(C) ProPublica
This story was originally published by ProPublica and is unaltered.
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Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast [1]
['Condé Nast', 'Patrick Radden Keefe']
Date: 2017-02-13
Bourdain said that this was exactly the kind of crowd he wanted to attract to the market. He had no interest in catering to “the gringos.” Instead, he wanted to teach the gringos that they could love a place that was legitimate enough to be popular with a crowd like this.
“It’s going to be hard,” Kwak said. “You’ll get the Asian-Americans . . . ”
Bourdain insisted that he also wanted the young Koreans who had grown up in Seoul, not Fort Lee. It was nearly 2 A.M. “So, after they get out of here, where do they go?” Bourdain asked.
Kwak laughed, and shouted, “They go right to where you just ate.”
In the summer of 2006, Bourdain flew to Lebanon to make a “No Reservations” episode about Beirut. He planned to focus on the city’s cosmopolitan night life, nibbling kibbe, drinking arrack, and taking in the vibe at beachside night clubs. In the episode, he explains in a voice-over, “Everyone’s been through here—the Greeks, the Romans, the Phoenicians. So I knew this was going to be a great place to eat.” But, while Bourdain was strolling down the street one day, a convoy of vehicles rolled by, flying the yellow flags of Hezbollah. They were celebrating an ambush in which Hezbollah forces had crossed into Israel, killing three Israeli soldiers and capturing two others. The next day, Israel launched missiles at Beirut, killing dozens of civilians. Bourdain and his crew ended up at the Royal Hotel, on a hilltop not far from the U.S. Embassy, playing cards while they waited to be evacuated. In a surreal accident of geography, they could watch the war unfold from the relative safety of the hotel pool.
All travel requires a degree of improvisation, and Bourdain and his cameramen are well versed in reconceiving a show on the fly. Once, when he was snorkeling off the coast of Sicily, in search of seafood, he was startled to see a half-frozen octopus splash into the water beside him. His host, a deeply tanned, eager-to-please Sicilian, was dropping fish onto the seabed for him to “discover” on camera. Naturally, this violated Bourdain’s dogma of verité. He was outraged, but decided to incorporate the moment into the episode, to hilarious effect. (“I’m no marine biologist, but I know a dead octopus when I see one.”)
“I don’t know anybody who is more a man of the twenty-first century,” Alan Richman, the food critic, says of Bourdain. “The way he acts. The way he speaks. His insanity. His vulgarity.”
In Beirut, there was no way to edit around the war. But Bourdain and his producers felt that they had a story to tell, and they put together a show about being stranded by the conflict. In the episode, viewers see Bourdain’s cameramen worrying about getting home, and the local fixers and producers worrying about the safety of loved ones. At one point in the narration, Bourdain says, “This is not the show we went to Lebanon to get.” Until he travelled to Beirut, wherever he had ventured, no matter how bleak, he had always ended the episode with a voice-over that was, if not upbeat, at least hopeful. At the conclusion of the Beirut episode, he said, “Look at us in these scenes. . . . We’re sitting around in bathing suits, getting tanned, watching a war. If there’s a single metaphor in this entire experience, you know, that’s probably it.” Darren Aronofsky describes Bourdain’s show as a form of “personal journalism,” in the tradition of Ross McElwee’s 1985 documentary, “Sherman’s March,” in which a story is pointedly filtered through the individual experience of the filmmaker. In Beirut, at a beach where a line of people stood clutching their belongings, Bourdain and his crew were ushered by U.S. Marines onto a crowded American warship.
At the time, Bourdain was in a new relationship. Éric Ripert had recently set him up with a young Italian woman named Ottavia Busia, who was a hostess at one of Ripert’s restaurants. She and Bourdain both worked incessantly, but Ripert figured that they might find time to enjoy a one-night stand. On their second date, Busia and Bourdain got matching tattoos of a chef’s knife. Eight months later, Bourdain returned, shaken, from Beirut, and they talked about having children. “Let’s spin the wheel,” Busia told him, adding, dubiously, “Your sperm is old, anyway.” Their daughter, Ariane, was born in April, 2007, and they were married eleven days later.
