Yikes.
I know it’s ~fine dining~ but I really didn’t need to read a firsthand account of Bourdain eating a small endangered bird whole. None of it sounds appetizing. I cannot imagine it actually tasted good. It very nearly made me queasy. How is it enjoyable to eat literally burning hot meat and bones and organs??? I will never understand fine dining, apparently.
Once I got past that part though, I really enjoyed it. I’ve really only known about Bourdain from TV and the fact that he died, so it was interesting to get a look into the type of writer he was. I was not expecting nearly the level of sarcasm and biting wit we got. The line about transitioning from heroin to crack? Describing a girl he knew in college as “I think she let me fondle her tit once”? I laughed out loud. I admire writers with some degree of self-awareness, and it seems that Bourdain had it in spades, between his rolling sentences and the fact that he refers to his own memoir as “obnoxious but wildly successful.” Clearly, I need to go read Kitchen Confidential, because Bourdain’s gotten me invested in his life and career in only the foreword. Somehow, reading even just the first ten or fifteen pages of this book made Bourdain more of a real human person than almost any chef I’ve ever seen on TV.
And anyone who’ll roast Barney is a winner in my book, anyhow. It’s that deeply ingrained antipathy that all millennials seem to have for the big purple bastard, we want him dunked on, regularly, at the very least.
Will Write for Food 