Book review: Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food

Published on Thursday 29 July 2010 15:47

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food By Anthony Bourdain Bloomsbury, 304pp, £18.99

Anthony Bourdain was exceptionally well positioned to bang out Kitchen Confidential in 2000: he'd spent 28 years at restaurant stoves and had a couple of noirish novels to his name. The memoir exposed the darkest corners of New York's kitchens and dining rooms. Now, after ten years as a food-world celebrity, he's even better positioned to dish it out to the industry and its four-star hype machine. Unfortunately, as the title of his new essay collection, Medium Raw, warns, he gives it to us half-cooked.

Since his first book, Bourdain has carved out a role as an acerbically funny raconteur who generates clouds of Web traffic each time he eviscerates a chef with a bloated reputation or damns a restaurant for poor standards. His new book contains pointed critiques, astute asides and semi-reported stories that tend to circle back to himself - the real reason, he presumes, you're buying this book.

It's an often funny, sometimes confusing mix. And it's always personal, even when it gets political. There are riffs on what it would take to get him to sell out, how he ended up on St Barts with a cokehead, and why you shouldn't become a professional cook; there's a profile of a contestant who got axed from a TV cooking show, and a story of how Bourdain and his wife tried to prevent their toddler from eating McDonald's. To wrap it up, there are two chapters on what he's learned since Kitchen Confidential.

Bourdain has insight, access and good taste, and he's a naturally engaging writer. But he can't stop writing about himself and the coolness that is his life. "Lust" begins with a Lou Reed quotation and slides into a Graham-Greene-meets-Tom-Waits reverie in Hanoi: "I often feel this way when alone in Southeast Asian hotel bars - an enhanced sense of bathos, an ironic dry-smile sorrow, a sharpened sense of distance and loss." Then we're whisked away on the back of a scooter for a beautifully observed tour through the city's streets and pho shops. After debating the cruelty of writing such "food and travel porn", he gives in and lays out sensual snapshots of international feasts. Somehow, Sichuan peppercorns prompt him to conclude the breathless sampler with the lines: "Pain, you were pretty sure, was always bad. Pleasure was good. Until now, that is. When everything started to get confused." Until now, that is. When everything started to read as if it were written after the third gin in Cathay Pacific business class.

Beneath the relentless swearing, the back-of-the-classroom bullying and the hipster posturing, Bourdain is a hopeless romantic when it comes to food and the people who cook. The subtitle's real valentines are two elegantly written profiles that make you wish he'd worked this hard throughout.His attempt to understand David Chang, chef at New York's Momofukyu Noodle Bar is full of pathos and demonstrates Bourdain's knowledge of the restaurant scene. And his portrait of Justo Thomas, fish filleter at the city's famed Le Bernardin seafood restaurant, has him prostrate as Thomas cleans and fillets 700lb of fish in five hours. In a heartwarming turn, he invites Thomas to lunch in the restaurant for which he works - and where he's never eaten.

Bourdain knows he's living a chef's dream. If only he remembered that he's living a writer's fantasy, too, and would pay attention to his craft again. After all, it's his prose, not his cooking, that got him a seat at the table.

• Anthony Bourdain is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 28 August