By Lambert Strether of Corrente
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Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know absolutely nothing about. Be kind. Always. -Apocrypha, By Robin Williams
This is a very serious week for Naked Capitalism, so we’re going to change things up a bit and ask our readers: Amuse bouchethis is like an old-fashioned blog post that you start writing without knowing where it will end up.
I don’t mean to criticize my mother’s cooking, but it was the kind of American food you’d find in a 1950s women’s magazine (meatloaf, creamed peas, jellies). It was thoughtful and nutritious, but… cookingI learned to eat there until I was in my mid-30s, when I visited for T in Montreal.eI attended the X Conference at McGill University, where I was working as a desktop publisher a few years ago, and after the program finished for the day, I walked down the mountain to Rue Sainte-Catherine and treated myself to a steakhouse.
The steakhouse was the Alouette Steakhouse, and the warm interior was packed with a bourgeois provincial crowd dining in. I chose from the menu, which was written in both French (large letters) and English (small letters), and had an exotic menu. Steak au Poivre and french fries, Escargot An aperitif and a carafe of red wine (considering the room, “I want to drink what everyone else is drinking”). The air was crisp outside, and steam was wafting from the windows when we stepped inside. A plump chef in a white hat was searing steaks on a rotating grill, presumably with an emphasis on speed. Bread, wine, and Escargot The meal arrived. I’d never seen snails served on a hemispherical convex plate before. They were garlicky, soaked in oil and not exactly firm. I ate the snails, soaked up the garlic and oil with bread, took a sip of wine to cut through the oil and garlic. The steak arrived, sprinkled with peppercorns and drizzled in cream sauce. I sliced off a chunk…
My whole mouth was happy. My whole mouth was happy. body I was so happy. I don’t know why this never happened before, but it did happen. As you can see, this is Madeleine For me, it was this moment: Bourdain, unlike me, is a real food writer, much better than I am, and here is this Madeleine moment that he had when he was much younger than I am. Kitchen Confidential (2000), pp. 18-19:
We had already finished our brie and baguettes and sipped our Evian, but I was still hungry, so I said, as usual. When Mr. Saint-Jour heard this, he asked in his thick Gironde accent, as if challenging his American passengers, if anyone would like to try some oysters.
My parents were hesitant – I don’t think it occurred to me that we might actually have to eat the raw, slimy thing we were floating in. My brother recoiled in fear.
But in the proudest moment of my young life, I smartly stood up, smiled defiantly, and volunteered to be first.
And so, in that unforgettably sweet moment in my personal history, one that stands out more vividly to me than the many other firsts that followed—my first joint, my first day of high school, my first published book, and so many others—I had my glory. Mr. Sanjur beckoned me over to the side of the boat, leaned forward, his head almost submerged, and emerged holding a huge, irregularly shaped, mud-covered oyster in his rough, claw-like fist. He cracked it open with a square, rusty oyster knife and handed it to me. With everyone watching now, my brother trembled in awe at this shiny, vaguely sexual thing, still dripping and almost alive.
I took it, and as instructed by the now-smiling Mr. Sanjour, I tilted the shell into my mouth and, sip after sip, devoured it. It tasted of seawater. It tasted of brine and flesh. And, somehow, it tasted of the future.
Everything was different. Everything.
Not only did I survive, it was fun.
This was a magic I knew only dimly and perversely. I was hooked. My parents’ trembling and my brother’s looks of uncontrollable disgust and surprise only reinforced the feeling that I had somehow become a grown-up. I had had an adventure, I had tasted the forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life – the long and often foolish and self-destructive pursuit of the next thing, whether it was food or drugs or sex or some other new sensation – had all begun from that moment.
I had learned something, instinctively, instinctively, spiritually and sexually, in a slightly pioneering way, and there was no turning back. The genie had come out of the lamp. My life as a cook and a chef had begun.
Food is powerful.
It could inspire, amaze, shock, excite, delight, and move people. It had the power to delight me and others. This was valuable information.
I was dining alone and fancy so only experienced the aesthetics. forceSo did Bourdain (for better or worse.) Sadly, Alouette Steak House is no longer around.
Like so much else downtown, it faded away. I moved on to more upscale eateries, but I don’t think there were any celebrity chefs then. Everything was still pure and food-centric. I discovered tasting menus, seven courses of small, tasty bites, and menus that specified ingredients such as “Monsieur Fortier’s Vegetables.” This is great. Because it’s local! I was supporting the farm! (In fact, one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten was in my home state of Maine, where the cook was Slow Food Dinner was all made with local ingredients (so any town can do that), and I also learned to despise the American custom of surrounding big chunks of meat with side dishes: Back then, at least in Montreal, meat and vegetables were considered equally important on the plate, designed to complement and enhance each other.
