Anthony Bourdain Visits Chicago
Q&A with the bad-boy author, chef, and adventurer
An eager, buzzing crowd packed the auditorium and spilled into the cavernous marble hallways of the Harold Washington Library this past June, though it was hard to tell if they were awaiting a Proust lecture or a Phish cover band.
Teens sporting dreadlocks and tie-dye sat amongst fifty-somethings in frocks and silk neckties. A grease-spattered cook, fresh off the lunch shift, chatted with an expatriate couple from Belgium.
The man who brought this unlikely group together, whose face glossed the back covers of the yet-unsigned books clutched in so many hands, was none other than celebrity chef, author, and adventurer Anthony Bourdain.
A Rags-to-Reptiles Story
Ten years ago, Bourdain was just a cook struggling to pay the bills. While working late nights by the deep fryer, he wrote an essay on the dark side of the New York restaurant scene and—“in a moment of drunken hubris”—sent it to the New Yorker.
That essay quickly became a best-selling book (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly) that spawned two more books, a short-lived Bradley Cooper sitcom, and a popular Travel Channel reality show that has made Bourdain a star.
On Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, the cursing, chain-smoking chef tours the world, and with an equal taste for adventure and cuisine, samples still-beating cobra hearts in Vietnam and receives tribal tattoos in Tahiti.
Frequently, he ventures into places where most travel shows don’t dare to tread; an Emmy-nominated episode documents the time he and his crew were unexpectedly stranded in Beirut during the Lebanon-Israel war in 2006, and for an upcoming show, he plans to retrace author Joseph Conrad’s journey down the Congo River in Africa.
This Ain’t Rachael Ray
Hero to dishwashers and jet-setting gourmands alike, Bourdain is vehemently critical of the celebrity-chef, Food Network culture that he has ironically helped to create.
The man who has referred stars like Rachael Ray as a “bobblehead” comes to grip with that irony in his latest book, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People who Cook, which he discussed in Chicago last week--while sipping a beer onstage.
Liz Mannebach is a writer and reporter currently studying journalism at Loyola University in Chicago. To learn more, visit http://mannebach.writersresidence.com/
