three bowls

Last night I saw Anthony Bourdain at the Moore Theater.  He's on some tour supporting his Travel Channel show No Reservations, which I've seen exactly zero episodes of, but he's a chef and since I have a crush on every chef, so of course I went anyway.

Bourdain kicked the evening off with an explanation of Dale Talde's dismissal from Top Chef, saying that despite what the viewers might think or feel about his overall abilities, he made a terrible dish of butterscotch scallops, which Bourdain likened to "felching Mrs. Butterworth."

Of course the audience fell apart when he said this, as they did every time he said "shit" or "fuck." 

The President of the Debate Club and I were talking about famous actors and singers the other day, and what makes them go from interesting and innovative to...well, let's say, Sting of today. 

I wondered if it's that the majority of people start responding to the blandest or most obvious thing the person does, and - just like a toddler who does something mischevious, gets a laugh, and keeps doing the mischevious thing over and over to get that positive attention - finds themselves unable to stop returning repeatedly to the thing that gets the biggest positive reaction.

While Bourdain has plenty to say about the food world that is rich and thought-out, he clearly knows how to get his audience even deeper into the palm of his hand, and that is with swears and references to genitalia and smoking. 

I'm certainly not looking for him to clean any of that up; I'm not going to be giving up the salty language anytime soon myself..but I sort of want more from him.  He's made it clear he's no fan of Rachael Ray, and one of the reasons is he thinks she and her ilk don't ask their audience to aim higher or take greater care with their food. 

I would say the same to him about writing/speaking; goosing the audience once too often with the excitement of "naughtiness" is sort of the verbal equivalent of deep-frying everything.  Sure, a lot of people will like it, but that doesn't make it your best effort.  He's clearly got the smarts; he shouldn't be so satisfied with those easy laffs. 

Anyway, some of the interesting things he had to say about food were...

He feels that China is the epicenter of all culinary greatness, for a variety of reasons I'm a little too ignorant to spell out as well as he did.  But it was interesting to hear; Chinese cuisine is one that has never held any interest to me, but he was so passionate about it that it made me think I need to learn more despite a lack of natural affinity for it.

I sat up a little taller under my bundle of sticks and straightened my babushka with pride when he noted that a great deal of exotic fine cuisine was actually discovered by hungry peasants.  Who else, he pointed out, would have ever eaten a snail for the first time?

He also had high praise for the true fusion cuisine of Singapore and Malaysia.  I've never had either but I will look for it soon.

He spent a bit of time talking about some of the lasting impact of his book Kitchen Confidential, saying with exasperation that it will be on his gravestone that he's the guy who told us not to eat fish on Monday.  "You live in Seattle for fuck's sake; eat fish on Monday!" he admonished us.

Despite my slightly curmudgeonly wish that he would Hemingway up a bit, I still had a good time, and he said something offhand (to an audience member who asked what he should try when he moves to China) that sums up precisely the attitude of his breed that is why I do, in fact, have a crush on every chef: "Say no to nothing."