A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal
4/5
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About this ebook
'It works extremely well. In large part because Bourdain is a very funny writer; sharp, honest and with a beguiling mix of belligerence and sensitivity' Sunday Telegraph
'Brilliantly written up in a raw, stylish gonzo prose, with pitch-black humour and a devilish turn of phrase' Evening Standard
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Anthony Bourdain, life-long line cook and bestselling author of Kitchen Confidential, sets off to eat his way around the world.
But being Anthony Bourdain, this was never going to be a conventional culinary tour. Bourdain heads out to Saigon where he eats the still-beating heart of a live cobra, and travels deep into landmined Khmer Rouge territory to find the rumoured Wild West of Cambodia (Pailin).
Other stops include dining with gangsters in Russia, a medieval pig slaughter and feast in northern Portugal, the Basque All Male Gastronomique Society in Saint Sebastian, rural Mexico with his Mexican sous-chef, a pilgrimage to the French Laundry in the Napa Valley and a return to his roots in the tiny fishing village of La Teste, where he first ate an oyster as a child.
Written with the inimitable machismo and humour that has made Tony Bourdain such a sensation, A Cook's Tour is an adventure story sure to give you indigestion.
Editor's Note
Armchair adventure…
There’s no better tour guide to far-flung places around the world than beloved chef Anthony Bourdain. He’ll take you from Cambodia to Morocco in search of the perfect meal — all from the safety of your couch.
Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Bourdain was the author of the New York Times bestsellers Kitchen Confidential, Medium Raw, World Travel, and Appetites and the novels Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo. His work appeared in the New York Times and The New Yorker. He was the host of the popular television shows No Reservations and Parts Unknown. Bourdain died in June 2018.
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Reviews for A Cook's Tour
671 ratings36 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Bourdain writes just as he delivers his monologues on his TV shows, no BS, gets straight to the point, says what he feels in his gut. The book is a series of vignettes, bouncing around the world in sixteen chapters, but some places like Vietnam he revisits. It may be a cook's tour, but food is really just his path to the culture and history of a place. He's a travel writer in his own right, bringing his own particular experience and his unique optic to new places. However surly and rebellious he may come off, he really models what a good traveller should be: friendly, humble, curious, respectful, and honest, especially about himself. The book isn't revelatory, but it is fun to experience these places and cultures as Tony does, with a heart wide open and a mind similarly disposed.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A wonderful companion to the TV series of the same name. Bourdain's witty prose gives a deep insight into the world he lived in behind the camera during his year abroad searching for "the perfect meal" and lets even the most the casual reader experience his horror and delight as he's confronted by the next plate set before him. He opens a door to countries many of us will never visit and details delicious and strange foods we may never get to eat or may be too scared to eat. In my opinion it was a great book that I would definitely read again.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm not sure if I'd like Bourdain in person or not, but I do enjoy his writing. He really makes the people and places he writes about come to life. And the food, oh my goodness, the food. I'm not an adventurous eater, not by a long shot. I've always been a picky, meat-and-potatoes gal, and I don't know that that's likely to change. But Bourdain's descriptions of the fare in Portugal, VietNam, Scotland, Spain, and several other places made my mouth water. Especially VietNam. The food there sounds fantastic. Although, I feel pretty confident that, unlike Bourdain, I will never ever eat the still beating heart of a cobra.I loved reading this book. It's great when people like Bourdain, who have a tremendous lust for life and all its experiences, are able to write beautifully as well so that the rest of us can experience those things vicariously. This was, I think, my second of Bourdain's books. It won't be my last.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A pleasant surprise. He writes like he speaks on his shows. Insightful if over the top on a few subjects (vegetarians, Vietnam War, cook from San Francisco) he had a great grasp of where he was and very very humorous. Look forward to reading more of his books.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm a huge fan of Anthony Bourdain and A Cook's Tour did not disappoint. It was really amazing to me how his tv 'voice' is so close to his more personal voice. I will definitely be reading more of his books in the future.
