Medium Raw

Medium Raw

Selling Out
I was so supremely naive about so many things when I wrote Kitchen Confidential—my hatred for all things Food Network being just
one of them. From my vantage point in a busy working kitchen, when
I’d see Emeril and Bobby on the tube, they looked like creatures from
another planet—bizarrely, artificially cheerful creatures in a candycolored
galaxy in no way resembling my own. They were as far from
my experience or understanding as Barney the purple dinosaur—or
the saxophone stylings of Kenny G. The fact that people—
strangers—
seemed to love them, Emeril’s studio audience, for instance, clapping
and hooting with every mention of gah-lic, only made me more
hostile.
In my life, in my world, I took it as an article of faith that chefs
were unlovable. That’s why we were chefs. We were basically . . . bad
people— which is why we lived the way we did, this half-life of work
followed by hanging out with others who lived the same life, followed
by whatever slivers of emulated normal life we had left to us. Nobody
loved us. Not really. How could they, after all? As chefs, we were
proudly dysfunctional. We were misfits. We knew we were misfits, we
sensed the empty parts of our souls, the missing parts of our personalities,
and this was what had brought us to our profession, had made
us what we were.
I despised their very likability, as it was a denial of the quality I’d
always seen as our best and most distinguishing: our otherness.
Rachael Ray, predictably, symbolized everything I thought
wrong—which is to say, incomprehensible to me—about the Brave
New World of celebrity chefs, as she wasn’t even one of “us.” Back
then, hearing that title applied to just anyone in an apron was particularly
angering. It burned. (Still does a little.)
What a pitiable fool I was.
But my low opinion of the Food Network actually went back a
little further in time. Back to when they were a relatively tiny, sad-sack
start-up with studios on the upper floors of an office building on Sixth
Avenue, a viewership of about eight people,
and the production values
of late-night public-access porn. Before Emeril and Bobby and Mario
helped build them into a powerhouse international brand. (In those
days, such luminaries of the dining scene as Donna Hanover [then
Giuliani] and Alan Richman, Bill Boggs and Nina Griscom, would sit
around in tiny, office-size rooms, barely enough room for the cameras,
showing pre-recorded promo reels—the type of crap they show on the
hotel channel when you turn on the tube at the Sheraton.) You know
the stuff: happy “customers” awkwardly chawing on surf and turf, followed
by “Chef Lou’s signature cheesecake . . . with a flavor that says
‘Oooh la-la!’ ” After which, Alan or Donna or Nina or Bill would take
a few desultory bites from a sample of same—which had been actually
FedExed from whatever resort or far-flung dung hole they were
promoting that week.

MEDIUM RAW. Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Bourdain. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.