(photo cred tumblr.com)
Foie gras and the future
204 pages into my latest literary undertaking and I’m feeling a bit stressed about it. I’ve spent significant time with Tony. As my most recent and lasting obsession, Anthony Bourdain, or Tony B. as I affectionately refer to him, has become a staple in my life. I discovered him last year, when my all-too-rare free time in the Salt City was spent salivating over The Travel Channel. Salivating because I mostly watched food shows, and as a grad student spent most of my time cooking only sweet potato fries (which I do pretty damn well, by the way) and tofu.
I felt a pretty strong connection with Tony the first time I watched him. You see, I never really spent much time casting my eyes on cable before I lived in 'Cuse, but my roommate insisted we splurge on it. Now, no disrespect to Syracuse or anything, but there’s really not much to do there. And even though I didn’t really ever have time to do anything anyway, my rare free hours were spent watching Tony with my pals Kate and Leigh over a meal we cooked up, drinking vino. That’s what got us through grad school.
I love Anthony Bourdain. I love his crassness, dry, wry wit and the fact that he was such a disaster in the 80s.
Condensation in California
It’s a rainy day in LA, a rare sight in the City of Angels, and a perfect day to watch a movie and read a book. After cooking up an impromptu brunch of fried eggs, homemade home fries, disgusting turkey bacon and toast, I sat down with my friend and watched Julie and Julia. It’s a cute movie about Julia Child’s rise to culinary success while simultaneously telling the story of Julie, a borough-bound call-center worker who writes a blog (!) about her adventure cooking 524 Child recipes in 365 days, raising her to fame. In my post-movie, post-brunch bliss I curled up by an open window and read some Tony to the sound of rain pounding the pavement.
I’m reading Kitchen Confidential, a Bourdain book, sort of a memoir about his own rise to food fame. In the preface, which is funny, written in 2000 before No Reservations, Bourdain writes almost incredulously about his success, which now, almost ten years later is at least ten-fold.
The chapter I just finished, “A Day in the Life,” gave me serious anxiety, as I bet was meant to with Tony's lengthy yet frenetic prose which push the reader through a day at Les Halles from the eyes of the chef. But what links Julie, Julia and Tony is not the French food, but their unrelenting goddamn hard work, and the risk-taking fervor with which they seem to approach life and work.
Tony hasn’t yet said how he got to Les Halles, and I’m not sure he will, but I’m sure it required blind-faith – jumping in full-force, and fearless. That’s what I admire so much about these three enormously successful people, and I think, I can almost guarantee that that is the recipe for success.
Goddamned hard work, uncompromising fearlessness and taking a chance. Julia Child worked for 8 years on something that may or may not have worked for her, Julie one year and Tony, almost twenty.
And in my current Bourdain-induced anxious twilight zone, I have renewed anticipation for what’s ahead in my own kitchen.