Looking back, when I reread my experience in Montreal, I see that with the “arrival of bread” I had fetishized bread, made it into an active agent. Serval They brought me food. Here’s one of Bourdain’s many observations about his staff: Kitchen Confidentialpages 208-209:
I think it was a historic moment.
(Stephen) showed up looking for the saute position, bringing with him his even more depraved friend Adam Real Last Name Unknown…
I could never turn away from Steven and Adam when they were in the kitchen together. They were hyperactive, destructive, evil energizer bunnies who, when they weren’t arguing or throwing food at each other, seemed to always be slipping out of the kitchen to run various criminal errands. They were loud, thieving, and relentlessly curious, and Steven would rummage through his desk whenever he saw it. They played pranks and built a network of like-minded coworkers. Within a few weeks of arriving, Steven already had the entire club under control, from top to bottom. The office help gave him everyone’s pay, the security guards gave him their share of the drugs they seized at the entrance, the technicians allowed him to play on the computers… The maintenance department gave Steven some of the lost property and shared a share of the leftover loot from promotional events, including gift bags filled with makeup, CDs, t-shirts, bomber jackets, watches, and more. The maintenance chief even gave Steven a key to an unused office on the supper club’s abandoned third floor. It was an old janitor’s storeroom that, without the janitor’s knowledge, had been converted into a carpeted, furnished, and telephoned entertainment district. It was a good place for small get-togethers, drug deals, and empire-building. It was furnished with remnants of carpet and furniture pilfered from the adjacent Edison Hotel. The janitor never visited it, because it was behind the fetid locker rooms, down a dark, unlit hallway where the spare china was kept, and up a long, trash-strewn back staircase. And the young men could rest easy in the knowledge that no matter how loud, disorderly, and violent their work, they were unlikely to be disturbed.
The boy Cookinghowever.
It’s the kind of fun office politics I learned at my dad’s knee…
Kitchen Confidential He made Bourdain a celebrity and a TV star, but I won’t go into that story here and instead show you three short video clips that show how much he loved food (and how, unlike my excessively expensive tasting menus, he loved good food that locals could get without spending too much money): From San Francisco, Swan Oyster House.
“All the good stuff. Brains and fats….”
From Donkey Place, Camden, New Jersey:
When Bourdain found out the cheesesteak was served on a Kaiser roll, he exclaimed, “That’s true!” – priceless.
From Vietnam, from a food stall:
“Everything you need to be happy.”
What these videos have in common is Bourdain’s respect for the people who create the food. Kitchen ConfidentialDespite quoting Hunter Thompson-esque writings on office politics, Chris Arnadoin his column (and book) Walking the worldHere, the words of master Bourdain seem to apply:
During my two weeks walking around Lima, I ate a lot of ceviche and drank a lot of Pilsen callao (sorry, but Pilsen is tastier and cheaper than the more famous Cusqueña).
Everyone is busy in Lima, and because no franchises take over the city, there are hundreds of places to eat, all a little different: food stalls, street vendors, carts and storefronts, all serving food that is made that day or the night before.
Franchising reduces the risk of what you eat, but the quality also decreases: even if you know what you’re eating, it’s likely to be pretty mediocre.
It also destroys the transcendent: to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, when a burger chain cooks a burger for you in a few minutes, the aura associated with making and eating food is lost.
But not when you’re standing a foot away from three women making ceviche with fish bought from the food stall next door.
We all take great pride in our work – the dignity of the job is an overused term, but the meaning of making something special, even if it’s “just” ceviche or aguadito de pollo, is real.
So I like to take the gamble of going through a few bad moments to find something truly sublime and capture some of its aura. I also like to give my money to people who create.
I think Bourdain would agree with this, and so would I.
I took the wrong lead. We all know where we end up, not immediately, but later. Sadly, Anthony Bourdain took his own life. Strange for someone who was so full of life (especially while eating, as you can see in the video). Celebrity is bad for people, wealth is bad for people. But we don’t know, and we can’t know, what inner battles Bourdain was going through, no matter how much time passes. gossip We try to explain most of the mysteries of life. MysteriousTo quote Lambert Stressor, “Live while you can; it’s wrong not to.” So eat as healthy as you can and try to be kind and respectful to the workers who produce the food you eat.
Appendix Seafood Stew
The clip is famous, so here it is, in which Baudin oversimplifies collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). The Big ShortTerrible books, terrible movies (at least for the financial layman):
For the truth about CDOs, Eve received proper technical guidance from an expert in 2010That said, the saying “this is not old fish, this is brand new, and the best part is, what they’re eating is three-day-old halibut” seems to apply not just to financial products but to the financialized economy as well: For example, one might think of an AI training set as a seafood stew.