Also, a huge traveller myself it was really nice to read about places that I'd been or that are currently on my to-do list. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Like tony is standing right there reading the book to you. Skipped the animal slaughter parts...ugh.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Bourdain's not a deep philosophical writer, and I am sure I read more into this book than what he ever intended. What is perfection? is it something predefined you are searching for? Is it something you'll know when you see it? Is it something realized after reflection? Regardless, a great idea for a book, something I am sure we all have wanted to do. To be able to travel our planet, learning about our neighbors and eating the best they have to offer.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5He is such a gifted writer.I stayed up until 3am reading it.I only wanted to read the Cambodian chapter,which is compelling, but read the whole book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Writing about food and how life shapes that experience. Writing about food, but not really, it’s writing about living.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Apparently Bourdain is a pompous ass in person, and this comes out a bit in his writing. Reading this book made me want to drink wine, smoke cigarettes and consume lots of French provincial cooking. Oh, and go to Vietnam. Alas, living vicariously through Anthony Bourdain does not necessarily make for a pleasant reading experience.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I liked this book a lot better than I expected to, having encountered Bourdain a few times on TV and when reading interviews. I am not fond of enfants terribile in general, and Bourdain is old enough that it's an increasingly pathetic approach as his hair grays and his face wrinkles. Fortunately, his writing in this book shows little of this aspect of him directly, and his writing is engaging.This book tracks a year of his life, as he travels around the world looking for both trouble and the "perfect meal", with mixed success. Both the failures and the successes made interesting anecdotes.I liked that the candidates for his "perfect meal" were all traditional for their cultures. So much modern food writing is very of-the-moment; Bourdain here is more interested in foods and food ways that have stood the test of time.I do wish there had been rather more detail about the foods and food ways he encountered, especially at the expense of some of his repeated tales of overindulgence in booze, drugs, and trouble-seeking; the later held little charm for me.Still, I'm glad I read it. I'd read another book of Bourdain's... assuming I could, like this time, borrow it rather than paying for it.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Tale of a man's travels around the world to get drunk, stoned, and eat gross stuff while trailing a television crew and sniping at other TV chefs. Self indulgent and boring.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very well written. Bourdain takes you through his search for the perfect meal while making his first TV show. You see here what they didn't put in the show and how he truly feels about the food he is encountering, all the while your mouth waters and sometimes your stomach gurgles.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great book.Based on his tv show, he tells about his travel and food adventures in various countries with his usual wit
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Bourdain is much better on audio than in print. His style is much better spoken than read, in my opinion. This book describes his search for the perfect meal. He went on a world tour with the Food Network and tried to find the perfect meal. His descriptions of his adventures highlight, not the food, but the people he encounters.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Bourdain's not a deep philosophical writer, and I am sure I read more into this book than what he ever intended. What is perfection? is it something predefined you are searching for? Is it something you'll know when you see it? Is it something realized after reflection? Regardless, a great idea for a book, something I am sure we all have wanted to do. To be able to travel our planet, learning about our neighbors and eating the best they have to offer.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anthony Bourdain's second book has him traveling the globe looking for the "perfect" meal. Visiting locales like France, Portugal, Morocco, Japan, Cambodia and Vietnam, as well as a little bit of his home country, Bourdain's goal is to try true, authentic, fresh food and not be afraid to join in and eat like the locals. No matter what their speciality is. Lamb testicles in Morocco, the beating heart of a cobra in Vietnam, haggis in Scotland, nattō in Japan. He's willing (though sometimes understandably reluctant) to try it all and along the way discover that it might actually be good. Except nattō. That just looked disgusting.
Told in vignettes each section focuses on one part of the location he is currently in. There are quite a few from Vietnam and even though they happened concurrently and interspersed throughout the book which can be a little odd to read. The journey he went on was also filmed by the Food Network for the show of the same name and I have that ready to watch to add another dimension to the story. From looking at the episode titles on that it seems that is just as mixed up but in a completely different order to the book.
I've always been an adventurous eater, willing to try anything once, though I don't have a very wide or refined palate. That said I'd be willing to give his trip a try (minus part of the time in Cambodia where he visited a Khmer Rouge-ran city) and hopefully have my horizons expanded. One of Bourdain's beliefs is that nothing should be wasted and all the places he visits are cultures which also embrace that philosophy. Just because some people may be squeamish with things like offal doesn't mean it should be thrown away. The more that can be used out of one animal means the less total number of animals needed to feed people. And it can be quite tasty. Liver and kidney are both nice, though I'm not really a fan of brain, heart or tongue.
One of my issues with the book is it didn't venture to enough places. He visited 5 European countries, 3 in Asia, 2 in the Americas and 1 in Africa. Maybe a little less time in Europe and some more elsewhere would have been good. But his current show, No Reservations, has taken care of that. I really liked Bourdain's attitude - self-deprecating, honest, harsh but always respectful of other cultures and willing to give things a try. And also passionate about the eradication of vegans. A great book I look forward to watching the show and then probably grabbing his next book. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I was pleasantly surprised by Bourdain's witty and wickedly funny writing. Read this book, but plan your next vacations around his destinations (and meals).
