it’s a character issue.

JN: What would you never cook? Is there anything?

AB: Yes. Anything with soy milk or soy cheese. Anything with, you know, vegie burgers. Anything with margarine.

[AI: It is at this point that I am glad I ordered a black coffee instead of my usual soy latte.]

JN: You wouldn’t be tempted to take, say a veggie burger, and make it good?

AB: That’s a complete contradiction in terms.

JN: <laughs>

AB: No. Fake food, you know, like fake Asian. It’s disrespectful, you know? I don’t make Thai food. I’ve been to Thailand for two weeks, what can I possibly, it’s almost an insult, it’s an insult to Thailand. They’ve been doing food for 600 years, I’m going to go to Thailand for two weeks, come back and start chucking red curry paste around and coconut milk. I would not presume.

JN: So are you talking, you wouldn’t in a restaurant or you wouldn’t even at home, just to try?

AB: I don’t think I’d do it even at home. There are plenty of Thai cooks kicking around, I will worship at their altar, their temple. I’m not starting my own cut-rate outfit.

JN: Do you have a favourite ingredient, something you…

AB: Can’t live without?

JN: Yeah, something you find yourself reaching for almost automatically and having to say, “no, not in this recipe”.

AB: Duck fat, great stuff. Butter, always. I happen to like crushed black pepper a real lot, freshly cracked black pepper. Sea salt. Those are things that I love, you can do almost anything with those things. <laughs>

JN: Do you find that separates a lot of the time things that are cooked in a kitchen versus things that are cooked in the home? Like, people not putting enough butter in.

AB: Well, I think if there’s a single ingredient that separates professionals from home cooks it’s stock. Without stock you really are at a huge disadvantage, particularly when you’re talking brown, you know, veal stock. You can’t use canned, tinned, or base or…

JN: Cubes.

AB: …cubes, it’s just, it’s a completely different solar system.

JN: I think I’m done with the standard questions. In travelling around, did you find any resistance, do you ever find yourself being an intrusion?

AB: I’ve been welcome everywhere. In Russia they’re a little, at first… Japan, those are very kinda closed societies, they’re not friendly initially. Alcohol, as Homer Simpson says, it’s the answer to, and cause of, all of life’s problems. Once you start drinking in Russia, you make friends quick, as long as you keep up. Japan, everyone lets their guard down after a bit. If you get in there, what do you do, how much do you? You know, I’m having a good time, you’re showing me a good time. No, I’ve been welcome, incredibly welcome, everywhere. I’ve been treated with just amazing generosity.

JN: Yeah.

AB: The Khmer Rouge were a little unfriendly. In fact, they were surly. I arrived at a bad time. They’d just negated the amnesty, they were talking about ending the amnesty and rounding them up, that wasn’t exactly, you know, light dinner table conversation, where they’re all, “well, I’m thinking about going back to the jungle”. Not a good time.

JN: And you’re like “I’m going back to New York”. Different worlds.

AB: Yeah.

JN: Did you find anywhere where you wanted to know, where you ate something and thought, “this is amazing, I want to know how to make this” and somebody said to you, “I really can’t tell you”?

AB. No. Everybody will tell you everything. This notion that cooks keep their recipes to themselves is overrated. People are generally very proud of what they do and they’re happy to show you. Now, whether they’re about to translate that into a recipe, more often than not, no. There’s always an x-factor. A sushi chef could show you, well, what is sushi?

JN: Of course.

AB: It’s fish, rice, wasabi and a little vinegar, but that’s ten years of work right there. Three years on the rice, three years on the… they can tell you all they want, it’s not going to help.

[AI: Wasabi is often called “Japanese horseradish” pungent and extremely flavoursome, it’s the traditional condiment for sushi. Sadly, most of the stuff we get over here is actually horseradish with green food-colouring in it.]

JN: So did you find that going around the world, some of the best meals you had were just from common…

AB: Almost always.

JN: …well, not common, but non-professional cooks?

AB: Almost always. Foods in sweet-stalls, hawker stands, farms, homes have been the best. Have been consistently the tastiest. I’m always relieved and thrilled to find myself in some back-alley or someone’s home; those are the best. You know, fancy fine dining meals are almost at a disadvantage, because if you’re spending four hours sitting there with one course after another, it better be goddamn good at this point. It better be something different. And that’s hard in the restaurant business, to be different, to be unique. People tend to follow the herd and there are certain things that just again and again and again…

JN: Pop up?

AB: Yeah. If I eat any more truffle oil, I’m gonna kill myself.

