“Rachel Ray does to food what Hitler did to Poland,” belted the food world’s self-styled gonzo bad boy, Anthony Bourdain, as he blasted into Sonoma a couple of weeks ago.
There’s nothing subtle about this guy, and that’s the way he likes it.
“I had to move the start time up tonight so I can take the ‘red eye’ back to New York to be there tomorrow to watch the sonogram to see if it’s a boy or a girl (applause). My Italian girlfriend said my 50-year-old sperm were dead!”
Bourdain was brought to the Sonoma Community Center by very independent bookseller, Readers’ Books, who sold more tickets than there were seats for Bourdain’s rare North Bay appearance. Bourdain’s San Francisco event sold out quickly, and Readers’ evening was a bargain at $5, with advance book purchasers getting seating in the first four rows, and a good supply of Sonoma Valley wines and nibbles was available.
Bourdain’s current travels focus on promoting a new book, “Culinary Educations from the World’s Greatest Chefs,” to which he is a contributor along with thirty-nine other chefs. Some of the other big names include Ferrán Adrià, José Andrés, Mario Batali, Rick Bayless, Mark Bittman, Gary Danko, Marcella Hazan, Mary Sue Milliken, Sara Moulton, Nancy Silverton and Ming Tsai.
And incidentally, Readers’ also sold out their special-order stock of Bourdain’s other books that evening, so you can see why he and other contributors go on these “selfless” promotional tours.
Many attendees recognized few other people in the large (for Sonoma) Andrews Hall auditorium and balcony, which were packed to the gills with Food Network and Travel Channel fans, many of whom screamed, squirmed and nearly swooned when Bourdain quietly walked onto the stage, without introduction, and gave his best Zen bow to the crowd.
Back to Rachel Ray, the now multi-media food star whom many uber-chefs consider to be under-trained, under-talented, and overly successful. Bourdain loves to hate her. Ray’s very existence contributes to Bourdain’s bad-mouth schtick, both in person and on television. He opens with, “Yeah, I talk [expletive] about Rachel Ray,” as he stands and sways in his faded black jeans, black leather blazer, grey T-shirt that happens to match his wavy grey hair, stud in left ear lobe, and rimless oblong glasses, to whispers of “Isn’t he adorable!”
Readers’ co-owner Lilla Weinberger dropped Bourdain off for a cup of coffee across the street from the bookstore at Della Santina’s, ironically one of Rachel Ray’s favorite wine country spots that she somehow squeezed into a $40-a-day dining experience in Sonoma. Apparently his dislike for Ray goes back to his “A Cook’s Tour” Food Network show being cancelled and hers rising to the top.
When Reader’s Digest called to ask if they could reprint his chapter of the new book, he suggested they read it, because his language is full of F and S words. They did not call back.
A New York City native who attended Vassar and graduated from the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, Bourdain actually cooked at the Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue, Sullivan’s, and Les Halles restaurants in New York. He believes that the “nuts, losers and punks (of American society) are all in the kitchen” of restaurants.
As a person who could be called “hardcore everything,” from wannabe punk rock star, onetime druggie, chain smoker and boozer, to obsessive food taster who brags about all of those pleasures and more, Bourdain claims to have tasted sheep testicles in Morocco, ant eggs in Puebla, Mexico, a raw seal eyeball during an Inuit seal hunt, and the beating heart, blood, bile and meat of a cobra in Vietnam – and probably has. As a true New Yorker, Bourdain said one thing he won’t eat is a rat, and has passed up fried monkey brain.
Bourdain tries “to be a good guest” and not turn down offerings of his hosts around the world. “If my host came out with a big steaming platter of puppy heads – I might eat them. Testicles are so last week!”
Bourdain turned a “New Yorker” article into his book “Kitchen Confidential,” which revealed the “underbelly” of the New York restaurant business with great flourish and color and led to the short-lived FOX Network sitcom also called “Kitchen Confidential.”
His current “No Reservations” show on the Travel Channel is so thoroughly peppered with sexual innuendo and profanity that it has earned a “viewer discretion advisory” at the beginning and re-start of his show after commercials, which probably attracts more viewers of vulnerable ages than it would running without warnings.
On one of the “Top Chef” show’s chefs Bourdain said he asked the chef, “What Kind of funky crack house are you running here?”
When asked where he would eat his last meal if he had a choice, Bourdain replied St. John’s in London and he would eat a roast veal bone dreaming of Orson Welles and Ava Gardener.
Confessing to some fast food addictions, Bourdain admitted that “late at night” when he is “drunk or stoned” after he and Mario Batali go out drinking, he often heads for “KFC’s macaroni and cheese with its unnatural color, no macaroni, and no cheese. I’m the first to go home, so that tells you something about Mario.” Batali’s various adventures of personal pleasures are well chronicled in “Heat,” a recent book by Bill Buford, who followed Batali around the country chefing, drinking and smoking under his guidance.
Bourdain said that if his show were canceled he would move for a year or forever to Vietnam, his favorite country full of fabulous food, “cooks, passionate eaters, and people who love feeding strangers.”
Of Ferrán Adrià’s El Bulli restaurant in Spain, mentioned in this column two weeks ago, he raved that the experience was “like hearing Jimi Hendrix or Patsy Kline for the first time,” but “rooted in Catalonia.”
When in San Francisco Bourdain likes to hang out at Red’s Java Hut or Swan’s Oyster Depot. He also said “mid-range restaurants out here are much better than in New York.”
It turns out he was unable to comment on Sonoma restaurants because after his coffee at Della Santina’s he moved on for a Shiatsu massage by Laura Dee and Gary Ruiz, who ended up feeding him a soup of “organic Rocky chicken with a Chinese herb formula of various roots, barks and berries known for its kidney tonic properties (sounds like a good idea) as well as a general tonic, with lots of garlic and ginger.”
Asked how he moved over to television, Bourdain said he didn’t have a clue. “Not giving a [care] has been a good model for me. I just get basic ingredients and try not to [mess] them up.”
He loves to travel the world, cooking, filming and telling people about the world’s cuisines. Having worked for years in hot, windowless kitchens with little pay and no health insurance, he said, “Normal people were a mystery to me until five years ago. I had no holidays and my rent was always late.”
Of controversial foie gras, Bourdain insisted “I’m gonna eat foie gras for the rest of my life just to spite what they did to Sonoma Saveurs,” the long-gone restaurant then run by the owners of Sonoma Foie Gras and once located where the excellent Harvest Moon Café is today on First Street West across from the Sonoma Plaza duck pond. “People are being force-fed in Guantanamo Bay, and you’re concerned about a duck?”
Bourdain’s favorite food to cook is a daube (stew) of beef Provençal or osso bucco, but his Italian girlfriend makes Italian food no one, including himself, should ever try to top.
Having been in Beirut, Lebanon during the recent bombing by Israel, Bourdain said he is “going back as soon as possible. The bombing was the neo-cons’ ideal of what we wanted.”
As far as his travels and future shows go, many countries have invited Bourdain, but he has turned some down “because I am unhappy with their governments, such as Burma (now Myanmar) and Iran. It isn’t a matter of scruples or integrity. I’m just [angry] at a couple of countries,” and he says “Iceland and Uzbekistan won’t have me back, ever!”
His Travel Channel shows already in the works include Ireland, Namibia, Ghana, New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Sao Paolo, Tuscany, Berlin and Argentina.
“I plan to die on the road, hopefully in Asia. I’m milking this celebrity chef puppy right now.”
Get hot food and wine news of the wine country in Kathleen Hill’s column at
www.sonomasun.com. Click on Kathleen Hill-Epicure.
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