Medium
Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
By
Anthony Bourdain
281
pages, HarperCollins, 2010
It’s
hard to not want to dislike Anthony Bourdain a lot of the time, but
it’s harder to actually dislike him – and Medium Raw
makes the latter even harder.
There
were definitely things to dislike about Kitchen
Confidential,
the 2000 tell-all, no-holding-back, warts-and-all, *insert your own
cliché* memoir/essay that made Bourdain a star. It was crude, it was
arrogant, its tone often spiteful and vindictive. But it was also
vigorous, playful and unapologetically, gleefully, loudly
entertaining. It exposed the restaurant business as the rowdy,
raucous, chaotic, macho environment we now all know it to be. Another
of the book's saving graces was that, no matter how harsh Bourdain
was about his peers and acquaintances in the business, he never
set himself up to be any better. No matter what you think of
his attitude and tone, the man is lucid about most things, including
himself.
This
trend continues in Medium
Raw,
a fairly disjointed series of essays about the world of food and
Bourdain's journey through it. If anything, the tone is more
measured, the author more humbled, more conciliatory. He explains the
angry, frantic state of mind he was in when he wrote Kitchen
Confidential.
He addresses (and largely admits to) charges that he is no longer
really a chef, and that he has been, overall, damn lucky in life. He
nuances his much publicized hatred of the Food Network. He even
finishes a biting chapter on Alice Waters, whom he clearly has no
love for, with the concession that the lady is really probably right
about most things that matter, and that she basically just annoys
him. You want to know how much Bourdain has changed in ten years?
There's an entire chapter devoted to how he is raising his
two-year-old daughter.