Busia is also a jujitsu fanatic, and, when I contacted her, she suggested that we meet at the school where she and Bourdain train, not far from Penn Station. “I’m here every day,” she said. Busia is thirty-eight, with big brown eyes, a warm, toothy grin, and the dense, bunched-up shoulders of a gym rat. She sat cross-legged on a mat, wearing a black T-shirt that said, “In Jujitsu We Trust,” and leggings that were decorated with cat faces. Busia first tried martial arts after giving birth, hoping to lose some weight, but she soon became consumed by jujitsu, and induced Bourdain to take a private lesson. (She bribed him, she maintains, with a Vicodin.) “I knew he was going to like the problem-solving aspect of it,” she told me. “It’s a very intellectual sport.”
Years ago, while filming an episode in Rajasthan, Bourdain met a fortune-teller who told him that one day he would become a father. “That guy’s full of fucking shit,” Bourdain told one of the producers afterward. “I would be a horrible father.” But Ariane is, by her parents’ accounts, a well-adjusted kid. For a time, Busia brought her along on some of Bourdain’s journeys, but when Ariane started elementary school that became impractical. Once, Busia was startled awake in the middle of the night with the horrifying realization that a strange man was in her bed. Then she rolled over and remembered that it was just Tony; she had forgotten that he was home. (Last year, Bourdain spent only about twenty weeks in New York.) Now that Busia is in peak physical condition, she is hoping to climb Mt. Everest. Last summer, Bourdain told me that she was sleeping in a hypoxia chamber—a device that mimics the oxygen depletion of high altitudes. “It basically re-creates thirty-two thousand feet,” he said, then shrugged. “Anyway, nobody’s sitting at home waiting for me to define them.”
When I asked about fatherhood, Bourdain grew reflective. “I’m shocked by how happy my daughter is,” he said. “I don’t think I’m deluding myself. I know I’m a loving father.” He paused. “Do I wish sometimes that, in an alternative universe, I could be the patriarch, always there? Tons of kids? Grandkids running around? Yes. And it looks good to me. But I’m pretty sure I’m incapable of it.”
Perhaps the most beautiful thing that Bourdain has written is a 2010 essay called “My Aim Is True,” which is a profile of Justo Thomas, a fastidious middle-aged man from the Dominican Republic, who descends early each morning to the basement beneath Le Bernardin, where he prepares a series of sharp knives, and then, with the precision of a heart surgeon, disassembles seven hundred pounds of fresh fish. The fish come to the restaurant, Thomas says, “the way they catch,” which, Bourdain explains, means whole, straight from the ocean—“shiny, clear-eyed, pink-gilled, still stiff with rigor, and smelling of nothing but seawater.” It is Thomas’s job to break each carcass down into delicate cuts that will be served upstairs, and the essay is a warm tribute to him and to the details of his largely invisible craft. (“The walls, curiously, have been carefully covered with fresh plastic cling wrap—like a serial killer would prepare his basement—to catch flying fish scales and for faster, easier cleanup.”) By the time Thomas completes his shift, it is noon, and Bourdain invites him to have lunch in the dining room. In six years of working at Le Bernardin, Thomas has never eaten there as a guest. Bourdain gestures toward the patrons around them, and notes that some of them will spend on a bottle of wine what Thomas might make in a couple of months. “I think in life they give too much to some people and nothing to everybody else,” Thomas tells him. But, he adds, “without work, we are nothing.”
In Bourdain’s estimation, writing is a less gruelling art than cooking. “I think I’ve always looked at everybody I met through the prism of the kitchen,” he told me at one point. “ ‘O.K., you wrote a good book, but can you handle a brunch shift?’ ” Writing is ephemeral, he said. More ephemeral than brunch? I asked. “Three hundred brunches, nothing came back,” he said, his voice hardening with the steely conviction of a combat veteran. “Three hundred eggs Benedict. Not one returned. It’s mechanical precision. Endurance. Character. That’s real.”