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Just like his TV show: a bit irreverent, a bit audacious -- but I'm selfishly interested mostly in those episodes that take place somewhere I've traveled. The others....are usually good but less compelling for me. Probably because Bourdain's show (and his writing) isn't meant to be an intro to a new country or culture, but is focused more specifically on exploring food (which CAN be a big part of a place's culture) and a bit of adventure -- I feel like Bourdain is like icing on the cake. He's awesome don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan -- but without the context of the cake, you can't really just eat spoonful after spoonful of icing. Alas. Three stars because I've only been to half the places in the book, which is to say I skipped through most of the other sections. Is that his fault? No, but I can't give more stars to a book that I read in such a piecemeal way. But I loved those pieces!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary: Chef Anthony Bourdain managed to parlay the success of his memoir Kitchen Confidential into the kind of deal that most people only dream about: he would travel around the world, eating local (and often strange) foods in exotic and adventurous locales. These travels would form the basis of this book, and of the TV show of the same name. (Both are somewhat of a preliminary version of his current book/show, No Reservations.) Each chapter takes place on a different trip, from Portugal to Russia to Vietnam to Mexico, as Bourdain travels in search of the perfect meal - both in terms of the food and the experience.Review: Memoirs have not been a large part of my reading life up to this point, mainly because I dislike the "oh, look at my poor, tragically bizarre childhood and how I overcame it" flavor of memoir, and that's all I was exposed to for quite some time. However, the two types of memoir for which I will happily make an exception are 1) travelogues, and 2) foodie memoirs, so A Cook's Tour was right up my alley.Bourdain's prose is not the smoothest or most polished that I've ever read, but it doesn't matter. He writes like he talks, and the effect is such that everything feels immediate, personal, and typically funny as hell. He doesn't spend a lot of time trying to describe flavors with flowery similies, yet still talks about food in such a vivid and appreciative way that I wound up wanting to eat everything he's describing. (Dieters, beware; this book will make you hungry like nobody's business, even if you have no actual desire to try some of the oddball foods he's eating.) The best chapters are the ones in which he manages to hit the right blend of food and travel (i.e. unlike the chapter on Cambodia, which was a destination more for the adventure and less for any notable food) - and where he didn't get too off track in trying to make a point. However, even when Bourdain did get a bit rambly, I was still interested, and given his biting sense of humor, hugely entertained throughout. 4 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: If you like travel, food, and/or reading about either of them, A Cook's Tour will keep you entertained while you plan your next meal... or vacation.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5An entertaining and quick read. It's probably not for everyone; people who are familiar with Bourdain's television work might get more out of it, because he talks about what it's like to shoot quite often. There are some good moments--the conflict between good television and authenticity rears its head often, for example.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Once you get past Bourdain's profanity, you realize he's a remarkably good writer, with some excellent insights. This is well worth reading, even 8 years after it was published, if only for the love letter he writes for Viet Nam. Surprisingly, having lived through the 70's, it made me happy.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A lot of people first heard about Tony Bourdain with the publication of “Kitchen Confidential,” the irreverent expose of the restaurant culture that elevated him from being a self-confessed mediocre chef to a celebrated author. Although I have since laughed my way through that book, I discovered Bourdain through his travel- and food-oriented show “No Reservations.” I love his sardonic take on the myriad dining scenes throughout the world and the generous way he treats cooks who ply their craft with respect and dedication, regardless of their comparative station.That is also the reason I enjoyed reading “A Cook’s Tour” so much. This book, which was published in conjunction with a television series of the same name, is basically a first-generation version of “No Reservations.” Bourdain’s passions for both cooking and traveling the world first came together in this project and the result is always interesting and occasionally fascinating. His search for the “perfect” meal takes him to the remote reaches of such places as Cambodia, Russia, Portugal, Japan, Scotland, Mexico, and the Sahara; the chapter on Viet Nam is especially good and chronicles the origin of the author’s well-known love affair with that country. As always, Bourdain’s writing is sharp and insightful and, at times, surprisingly beautiful.This is a very different book than “Kitchen Confidential” but one that I found to be a great deal more satisfying. It does not produce the kind of sound-bite moments of that earlier work—the whole “don’t order fish on Mondays” thing, for instance—but it was written far more from the heart. Bourdain may have cooked in second-tier restaurants, but he is a first-class travel and food writer and that talent is fully realized here.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Anthony Bourdain is the gangster of the celebrity chef world and I love him. Crass and unapologetic for who he is, but utterly charming in his love for food. He travels the world for the "perfect" meal and has so many "perfects" that it is hard to pick just one. I long to eat at the many places that he has eaten in this book, and not just the "pretty" ones.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This was good, but I didn't enjoy it as much as Kitchen Confidential. I've been trying to decide why & I think it's because ultimately this isn't so much a food book as it is a travel book. That's okay, but the notion of hunting down the perfect meal has an appeal to me & led me to expect something different. Having said all of that, I enjoyed the book. It's hard not to love someone who hits the jackpot with a best seller & says to themselves, "Hmmm ... I think I'll see if I can get someone to pay for me to travel around the world eating cool stuff & looking at cool & interesting places." That someone actually did agree to pay for this & that it was the Food Network makes it all the more amusing since he spends much of Kitchen Confidential slagging the Food Netwok & many of its chefs. If you've seen No Reservations you know the schtick - Tony visits exotic locale, meets interesting people, talks a lot, & eats cool food. Often there is is drunkenness & there is the occasional oblilgatory inspired by the producers moment of Eat-This-Weird-Thing-While-We-Film-You-It'll-Be-Great-Remember-We're-Paying. I like that Bourdain gets that great food doesn't all happen at 5-star restaurants. It can, but it doesn't happen only there. Great food also happens at people's houses, from street vendors, down at the local. It was fun to read about his meal at The French Laundry, but I'm not dropping $400-$500 on a meal anytime soon & I much more enjoyed his writing about his adventures in Mexico with the families of some of his cooks from his New York restaurant. All in all I think that this kind of thing works better as a TV series. Ultimately with travel I want to actually see the place, the food, the people. What works as voiceover makes for okay reading, but just okay.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Meh. I was disappointed. Bourdain's book [book: Kitchen Confidential] was so good that I couldn't wait to read this one. More of a documentation of his travels for the show No Reservations, the wit and banter is not there. Too much time is spent on the logistics of travel and it seems to drone on and on.This doesn't mean I won't continue to read his stuff and watch his show. I think he's funny and writes well. But this book is just not as good.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5After the bravado and profanity of Kitchen Confidential, the last thing I expected from this book was warmth and tenderness. Damned if Bourdain didn't surprise me. Yes, there was a fair amount of blue language and contempt for The Man, but it's set against a backdrop of genuine affection for the cultures he visits. The chapter where he goes to France with his brother made me tear up. The lush descriptions of food made me ravenous. Not a good book to read for dieters, vegetarians or nuns.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Definitely not as good as "Kitchen Confidential," but there still some nice Bourdain wit. I think chapters about London, Japan, and San Francisco are among the best.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5My name is j, and I am a bookoholic. I devour the things. I could live in a house made of books, and in fact I almost do. I eat them. Quickly. Like an obese American with a Big Mac attack. This book takes me days upon days to parse. Not that the language is poorly chosen, mind you, but because it is so rich. You know those fabulous and rare desserts where one bite really is enough? Remember that feeling after one perfect smoked sea salt caramel from Fran's in Seattle? That "I am in love and I can die happy" feeling? In the slow parts of this book it takes me a page or two before I feel that sated. In the best parts, I can live a week on a paragraph. If you at all like the travel channel show, buy this book. I love the show. This is infinitely better.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I love the TV show No Reservations and this book was an interesting supplement to the show. But it was also a bit snide, and since I'm not a cook, I didn't get all the culinary references. Still, Anthony Bourdain rocks!