JN: So say, one of those things that you always read about and hear about, The French Laundry, is that…

[AI: The French Laundry. Situated in the Napa Valley in California, it is often called the best restaurant in the world and tops “best of” lists around the world. Owned and operated by Thomas Keller, often called the world’s best chef.]

AB: It is the greatest restaurant in the world.

JN: And it is different?

AB: It is different.

JN: Really deserved of its reputation?

AB: Far and away. It’s way out in front of every other fine dining restaurant in the world. There’s humanity in it. It’s not just incredibly high standards, great ingredients, innovative, ambitious, but there’s a humanity there, it connects on a human level, it’s fun to eat there.

JN: Well, you said something before about people not being born chefs, but do you find that someone like Tom Keller, is he like Michaelangelo, someone you look at and say, “you could have been nothing else but…”

AB: I think he had certain personality traits that were conducive to being a chef, but he has said that he was formed as a chef by his family’s situation as a kid. His older brother was a chef, he grew up without a father, his mom worked, he was left in charge of the house, to clean, and he cleaned very well.

JN: Yeah.

AB: And he’s just very detail oriented. I don’t know of anyone who was born to be a chef, as Jean-Louis Palladin said, “Born? My parents sold me into slavery!”

[AI: Jean-Louis Palladin at age 28 became the youngest chef ever to earn two Michelin stars. Just a giant of cooking. Ran the restaurant at The Watergate Hotel for 20 years. Yes, that Watergate Hotel.]

JN: So you don’t… especially from reading your books, I find that there are moments for you that it does transcend… in the same way that that’s a painting [AI: I point a typical innocuous hotel-lobby painting hanging on the wall near us] but then you get “a painting”, I find that there’s a transcendent quality to certain meals.

AB: Yeah, but usually when you have a transcendent meal it’s not just the food, it’s all these other x-factors that come together. Who you’re eating with, the music that’s playing, what’s going on outside the window, how you felt, what you brought with you to the table, what the other people brought with them to the table, meaning just how they’re feeling. Those are significant factors in a transcendent meal. Everything comes together. You know, cooking is a dominant act. Cooking, particularly professional cooking is a dominant act. Eating is, and should be, a submissive act. Meaning you allow yourself to have the perfect meal. You put yourself in the position to have those things happen to you, you can’t decide it’s going to happen today. You just regularly take a position where I’m reasonably sure something good is going to happen. Sometimes you get fucked, it doesn’t work out. But if you don’t allow yourself to get fucked over now and again, you’re not going to have… all those things are not going to happen to you. They sneak up behind you and pick you up and carry you.

JN: So was that… one of the most memorable parts of the book was, is it in Portugal with the pig slaughter?

[AI: Book = “A Cook’s Tour”.]

AB: Yeah.

JN: Was that…?

AB: That was a great experience, but a deeply troubling one. Sometimes acquiring wisdom and knowledge hurts. Bad.

JN: Was it the first time…

AB: Yes.

JN: …you confronted all those things about what you’d been cooking?

AB: Never seen an animal getting killed before. It was very, very, very upsetting. Really hard. But… that changed the way I cook.

JN: Really? In what?

AB: You know, cooking meat I try not to waste, I try to respect the ingredient; I try to cook it well. Something died for my dinner, I’m not going to throw half of it in the garbage or just treat it like it’s shit.

JN: Obviously that’s how French cooking came about, where people just used… the rich people had the fine cuts, and the poor people had the… everything else, and they made these…

AB: The greatest cooks have always been free of the crippling handicap of affluence. The engine that drives all great cuisines has always been poverty. Necessity. People cook well because they have to.

JN: I’ve found that just from my small experience, and from growing up, and the food… You know, there’s Polish restaurants here now, and when I go and think that this is food that I used to eat as a little kid on the farm and it’s all dressed up and cut nicely and all dressed up with oils and a, it doesn’t taste the same…

AB: Yeah, right.

JN: …and b, it’s… like you said, it’s almost insulting, where I think, you’re making something out of this that it isn’t.

AB: Yeah, when they make something really twee, a twee version of something that was fine just the way it was.

JN: I think the other thing I find is that when portions get smaller it loses something in the translation…

AB: Ummmm…

JN: … where I want, where a particular meal was served as a giant lump and when you have four miniature versions of it around the plate.

AB: Right. The communal… I like food served family style, that’s really fun. I do like tiny bites though. If you’re going to be… I like the Spanish style.

JN: I was going to say yum-cha or tapas.

AB: Bouncing from place to place, grabbing two bites. Because, in fact, after two bites, you’re eating because you should. The experience, the flavour/texture experience is pretty much over. It’s a lot like cocaine, actually. The first hit is good, after that you’re chasing the high.

