Its not that I am lazy or have exhausted the number of shits left to give, dear reader(s), I assure you. I’ve been working my stubby fingers beyond the conventional 40 hrs in order to satisfy the conscientious and well heeled groupies, but, just as today’s abrasive music might as well be a rusted steel brush scraping my eardrums, anything worth reading is printed in blurry typeset and what used to be a manageable dose of brown liquor lays me out stiff like a merciless Sonny Liston uppercut, I’m not into fetishizing the punch clock like I used to. The world is spinning at a different cadence and now that I’ve increased the global population by a soon to be 30lb soul, priorities have changed.
My bedrock commitment to trade-crafts of food stuffs and its satellite pleasures has not wavered, even if my over-ripened cynicism is well beyond salvaging for any worthwhile purpose beyond inoculating others to critical despair and disparities. Think of my reliable hopelessness for America society like a sourdough started or a salami’s musty -yet vital- bloom that entrepreneurial folks sell for $25/oz.
Sure my posting frequency has become somewhat impotent compared to the explosive weekly discharge of yesteryear’s culinary basement lust but if reader traffic stats are a motivating indicator, the number of eyes and bots using my blog for spam instructions and/or content have skyrocketed downward along with my investments in retirement, goofy exercise equipment and social band-aids during a pandemic. I take full responsibility for declining activity by selflessly sharing the blame with my waning, yawning readership. But there’s no deadline for a reset and on a weekend getaway to ground zero of my culinary renaissance we listened to Kitchen Confidential, read by the late author (at 1.25 times the normal speed which assured me that he scribbled the whole damned thing on a 3 day amphetamine spree) and we were supremely delighted. Borrow an audio copy from your library. I was inspired to squirt some revitalizing hot sauce onto our mutual indifferences and for those willing to endure more than 140 characters and anything more involved than a caption, meme or 15 second video of a dolphin catching a frisbee…settle down for 3 minutes and strap on some goggles because you are about to get fucked in the eyes.
Chef Tony was a master raconteur from the tippiest, toppiest shelf. A distillation of Tom Robbins’ flowery vernacular and Bukowski’s blunt, mostly harmless depravity. Chef Tony had a prodigious prep list of vices, would happily lure unmoored cooks to his port, picked quick money over long-term tutelage, got tuned up on school nights and school days, but, much like the hungover working man’s anti-hero Hank Chinanski, neither was a crook. Morally spoiled, sure. Discount purveyors of bad ideas, yup. Slovenly drunks, chain smoking itinerants with platter-sized chips on their shoulders, absolutely. But they weren’t scofflaws. If they drove drunk they did their best to abide by the rest of the tenets of conventional traffic law and felt bad about it next day (hangover notwithstanding).
I met Anthony Bourdain, briefly, a few months into my resettlement in the Nation’s capital. It might have been November of 2002. I was working at Bistro Bis on Capitol Hill and I think Chef Tony was in town for a book related chit-chat. The chef-owner, Jeffrey Buben, was cut from the same cheesecloth as Bigfoot. He would pick through a case of limes and demand restitution for any lime that wasn’t uniformly green (the driver was always flummoxed and the math way above his pay grade). He’d curse the price of salsify and ask me if I’d pay the same price for weed (depends on the quality I suppose). Buben would guard the trash like a border agent, redirecting anything that was still edible to distinguished shelf on the walk-in where food scraps and leftovers reincarnated into meatloaf divinity. A pint of diced celeriac, a couple ounces of huckleberry sauce, limp scallions, a piece of lamb not worthy of FIFO. It all went into the grinder and it was curiously as tasty as it was resourceful. There was a standing freezer packed full like a teenager’s locker with scraps of raw salmon accumulated over 6 months would would become profitable salmon cakes during the biannual “restaurant week”. Buben was the unicorn who made money during “restaurant week”. He would scrub the bottom of the dish machine during service and it would shine like chrome. The cleaning supplies closet was locked after inventory and if you didn’t have a scrubby to clean, you were shit out of luck and resigned to elbow grease. As a matter of business principle, Buben never bought chicken bones. He had some barter with a Chinese restaurant and would come back with a cooler full of chicken leg bones once a week. He would pick carrot chunks out of the veal stock, extol their tender, veal soaked virtue and use them as a garnish on the next day’s special. Frugality was his superpower and stock in trade.
Legend lent him a “bubbles” nom-de-plume after it was said that he climbed onto the stove at his flagship restaurant during service, throwing plates, frothing at the mouth about too much that wasn’t up to snuff and his shoes began to bubble on the hot flat top. Want to run tuna next week? A colleague was enlisted in the wee hours to go fishing off the North Carolina coast, the only, albeit not exactly legal, alternative to the indignity of paying a wholesaler for the same thing. It was a 4 hr drive each way (boat registration was probably cheaper there or something) and the boat was then fastidiously scrubbed to the point where the vessel had appreciated in value. He had crunched the numbers and even with the cost of time and fuel, there was enough juice worth the squeeze. A dishwasher would scrape the sinew, chewier parts were transformed into tuna salad and if collards, eyeballs, scales and deep-fried tuna assholes were the rage, the trips would have paid off even more dividends. Everyone was happy all around, except for the server who had to moonlight as a deckhand during the summer and required more sleep than Buben’s low-power mode.
We were cleaning up towards the end of the night when a 10-watt bartender (we told him once to ask a patron on their way to the restroom whether it was a #1 or #2, so that we could time the plating of their main course and he wasn’t sure if we were joking. In hindsight, we should have insisted that we weren’t) shuffled back to the kitchen and told me that a gentleman (who’s name I was able to decipher as “Bourdain”) would like to buy the kitchen some suds. I was the only one on the line and the only one who recognized the name and made haste to fetch my drink. Tony was at the bar by himself and was thoroughly satisfied by the “soupe de poisson”, which I hadn’t made and wasn’t my recipe and the selection of high-brow cheeses, which I hadn’t ordered, cut or plated, but I was honored by the compliment. I can’t remember what we talked about. I invariably asked some dumb questions impulsively but he was kind enough to offer me a Doral cigarette, a testament to rock ‘n roll thrift. In retrospect, 20 years ago, given a second chance, I would have taken him to the basement of the Townhouse Tavern to drop the plow, reminisce about childhood in France, goof on the sticky parts of the carpet and politely decline solicitation from neighboring club’s fellas to watch us pee.
If it were last week, I would have settled for a fancy liquor bar 1st, then cheap beer and shots somewhere else, still reminiscing about childhood in France with bonus toasts to our mentors, culinary stalwarts, epicurean epiphanies and how to make some parts of the planet a little better. I don’t have nearly the same stories to tell and my stupider days are generally in the rear view mirror though there is an emergency reserve in the glove compartment. I’ve got responsibilities and am still determined to figure out how to make things well. Hot-dogs and mortadella are my moonshot. Chef Tony inspired me to tickle the keyboard again and offer more to posterity than trolling the MAGA dipshits. If you miss Chef Tony’s sardonic appraisals of the culinary atmosphere, its peripheries and the honest joy of piecing together good places, better people and the best food (such conflictions may have led him to call it quits) then I urge you, committed reader(s), to rediscover his reading of Kitchen Confidential through your local library’s audio books. I’ll bet a flounder sandwich that he is cursing Roadrunner not being free despite a cable subscription and will wait patiently until it is.
Kitsch & Classics 