Book preview
A Cook's Tour - Anthony Bourdain
A Cook’s Tour
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Bone in the Throat
Gone Bamboo
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Typhoid Mary (an Urban Historical)
To Nancy
CONTENTS
Dear Nancy
Introduction
Chapter 1 Where Food Comes From
Chapter 2 Back to the Beach
Chapter 3 The Burn
Chapter 4 Where the Boys Are/Where the Girls Are
Chapter 5 How to Drink Vodka
Chapter 6 Something Very Special
Chapter 7 Highway of Death
Chapter 8 Tokyo Redux
Chapter 9 Road to Pailin
Chapter 10 Fire Over England
Chapter 11 Where Cooks Come From
Chapter 12 Can Charlie Surf?
Chapter 13 West Coast
Chapter 14 Haggis Rules
Chapter 15 Very, Very Strong
Chapter 16 Perfect
Dear Nancy,
I’m about as far away from you as I’ve ever been – a hotel (the hotel, actually) in Pailin, a miserable one-horse dunghole in northwest Cambodia, home to those not-so-adorable scamps, the Khmer Rouge. Picture this: a single swayback bed, a broken TV set that shows only fuzzy images of Thai kick-boxing, a tile floor with tiles halfway up the wall and a drain in the middle – as if the whole room were designed to be quickly and efficiently hosed down. There’s one lightbulb, a warped dresser, and a complimentary plastic comb with someone else’s hair in it. In spite of the EZ Clean design features, there are suspicious and dismaying stains on the walls. About two thirds of the way up one wall, there are what look like bloody footprints and – what do they call it, arterial spray? How they got there, so high up, I can only guess. The wall opposite has equally sinister stains – evidence of a more opaque substance – these suggesting a downward dispersal. Having seen the bathroom, I can’t blame the perpetrator for anything.
There are no smiles in this town, just glares of naked hostility. The clothing of choice is the moldering remnants of military-issue fatigues. There is a ‘karaoke’ booth in the lobby, next to the standard pictogram of an AK-47 with a red line through it (no Automatic Weapons in the Lobby). ‘Karaoke’ means, presumably, that the bison-sized women lounging around by the front desk with their kids are available for purposes of sexual diversion. The best-looking one is a dead ringer for Hideki Irabu. (We traded that lox to Toronto, didn’t we? Or was it Montreal?) My Khmer translator, who has hardly opened his mouth since we entered Khmer Rouge territory, says that the last time he stayed here, during the last coup, he got a terrible skin rash. He intends, he says, to sleep standing up. Now he tells me . . .
Could you maybe make a doctor’s appointment for me for when I get back? I’m thinking a full workup, to be on the safe side. I’ve been wading in water – and drinking it – from the kind of worst-case scenarios you read about in the guidebooks and travelers warnings. Needless to say, some of the food I’ve been eating – well, the food handling has been . . . dubious, at best. Is liver fluke curable? I don’t think they gave me a shot for that. I miss you. I miss the cat. I miss my own bed, The Simpsons at 7:00 and 11:00. I could really go for a cold beer. A pizza. Some chopped liver from Barney Greengrass. Toilets that don’t double as showers. I’ll call you when I get back to Phnom Penh or Battambang.
Love you.
Tony
Introduction
I’m sitting cross-legged in the bush with Charlie, deep in the Mekong Delta, drinking Vietnamese moonshine from a plastic cola bottle. It’s dark, the only light coming from a single generator-powered lightbulb, and on the tarpaulin of stitched-together fertilizer and rice sacks laid out on the hard jungle floor in front of me, dinner has just been served: a humble farmer’s meal of clay-roasted duck, duck and banana-blossom soup, salad, and stuffed bitter melon. My host, affectionately referred to as ‘Uncle Hai,’ sits to my left, his right hand clutching my knee. Every once in a while he gives it a squeeze, just to make sure I’m still there and that I’m having a good time.