JN: Maintaining.

AB: No, you’re trying to get back to that original high and you never find it. Cocaine, I mean, food, you experience it for two bites, after that you’re basically just loading. There’s a lot to be said for that, especially when you’re with friends and you’re drinking and eating. But if you’re thinking like a gourmet, meaning I’m here to taste, to experience as many flavours as possible, after two or three, you’ve pretty much had the dish.

JN: I definitely agree with you, I think one of the biggest, and I’ll ask you what the biggest trends in America are, but I think one of the biggest trends here is tapas bars, where people go and you see tables loaded with little plates and little bowls.

AB: Biggest trends across the board are, not so much Spanish food, but Spanish style of eating. You know, casual, standing up or sitting down at counters. The general trend toward ingredient driven rather than chef driven, meaning let the ingredients speak for themselves. More casual, simple. A lot of fancy restaurants are dispensing with the glassware and the nonsense and the flowers and they’re just trying to serve it in a sushi bar type of environment. Where you can sit at a bar and the chefs serve you directly. You know, you’re paying for the food, you’re not paying for the waiter’s uniform. I think there’s a move towards authentic and away from pretentious, I hope so.

JN: The days of the ring…

AB: They’re not dead yet, we’ve got a ways to go, I’m afraid. Let’s face it, you cram food into a ring, you can charge more for it, it’s just that simple. You make it pretty, the punters are going to say, “oh, ain’t that nice, it’s worth it”. Whereas if you just blap on a plate, they’re going to say, “Well, what am I paying for this shit for?”

JN: Ingredients and skill.

AB: Oh, well, most people unfortunately… a lot of people, that’s worth money to people. They took the trouble to cram it into a ring, I must be in a good restaurant.

JN: Well, I’m hoping then, like you were saying, perhaps with the books, with the TV shoes, with all those things, as things become exposed, as the skill and the quality of ingredients becomes a factor…

AB: I hope so. I think things are getting marginally better, but you know, you’re up against the evil empire. It’s so easy to roll into one of these fast-food outlets and shove a bunch of food in your face and move on. For all the great chefs they’re also, you know, they’re recruiting kids in school, look Ronald McDonald, here’s your friend Ronald, he’s more recognisable than Mickey Mouse…

JN: Yeah.

AB: …or Jesus, I think. In Fast Food Nation, they did…

[AI: “Fast Food Nation”. A book about fast food and the American food industry by Eric Schlosser. As scary as it sounds.]

JN: They did.

AB: … “who’s the nice man?” Ronald!

JN: Did you see the film?

AB: Fast Food Nation? No, you mean Supersize Me?

[AI: “Supersize Me” is a documentary by Morgan Spurlock in which he decides to live on nothing but McDonald’s for a month. As scary as it sounds. But a lot funnier.]

JN: Sorry, yeah.

AB: No.

JN: Have you read Fast Food Nation?

AB: Yes, of course.

JN: What did you think about that?

AB: Great.

JN: Great book, yeah?

AB: Frightening.

JN: So do you have that in America where the beef, the milk, all these things that he says in the book are so…

AB: Well he’s a little hysterical about food purity and the dangers of bacteria and stuff like that. We’re designed to process bacteria, he’s a little nutsy about that. I absolutely agree with him about everything, but I don’t fear food, nor am I ideological about organics. I like organics, I’m glad I can afford them. For me, I’m in the pleasure business, is it good, that’s all I care about. Does it cause a tumour in lab rats now and again, I don’t really give a fuck if it’s good, I’ll eat it. You show me a GE tomato that’s better than an organic tomato; I’ll be ordering those. Unless, I mean, if you’re going to tell me that it’s going to destroy the entire human race, which I’m not convinced that it will.

JN: Yeah.

AB: There are a lot of hungry people in this world, so this notion that organics are necessarily better, something I’d like to take a wait-and-see on before I start dismissing it. There’s a certain elitisms to the organics posse. It’s great they can afford it, but there are a lot, a lot, a lot of hungry people in this world for whom whole “is it organic?” is pretty much a ridiculous question.

JN: You would obviously be hunting the best ingredients in what you do…

AB: What tastes best.

JN: What tastes best?

AB: What’s most pleasurable.

JN: So to you it doesn’t matter where it comes from or who…

AB: Well, it matters.

JN: It matters to a certain degree…

AB: But then again, it’s all well and good to have the best ingredients, but most of the recipes we’re talking about here came from people dealing with second and third best ingredients, which is why they had to cook well in the first place. You know, what’s the history of salt? Spices? You know, people weren’t fighting wars over salt and spices because they enjoyed the flavour, it preserved meat. Sauces were designed to mask things, fat, confit was designed to preserve things. It’s great when you have the best ingredients to start with, but stew, nobody would be stewing if they didn’t have to, I mean, in the beginning. They stewed because they couldn’t grill, because their meat was though.

