New Look at an Old Friend: Medium Raw

Very little food media has the knack of true timelessness. More than almost any other field, its styles and methods are transient, mutable, and very much identifiable. Author, origin, and year go a very long way, but then comes the style- be it of page layout, recipe choice, prose, or photography, so many cookbooks and memoirs read as though they were carved from the stone of their era in the business. Sometimes those are shining crystal, others polished marble, and still more might as well be kidney or gallstones. They all leave their marks.

I decided to take a look at an Anthony Bourdain book today. If anyone in living memory served to define a generation's perspective on the restaurant business and serve as its face, it would probably have been him. Five years dead now, he left behind two wives and many lovers, a daughter (who manages quite well to stay out of the spotlight), and a massive legacy as messy and fraught with conflict as his career.

Kitchen Confidential was one of those rare volumes that mixed knowledge with candor and pain in a manner that not only spoke to people, but enticed them to more. To sit down, shut up, and listen- and then think about what was said. About who said it, how they said it, and why. It was a story of a life indulged, squandered, wasted almost in its entirety, and then through blind luck and happenstance, unleashed upon us all.

But that tale of frustration, anger, and war stories from the culinary underbelly isn't the book I'm looking at here. It is instead the ten-years-on incarnation, Medium Raw.

Straight out of the gate, to set the mood, there's a lengthy bit on the notion of 'selling out', wherein Bourdain admits to having tried to uphold some fabricated sense of principles, of integrity. Aghast that people he thought of as heroes were willing to shill for nonsense, he listened to them. He learned perspective. For the big names, the empire builders, it's no longer personal. It's about those that depend on them- the staff of the restaurants and operations bearing a larger-than-life name. The beast must be fed, and it can't afford to be a picky eater. Perhaps out of sheer stubbornness, remembering how many years he spent bereft of anything remotely resembling principles, Bourdain still clung to those supposed notions, resisting the offers of endorsing things or people that would stick in his craw... until he had a daughter.

Almost everyone has a price- though in fairness, I've yet to find mine. My principles have kept me warm when I was cold, and assuaged the hunger when I was starving. But it's tireless work and constant suffering for no tangible reward, and it really shouldn't be.

There's a broad section on heroes and villains, which is always interesting when it comes from the heart and mind of someone so awash in the potential for vitriol. Some real surprises in this section for most people, I'd say, but the neat bit is that it sets the stage for the rest of the book, which does a superb job riffing on that theme. Bourdain offers a much more comprehensive perspective than would have been penned ten years past, rich in tone and robust in descriptives as he moves from food writing and food media to squabbles between industry titans, a deeply personal look at the most important invisible man in one of the greatest restaurants in the world, and then finishing out with a thoughtful, uncompromisingly harsh look at himself, his attitudes, and his future.

In one last nod to Kitchen Confidential, the final bit 'Still Here' gives briefs of some names and faces of his own checkered career. It reads quietly, apologetically, even mournfully, as it all slowly fades to black.

At the end of the day, Anthony Bourdain knew he was on borrowed time. Never once even dreaming that he could have met the requirements for the life his lightning-in-a-bottle book gave him, he merely did his best to do it justice. Sometimes he failed, and he never shied away from saying so. In spite of that, he kept at it, seeking the deeper, more personal feelings behind everywhere he went and everyone he met; an explorer knowing full well he was on a one-way trip, but determined to make the world a more informed, aware place in that familiar coarse way he'd always had.

We should be grateful. But we must also be worthy. He wasn't. But he knew that he wasn't, right down to the core of his being, and his work has always made that hard truth quite clear. In that regard at least, his integrity was beyond reproach. That, above all else, is what will always make him memorable.

Anthony Bourdain: 1956-2018.