I am having a good time. I’m having the best time in the world. Across from me, a ninety-five-year-old man with a milky white eye and no teeth, who’s wearing black pajamas and rubber sandals, raises a glass of the vicious homemade rice whiskey and challenges me to yet another shot. He’s a war hero, I have been assured. He fought the Japanese, the French; he fought in the ‘American War.’ We exchange respectful salutations and both hammer back a shot.
The problem is, nearly everybody at this meal is also, apparently, a war hero. The delta was an incubation chamber – a hotbed of VC activity during our country’s time here – and everybody, one by one, wants to have a drink with me. Grampa, directly across from me, his legs tucked comfortably under his body like a supple sixteen-year-old’s, has raised his glass in my direction six times already, fixing me in the gaze of his one unclouded eye, before knocking back another shot. Almost immediately, someone else tugs on my sleeve.
‘Please, sir . . . the gentleman down there . . . he is also a great war hero. He would like to drink with you.’
I look down the length of the makeshift picnic blanket to a tough-looking guy, fortyish maybe, with thick neck and forearms. He’s staring right at me, not shy at all, this one. He’s smiling, too – though not exactly the same warm, friendly smile Grampa’s been giving me. This smile says, I’ve killed a few of your kind, you know. Now, let’s see if you can drink.
‘I’m right here, Cool Breeze,’ I say, trying not to slur. ‘Come and get me.’ Then I give him my baddest-ass Dirty Harry, jailhouse stare while I drain another glass of what I am quickly coming to believe is formaldehyde.
Three Communist party officials from the Can Tho People’s Committee, picking at salads with chopsticks, watch with interest as the silly American, who came all this way – by plane, by car, by sampan – to eat clay-roasted duck with a rice farmer and his family, slugs back his twelfth shot of the evening and looks worriedly around the clearing at all the other war heroes waiting to do the same. There are about twenty-five men crowded around the tarpaulin, sitting with their legs folded tightly, tearing at duck with their chopsticks and watching me. The women serve, looming up out of the darkness with more food, more liquor, and the occasional sharp word of advice.
Don’t make him carve the duck! I imagine they’re saying. He’s American! He’s too stupid and clumsy! In America, everything arrives carved already! He won’t know what to do! He’ll cut himself, the idiot, and shame us all! A paper plate arrives with a small paring knife and another sizzling-hot duck: head, feet, bill, and guts intact. I position the thing as best I can with burning fingers, wrestle not too gracefully with it for a few seconds, and manage to remove legs, breasts, and wings in the classic French tableside style. I crack open the skull so my friend Philippe can scoop out the brains (he’s French; they like that stuff) and offer the first slice of breast to my host, Uncle Hai.
The crowd is pleased. There’s a round of applause. Behind me, children are running around, playing in the dark. A while ago, there were only a few of them. But as news of the American visitor and his French friend spread, their number has swelled – as has the number of dinner guests. They’ve been arriving all night from surrounding farms. In groups of two and three, they’ve been coming from the river, pulling up in their narrow boats and disembarking at Uncle Hai’s tiny landing. They’ve walked single file down the packed-silt riverbank, the dried-mud causeway that serves as both jungle highway and levee, part of an intricate, centuries-old irrigation system that extends for hundreds of square miles. Occasionally, a small child will appear at my elbow to stroke my hand or pinch my skin, seemingly amazed at the color, the hair on my arms. There is a look of absolute wonder and confusion on his face, as if, perhaps, older friends dared him to go pinch the Giant American Savage who once bombed and strafed the village, but now comes in peace to eat duck and drink rotgut with these patriotic heroes. A while ago, I had my Sally Struthers moment, posing for a photograph with about twenty of them, before allowing them to chase me around the clearing with a lot of fake Hong Kong martial-arts moves, then letting them tie me up with a length of twine – to much squealing of delight.
The duck is a little tough, and smoky-tasting from the mound of burning straw it’s been cooked in; and the Mekong whiskey is going down like drain cleaner. I’m worried about what I’m going to do when all this alcohol hits me, how I’m ever going to get back on that narrow, wobbly boat in the middle of the night, make my way downriver through the absolute blackness of the jungle, disembark (while still retaining verticality) across a bamboo and mangrove monkey bridge to a sleepy Stone Age hamlet, then, in a shared car, bounce over twisting narrow jungle track and shaky wooden bridges to Highway 1 and Can Tho without blowing chunks all over the three representatives of the People’s Committee.
I don’t want to disgrace my clan. I don’t want my gracious and genial hosts to see me stumble or fall. I don’t want to get hauled away from this meal on a stretcher, my head hanging over the side of the sampan, drooling bile into the black water. I’ve got something to prove. We may have lost the war. We may have pointlessly bombed and mined and assassinated and defoliated before slinking away as if it were all a terrible misunderstanding – but, goddamn it, we can still drink as good as these guys, right?
