Bourdain: The Mexicans share a lot of traits with the Vietnamese. All of that good stuff, like the goat’s head soup, you’ll find in a lot of poorer cultures with powerful traditions, good food traditions. They use everything. They treasure that. Menudo and pozole in Mexico. In France you have cassoulet. In Brazil, feijoada. These are all poor folks’ food.When the rich people take the sirloin and the filet, the poor are left with the snouts and the hooves and whatever little bits of meat and animal protein they can get. They can’t go down to the green market and buy organic vegetables, pick up some tofu and a vitamin pack to compensate. They’ll take what they can get, and more often than not they devise these fiendish and lovely ways to make it into something wonderful. Those dishes are often fed back into the mainstream culture as a treasured staple. You see this time and time again.More Anthony
makes me want to do some travelling….Toot? Spain or Vietnam?
He’s a smart ass sarcastic son-of-a-bitch…but I respect him. He travels the world and immerses himself with other cultures, eating anything out of respect to the people who feed him. Whether it be scrambled eggs cooked in sand, rocket fuel moonshine, or a bull’s penis, he’s game.
“”Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone … Bad food is fake food … food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people’s ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives. Food that’s too safe, too pasteurized, too healthy – it’s bad! There should be some risk, like unpasteurized cheese. Food is about rot, and decay, and fermentation….as much as it is also about freshness.” - AB
Among his many epicurean exploits, Bourdain is famous for consuming sheeptesticles in Morocco, anteggs in Puebla, Mexico, a raw sealeyeball as part of a traditional Inuit seal hunt, and a whole cobra — beating heart, blood, bile, and meat — in Vietnam. According to Bourdain, the most disgusting thing he has ever eaten is a Chicken McNugget, though he did declare the warthog rectum he ate in Namibia “the worst meal of [his] life”. The FOX Network produced a short-lived sitcom adaptation of Kitchen Confidential, which aired in the fall of 2005. The character “Jack Bourdain” was based loosely on the biography and persona of Anthony Bourdain.
Bourdain is an unrepentant smoker and drinker, and a former user of cocaine, heroin, and LSD. In Kitchen Confidential he writes: “We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in [refrigerator] at every opportunity to ‘conceptualize.’ Hardly a decision was made without drugs. Pot, quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey and used to sweeten tea, Seconal, Tuinal, speed, codeine and, increasingly, heroin, which we’d send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to Alphabet City to get.”[7] In a nod to Bourdain’s two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, renowned chef Thomas Keller once served him a 20-course tasting menu including a mid-meal “coffee and cigarettes” dish of foie gras with tobacco-infused custard.[8] Because of his liberal use of light profanity and sexual references in No Reservations, the network has prepended viewer discretion advisories to each segment. [wikipedia]“
