Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [135]
I'm not even going to talk about my feet.
It's been twenty-seven years since I walked into the Dreadnaught kitchen with my hair halfway down my back, a bad attitude, and a marginal desire to maybe do a little work in return for money. Twenty-six years since my humiliation at Mario's when I looked up at Tyrone's mightily abused claws and decided I wanted a pair like that. I don't know who said that every man, at fifty, gets the face they deserve, but I certainly got the hands I deserve. And I've got a few years to go yet.
How much longer am I going to do this?
I don't know. I love it, you see.
I love heating duck confit, saucisson de canard, confit gizzards, saucisson de Toulouse, poitrine and duck fat with those wonderful tarbais beans, spooning it into an earthenware crock and sprinkling it with breadcrumbs. I love making those little mountains of chive-mashed potatoes, wild mushrooms, ris de veau, a nice, tall micro-green salad as garnish, drizzling a perfectly reduced sauce around the plate with my favorite spoon. I enjoy the look on the face of my boss when I do a pot-au-feu special - the look of sheer delight as he takes the massive bowl of braised hooves, shoulders and tails in, the simple boiled turnips, potatoes and carrots looking just right, just the way it should be. I love that look, as I loved the look on Pino's face when he gazed upon a perfect bowl of spaghetti alia chitarra, the same look I get when I approach a Scott Bryan daube of beef, a plate of perfect oysters. It's a gaze of wonder: the same look you see on small children's faces when their fathers take them into deep water at the beach, and it's always a beautiful thing. For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we've all had to become disappears, when we're confronted with a something as simple as a plate of food. When we remember what it was that moved us down this road in the first place.
Lying in bed and smoking my sixth or seventh cigarette of the morning, I'm wondering what the hell I'm going to do today. Oh yeah, I gotta write this thing. But that's not work, really, is it? It feels somehow shifty and . . . dishonest, making a buck writing. Writing anything is a treason of sorts. Even the cold recitation of facts - which is hardly what I've been up to - is never the thing itself. And the events described are somehow diminished in the telling. A perfect bowl of bouillabaisse, that first, all-important oyster, plucked from the Bassin d'Arcachon, both are made cheaper, less distinct in my memory, once I've written about them. Whether I missed a few other things, or described them inadaquately, like the adventures of the Amazing Steven Tempel, or my Day in the Life, are less important. Our movements through time and space seem somehow trivial compared to a heap of boiled meat in broth, the smell of saffron, garlic, fishbones and Pernod.
Though I've spent half my life watching people, guiding them, trying to anticipate their moods, motivations and actions, running from them, manipulating and being manipulated by them, they remain a mystery to me. People confuse me.
Food doesn't. I know what I'm looking at when I see a perfect loin of number one tuna. I can understand why millions of Japanese are driven to near blood lust by the firm, almost iridescent flesh. I get why my boss grows teary-eyed when he sees a flawlessly executed choucroute garnie. Color, flavor, texture, composition . . . and personal history. Who knows what circumstances, what events in his long ago past so inspire this rare display of emotion? And who needs