Looking across at Grampa, who’s refilling his glass while a toddler crawls onto his lap, I’m not so sure. Screw it. I’m having a good time. I smile at the old man and hold up my glass. I like him. I like these guys. Since coming to Asia, I’ve never met such a great group of people. It’s been food, folks, and fun like I’ve never experienced. These are, by Vietnamese standards, party animals – warm, generous, thoughtful, kind – occasionally very funny, sincere in both their hospitality and their fierce pride. I don’t want to leave. I want to do this all night.
One of the younger war heroes at the other end of the tarp suddenly stands up, and the other guests stop chattering as he breaks into song. Accompanied by a clapped-out guitar, he sings, his palms held together as if praying, looking out over our heads, as if singing to someone in the jungle. It’s beautiful, a heartfelt, sweet-sounding, absolutely haunting invocation, and in the dim light from the single bulb, he looks angelic. No one makes a sound while he sings, but I manage to whisper a question to the translator on my right.
‘What’s he singing about?’ I ask.
‘It is a patriotic song,’ he says, ‘about the people of this village, the farmers and their families who hid the soldiers and helped them during the American War. About the difficulties they faced. And their courage.’
‘Oh,’ I reply.
I know the song is basically about killing my kind – and not too terribly long ago – but I’m absolutely riveted. I’m charmed. I’m flattered. I have been treated, in the last few hours, with never-before-encountered kindness and respect. Uncle Hai gives my knee another squeeze. The old man across from me smiles and raises his empty glass to me, summons a younger man to refill it, gestures that he should do the same for me. A swollen moon appears from behind puffs of cloud, hangs heavily over the tree line beyond the river. Other guests are arriving. I can hear them in the distance, their sandals and bare feet padding softly along the hardened silt, emerging from the darkness to take places around the tarpaulin.
I wanted the perfect meal.
I also wanted – to be absolutely frank – Col. Walter E. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Lawrence of Arabia, Kim Philby, the Consul, Fowler, Tony Po, B. Traven, Christopher Walken . . . I wanted to find – no, I wanted to be – one of those debauched heroes and villains out of Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, Francis Coppola, and Michael Cimino. I wanted to wander the world in a dirty seersucker suit, getting into trouble.
I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung River to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulquería in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies.
Unreasonable? Overromantic? Uninformed? Foolhardy?
Yes!
But I didn’t care. I’d just put down a very nice score with an obnoxious and overtestosteroned account of my life in the restaurant business. Inexplicably, it had flown off the shelves. I was paying rent on time for the first time in my life. I had, amazingly, health coverage at long last. I actually had money in the bank and the goodwill of a publisher on my side. After a few months of traveling the English-speaking world, flogging my book, giving the same witless three-minute interview over and over and over again, I was no longer a useful factor in the day-to-day operations of my kitchen. My cooks had long since begun calling me ‘Pinchay Famoso’ and making fun of me when I’d show up slathered in TV makeup after yet another segment showing me warning the public about ‘fish on Monday’ and the ‘perils of hollandaise.’ I needed something to do. I needed another idea for a book – preferably while I was still in good odor from the last one. I may love cooking, and I certainly love the life of the professional chef, but I did not, at age forty-five, forty-six, or ever again, want to find myself slopping out brunches in some West Village café when my knees went completely and my brain turned, finally, to mush.
‘How about this?’ I suggested to my editor. ‘I travel around the world, doing whatever I want. I stay in fine hotels and I stay in hovels. I eat scary, exotic, wonderful food, doing cool stuff like I’ve seen in movies, and looking for the perfect meal. How’s that sound?’
That sounded like a good business plan, right? I’d comb the world looking for the perfect mix of food and context. Upriver in Southeast Asia to eat snakes and bird’s nests, back to La Teste for a bowl of soupe de poisson, scale the mountains of the new haute cuisine – the French Laundry in Napa Valley, I hadn’t eaten there yet! That Arzak guy in Spain – all the cooks are talking about him. I’d look and look, and eventually I’d find the best meal in the world – according to me anyway – and I’d write about it.
Of course, I knew already that the best meal in the world, the perfect meal, is very rarely the most sophisticated or expensive one. I knew how important factors other than technique or rare ingredients can be in the real business of making magic happen at a dinner table. Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life. I mean, let’s face it: When you’re eating simple barbecue under a palm tree, and you feel sand between your toes, samba music is playing softly in the background, waves are lapping at the shore a few yards off, a gentle breeze is cooling the sweat on the back of your neck at the hairline, and looking across the table, past the column of empty Red Stripes at the dreamy expression on your companion’s face, you realize that in half an hour you’re probably going to be having sex on clean white hotel sheets, that grilled chicken leg suddenly tastes a hell of a lot better.
I talk about these mysterious forces all the time with my chef cronies. Nothing illustrates them more than the Last Meal Game. ‘You’re getting the electric chair tomorrow morning. They’re gonna strap you down, turn up the juice, and fry your ass until your eyes sizzle and pop like McNuggets. You’ve got one meal left. What are you having for dinner?’ When playing this game with chefs – and we’re talking good chefs here – the answers are invariably simple ones.
‘Braised short ribs,’ said one friend.
‘A single slab of seared foie gras,’ said another.