[AI: Confit is a method of preserving meat my cooking and storing it in its own fat.]

JN: Do you do that as a challenge, I don’t know, as a challenge or as just something to do, do you ever find yourself taking just… one of the things that I absolutely adore in Vietnamese cooking is tendon, which I think would be so hard to cook.

AB: Oh, I love that.

JN: Do you find yourself ever taking something that’s not traditionally considered nice and…

AB: Not me, but I eat it all the time. Of course, my most satisfying cooking moments are dealing with a shank, or the tough bits, for which there’s always a traditional recipe, that’s very satisfying to me. But a lot of my happy eating moments, like when I first discovered chicken feet, you know, that’s… going to a Korean restaurant, that’s like cool stuff.

JN: When was that?

AB: Well, I’d had them in Chinatown before, but some people I met in Los Angeles took me out to Koreatown late at night, and we’d just be restaurant and bar hopping in this whole other subculture, where most white people aren’t allowed to see, I mean they don’t even have signs in these places. All Korean, open all night, and this is in a city where you’re not allowed to drink past a certain hour and there’s no smoking anywhere, and people are smoking and drinking and bringing out big plates of barbecued, really spicy chicken feet, it was just fabulous.

JN: That was actually one of my, you probably have those as well, but one of my weird “food as culture” moments was, I’d grown up with chicken feet and they’re one of my favourite things to eat, me and my brother used to fight when…

AB: Yeah.

JN: …when my mother made chicken soup, we used to fight over them, and I remember walking down to eat with a Chinese friend of mine and we were just talking about food and I said “what’s your favourite part of a chicken?”

AB: Right.

JN: And she said “chicken feet”. And it was one of those really strange…

AB: Exactly.

JN: And we grew up in cultures so far apart…

AB: Right, but the same forces pushed people… what’s really gratifying is seeing how… I mean, it took exposure to Chinese cooking, travelling around Asia, to really appreciated what’s great about French cooking. There are common threads in great food cultures. You see a dish, like in Malaysia, laksa, and yet you go to Brazil and there’s an almost identical…

[AI: Laksa. A spicy soup made from coconut milk and seafood.]

JN: Oh really?

AB: … dish, moceca. Probably grew up for exactly the same reasons. Spicy, you know, it was hot, they’re dealing with slightly older fish, hot climate, no refrigeration, you know, hot climates are usually spicier stuff, they had similar products to work with, coconut milk, palm oil, things like that. So these two dishes, almost completely independent of each other, came up. Or the Portuguese might have been wondering, damn Portuguese! <laughs>

[AI: Moceca. Same as above, but originating from Brazil instead of Malaysia. Though you could have gotten that from the main text.]

JN: Yeah, yeah.

AB: Food ways are interesting. Seeing how certain food… why people eat the way they do around the world, it’s a fascinating thing, a subject of endless fascination for me.

JN: So you find that similar factors will form similar foods or similar ways of preparing?

AB: Yeah, I think so. All intelligent, all noble cultures understand that the fish head is the best part of the fish. Smart is smart. <laughs>

JN: <laughs> Yeah, again, back in my own family, it was always dad who got the fish head and damn the kids. Tail and head were always reserved.

[AI: The interview is over and recording switched off when Bourdain suggests that since Fiend is a music magazine, he should give us his music to cook by list. How could I resist?]

AB: Definitely the Brian Jonestown Massacre during the prep period. Curtis Mayfield. Towards the end of the shift, Dead Boys and George Clinton. That’s good second wind, while you’re chopping carrots it’s not a good idea to get too jangly.

JN: And when eating?

AB: <laughs> When eating? Well, everybody’s different.

JN: For you.

AB: For me? I don’t know… eating… maybe because so many of my happiest moments eating, you know, I like eating with no shoes, with sand between my toes, it’s a perfect moment. So although I’m not a reggae fan, I’ve always found, you know… distant reggae. <laughs>

JN: <laughs>

AB: Somewhere over the dune. <laughs> I like that, or mariachi, something that takes me out of my, you know, where I am.

JN: So all the senses are filled with something different.

AB: I wanna be transported, I don’t want the familiar. I dearly love Television and all that mid-seventies, late-seventies punk, but you know, not while I’m eating.

[AB: After the interview, I share a cigarette with AB while he waits for his cab, and he tells me he really doesn’t like Vegemite.]