Bourdain has eaten some appalling things—bear bile in Vietnam, bull’s-penis soup in Malaysia, the unwashed rectum of a warthog in Namibia—but he is careful to distance himself from any suggestion that he trucks in gag-reflex entertainment.
When Bourdain tells his own story, he often makes it sound as if literary success were something that he stumbled into; in fact, he spent years trying to write his way out of the kitchen. In 1985, he began sending unsolicited manuscripts to Joel Rose, who was then editing a downtown literary journal, Between C & D. “To put it to you quite simply, my lust for print knows no bounds,” Bourdain wrote, in the cover letter for a submission of cartoons and short stories, noting, “Though I do not reside on the Lower East, I have in the recent past enjoyed an intimate though debilitating familiarity with its points of interest.” Rose eventually published a story by Bourdain, about a young chef who tries to score heroin but is turned away, because he has no fresh track marks. (“There’s tracks there! They just old is all cause I been on the program!”)
Bourdain bought his first bag of heroin on Rivington Street in 1980, and plunged into addiction with his usual gusto. “When I started getting symptoms of withdrawal, I was proud of myself,” he told me. Addiction, like the kitchen, was a marginal subculture with its own rules and aesthetics. For Bourdain, an admirer of William S. Burroughs, heroin held a special allure. In 1980, he says, he copped every day. But eventually he grew disenchanted with the addict’s life, because he hated being at the mercy of others. “Getting ripped off, running from the cops,” he recalled. “I’m a vain person. I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror.” Bourdain ended up on methadone, but he resented the indignities of the regimen: being unable to leave town without permission, waiting in line to pee in a cup. He quit cold turkey, around 1987, but spent several more years addicted to cocaine. “I just bottomed out on crack,” he recalled. Occasionally, between fixes, he would find himself digging paint chips out of the carpet in his apartment and smoking them, on the off chance that they were pebbles of crack. Things grew so bad that Bourdain recalls once sitting on a blanket on Broadway at Christmastime, with his beloved record collection laid out for sale.
Given Bourdain’s braggadocio, there were times when I wondered if the bad years were quite as grim as he makes them sound. “There are romantics, and then there are the hard-core addicts,” Karen Rinaldi said. “I think Tony was more of a romantic.” Nancy Putkoski told me in an e-mail that Tony is “pretty dramatic.” She wrote, “It does look pretty bleak in the rearview mirror. But, when you’re living it, it’s just your life. You struggle through.” Once, Bourdain was riding in a taxi with three friends, having just scored heroin on the Lower East Side. He announced that he had recently read an article about the statistical likelihood of getting off drugs. “Only one in four has a chance at making it,” he said. An awkward silence ensued. Years later, in “Kitchen Confidential,” Bourdain pointed out that he made it and his friends had not. “I was the guy.”
In 1985, Bourdain signed up for a writing workshop led by the editor Gordon Lish. “He took it very seriously,” Putkoski told me. In letters to Joel Rose, Bourdain referred to the workshop as a transformative experience, and talked about “life after Lish.” (When I reached Lish by phone, he recalled Bourdain as “an altogether charming fellow, very tall,” but he had no recollection of Bourdain’s writing.)
After getting clean, around 1990, Bourdain met an editor at Random House, who gave him a small advance to write a crime novel set in the restaurant world. Writing had always come easily to Bourdain; at Vassar, he wrote term papers for classmates in exchange for drugs. He didn’t agonize over the novel, he said: “I didn’t have time.” Every day, he rose before dawn and banged out a new passage at his computer, chain-smoking, then worked a twelve-hour restaurant shift. The novel, “Bone in the Throat,” was published in 1995. (“Two-hundred-and-eighty-pound Salvatore Pitera, in a powder-blue jogging suit and tinted aviator glasses, stepped out of Franks Original Pizza onto Spring Street. He had a slice of pizza in one hand, too hot to eat.”) Bourdain paid for his own book tour, and recalls sitting behind a table at a Barnes & Noble in Northridge, California, with a stack of his books, as people walked by, avoiding eye contact. That novel and a follow-up, “Gone Bamboo,” quickly went out of print. (They have since been reissued.)
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/13/anthony-bourdains-moveable-feast
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