‘Linguine pomodoro, like my mother used to make me,’ said another.
‘Cold meat loaf sandwich,’ said another, shuddering with pleasure. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’
No one I’ve ever played this game with came back with ‘The tasting menu at Ducasse.’ No one remembers their best meal ever as being consumed jacketed and tied, in a starched dress shirt, sitting bolt upright in a four-star restaurant. That particular combination of skill, technique, prime ingredients, and artistic genius was not really what I was looking for – though I was determined to give it a shot now and again. There are other forces at work in the enjoyment of a truly great meal. Nice crystal, mood lighting, squeeze-bottle-applied sauces, good china, attentive service, spectacular wine – I was already well aware of their strange and terrible powers to seduce and delight. Though not always capable of fully harnessing them myself, I was fully conscious of them. I knew how those things worked, the classic interplay between food and service, the effects of low-wattage peach-tinted lightbulbs, the sound of well-polished sommelier’s shoes gliding across a dining room. The entire food business as show business is what my friends and I have been doing our whole lives. I knew about that like I knew about the physical forces at play in the kitchen: gravity, decay, coagulation, fermentation, emulsification, oxidization, reduction, caramelization. I didn’t want to think about those things. I wanted to detach myself from the hard wiring, the way my whole nervous system becomes aware of every movement in a crowded restaurant, habitually monitoring the busboys’ progress in the neighboring station, eyeing an overflowing bus pan, a backed-up service bar, listening for the sizzle as my fish hits a hot pan in the kitchen.
I wanted magic. When is food magic? What are the common denominators? Certainly, when food is the result of a brilliant and obsessive personal vision, it can take on mystical, magical aspects. At their best, chefs like to consider themselves alchemists, and some of them, particularly the French, have a long and glorious tradition of turning lead into gold. For what is a humble shoulder or shank or strip of gut if not leaden and unlovely, and what is daube of beef Provençale or osso buco – when every bit of flavor and texture has been coaxed gently by skilled hands – but pure gold? And it’s not just magic for the person eating. It can be magic for the chef as well, seeing that tough, veiny, uncooked hunk of meat and bone going into the oven, swimming in purplish and not very distinguished red table wine, then seeing it, smelling it, tasting it only a few hours later, the sauce reduced, a hearty, thick, mellowed, and wonderful witches’ brew – transformed.
It’s an understanding of this process that raised the French (and Italians) to the forefront of classical cuisine. It’s why we love them – even when we hate them. Few sane persons enjoy French pop music – or even the French much – but they know what to do with every scrap of hoof, snout, entrail, and skin, every bit of vegetable trimming, fish head, and bone. Because they grew up with that all-important dictum. Use everything! (And use it well.)
Why is that? Why them and not us?
The answer is, in many ways, to be found elsewhere in the world – in Vietnam, Portugal, Mexico, Morocco – because they had to. It was not – in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France – as it is not today in much of the rest of the world, an option whether to use the nasty bits. You had to.
They damn well better have figured out something to do with calf’s face, pig’s feet, snails, old bread, and all those cheap cuts and trimmings, or they’d go broke, starve, never be able to afford the really good stuff for special occasions. Sauces, marinades, stewing, charcuterie, the invention of the quenelle, the sausage, the cured ham, salted fish, confit – these were strategies, the results of necessity and countless experimentation. Coq au vin? Tough oversized bird, marinated in red wine and braised long enough to be able to be chewed. Pot-au-feu? Boiled tongues, tails, bones, and cheap root vegetables. Pâté? Scraps and trimmings and fat, ground up and seasoned and decorated until somebody was interested in putting it in his mouth. Confit de canard? I got no refrigerator and I got no freezer and all these damn duck legs are going bad! Those shrewd and wily French toiled mightily over the years, figuring out ways to make just about everything that grazed, creeped, swam, crawled, or hopped, and every growing thing that poked through soil, rotted on the vine, or hid under dung, into something edible, enjoyable – even magical.
Long after the arrival of the refrigerator, while Americans ate plastic-wrapped fluffy white chicken breasts and denied even the existence of legs or giblets, secure in the certain knowledge that sirloin, filet mignon, and prime rib were really the only ‘good’ parts of the steer, that everything else was hamburger, the French kept at it like nothing had happened. They’d come to love their hooves and snouts. They’d found something to love in every little bit – if it was done right – and, as with so many cultures on this big planet, they’d come to value, to cherish, the humble, poor man’s fare of their past. Merchandising, once a necessary device for the transformation of the inedible to the edible, had fostered an entire cuisine, an approach, a philosophy, a way of life. And magic was the mainstay of the process – a valuable arrow in any cook’s quiver, even one playing with thousand-dollar-a-pound white truffles and torchons of foie gras.
Respecting the ingredient may no longer be an economic necessity in much of the emerging world; it is now a pleasure, to be experienced and enjoyed at one’s chosen time and place. When everything is just right, a well-made tête de veau can be not only a thing to be savored for its challenging yet simple combination of flavors and textures; it can, with the haunting power of sense memory, remind us of times and places long past.
Think about the last time food transported you. You were a kid, had been feeling under the weather all week, and when you were finally getting your appetite back, after a long, wet walk from school in the rain, mom had a big steaming bowl of homemade minestrone waiting for you. Maybe it was just a bowl of Campbell’s cream of tomato with Oysterettes, and a grilled cheese sandwich. You know what I mean.
Your first taste of champagne on a woman’s lips . . . steak frites when you were in Paris as a teenager with a Eurorail pass, you’d blown almost all your dough on hash in Amsterdam, and this slightly chewy slab of rumsteck (rump steak) was the first substantial meal in days . . . a single wild strawberry, so flavorful that it nearly took your head off . . . your grandmother’s lasagne . . . a first sip of stolen ice-cold beer on a hot summer night, hands smelling of crushed fireflies . . . leftover pork fried rice, because your girlfriend at the time always seemed to have some in the fridge . . . steamer clams, dripping with drawn butter from your first family vacation at the Jersey shore . . . rice pudding from the Fort Lee Diner . . . bad Cantonese when you were a kid and Chinese was still exotic and wonderful and you still thought fortune cookies were fun . . . dirty-water hot dogs . . . a few beads of caviar, licked off a nipple . . .
Nostalgia aside, good ingredients are not to be discounted. One tends to remember vividly one’s first really fresh piece of fish, one’s first taste of top-quality beluga, an early encounter with truffles, fresh baby peas right out of the pod, a perfectly marbled prime côte de boeuf, an introduction to fresh morels, or stuff you’d just never tried before and maybe didn’t even know existed, like a hunk of raw o-toro, or sea urchin roe. I wanted more memories like these. New ones. I knew time was running out. I was forty-four years old and I’d been basically nowhere. I was becoming a little slower as a line cook, a little bit crankier. When I got swamped on my station, when it seemed sometimes like every order was coming off my sauté station, I began thinking it a conspiracy. The waiters were sandbagging me! Loading up Pops with sauté items, just to see him sweat. Listen to his knees snap crackle pop when he bends down to that lowboy. Look at him, snarling and cursing under his breath – he’s losing it! While my Mexican carnales soldiered quietly on under mountains of orders, I would rail at the powers that put me in this awful spot. It was getting to me: the pressure, the relentless nature of feeding that bottomless pit of hungry public, of every day sending out food into the Great Unseen Maw in the dining room, only to have to do it again and again, with no end ever in sight. Even my expediting was suffering. I hate admitting this. Because when you’re done as an expediter, you are truly fit only for the glue factory (or a consultant’s job). The realization came on a busy night at Les Halles, when after screaming loudly, ‘Fire table eight!’ my Bengali runner, Mohammed, gently nudged my arm and whispered tactfully, even pityingly, ‘No, Chef, it’s table seven.’ I almost cried. My eyes actually filled. I was losing it.
What the hell. I’d eat my way around the world, right? Fearlessly, I’d look for magic in Vietnam, Cambodia, Portugal, Mexico, Morocco – and anywhere else that occurred to me. There would be nothing I would not try. Okay: one thing. My wife, Nancy, already unhappy about me leaving her behind while I flew around the world, told me flat out, ‘I hear of you scooping the brains out of some cute little monkey’s head while he’s still alive? It’s divorce court. Got it? And try to lay off the dog and cat. You do still have a conscience, right?’
No problem. The novelty value of tormenting a little monkey (not to mention the risks of some simian spongiform bacteria) did not, to my mind, offset the cruelty factor. I don’t know if that even qualifies as a meal.
I would, however, revisit Japan. Do it right this time and try that poisonous blowfish I’d heard about. In France, I’d eat an oyster, fresh out of the water, from the same oyster beds where I’d had my first as a kid – and see if there wasn’t some magic to be had there. I wanted to find out if all my cogitating on memory and context was on target or not. I’d go to rural Mexico, to the little town in the state of Puebla, where all my cooks come from, maybe have their moms cook for me, find out how come they’re all so damn good at what they do, what the roots of their particular kind of magic powers might be.
When I told my boss at Les Halles, José, about my plans, and that we’d be needing a new chef de cuisine while I bopped around the globe, there was not the weeping and rending of garments and the ‘Oh my god! No! Noooo! What will we do without you?’ that I’d been secretly hoping for. The first words out of his mouth were, ‘Ah! Then you must go to Portugal. I will call my mother and tell her to start fattening a pig.’ I cleared my schedule, prepared to cut myself loose from everyone and everything I knew and loved.
Full Disclosure
Here’s the part where I reluctantly admit to something about which I’m deeply conflicted – even ashamed. I’d lie about it if I could. But you’re probably going to find out about it anyway, so here’s a little preemptive truth telling: Almost the entire time I would travel, there would be, somewhere in the vicinity, at least two people with digital cameras. They’d be wearing headphones. One set of phones would be recording, or at least monitoring, every word, curse, and belch issuing from my mouth. When I went to the bathroom, I would have to remember to turn off the little clip-on mike attached to the transmitter on my hip. I had, you see, sold my soul to the devil.
‘We’ll follow you around,’ said the nice man from the television production company. ‘No lighting equipment, no boom mikes, no script. It’ll be very inobtrusive. Just be yourself.’