Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal
Author: Anthony Bourdain
Dodging minefields in Cambodia, diving into the icy waters outside a Russian bath, Chef Bourdain travels the world over in search of the ultimate meal. The only thing Anthony Bourdain loves as much as cooking is traveling, and A Cook's Tour is the shotgun marriage of his two greatest passions. Inspired by the question, 'What would be the perfect meal?', Anthony sets out on a quest for his culinary holy grail.Our adventurous chef starts out in Japan, where he eats traditional Fugu, a poisonous blowfish which can be prepared only by specially licensed chefs. He then travels to Cambodia, up the mine-studded road to Pailin into autonomous Khmer Rouge territory and to Phnom Penh's Gun Club, where local fare is served up alongside a menu of available firearms. In Saigon, he's treated to a sustaining meal of live Cobra heart before moving on to savor a snack with the Viet Cong in the Mecong Delta. Further west, Kitchen Confidential fans will recognize the Gironde of Tony's youth, the first stop on his European itinerary. And from France, it's on to Portugal, where an entire village has been fattening a pig for months in anticipation of his arrival. And we're only halfway around the globe. . . A Cook's Tour recounts, in Bourdain's inimitable style, the adventures and misadventures of America's favorite chef.
Book Magazine
Anthony Bourdain's idea of the potentially perfect meal is surely not your idea. Been craving Moroccan lamb testicles lately? Didn't think so. Had a hankering for goat's head soup? Chili-roasted maguey worms? How about the beating heart of a cobra, freshly extracted from its former owner? Clearly Bourdain isn't your garden-variety gastronome. Familiarity, and fat-free cooking, breeds his contempt; derring-do is his stock in trade.
The author of last year's bestselling Kitchen Confidential, the delicious tell-all book of life in the pit of the "culinary underbelly," Bourdain has become an overnight sensation as unlikely as an upside-down tequila shot in a muffled nouvelle-cuisine dining room. In the world of celebrity chefdom, where the life of cuddly Emeril Lagasse begets a sitcom, Bourdain's would be a snuff-film screening on skid row. While England's Two Fat Ladies puttered onto the foodie scene in a kooky sidecar motorcycle, Bourdain barges in pulling screaming wheelies on a dastardly chopper straight out of the cartoon art of Big Daddy Roth.
In Bourdain's hands, "food porn" takes on an all-new, and sometimes quite literal, meaning. In this book, he uses his newfound celebrity to circle the globe, visiting some of its darkest corners in search of a sensory overload involving his mouth, his stomach and quite often his bare hands. As much a reckless travelogue as a vicarious dining experience, the book might scare off a considerable number of Bourdain's more organic-oriented fans. But then, if they enjoyed Kitchen Confidential, they can't say they weren't sufficiently warned.
The author envisioned his new book as an adventure, with himself portraying "one ofthose debauched heroes and villains" out of Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Cimino. "I wanted to wander the world in a dirty seersucker suit, getting into trouble," he claims. By and large, he fulfills the vision, even if he's sometimes wearing a cowboy hat or a tiny Speedo bathing suit instead of the seersucker.
Once again, Bourdain is laugh-out-loud funny at times, in an unapologetic, sophomoric sort of way. Of that dubious Moroccan lamb delicacy, he writes, "It was certainly the best testicle I'd ever had in my mouth. Also the first, I should hasten to say." The writing is occasionally careless—one larded meal, for instance, leaves him "feeling like Elvis in Vegas"—but mostly it matches the lurid glee that made Kitchen Confidential such a success. Describing durian (the spiny, famously pungent fruit he devoured with delight in Cambodia), he writes, "God it stank! It smelled like you'd buried somebody holding a big wheel of Stilton in his arms, then dug him up a few weeks later."
Bourdain's success as a writer is his knack for making food the centerpiece of a much broader discussion about living life on a grand scale. In fact, in A Cook's Tour, the food is sometimes relegated to a side table. In Russia, the author pounds vodka and attends an illegal, no-holds-barred cage-fighting event. In England, he offers one man's humble explanation of why the pornography there is so exceptionally bad. In Morocco, he finds himself too high on hashish to communicate with the camera crew that's documenting his travels for an upcoming Food Network series. ("God help me," he moans hilariously about getting himself entangled in that particular piece of business.)
The gist of his search is that Bourdain wants to re-create the earth-shattering oyster-eating experience he had as a boy in France, so vividly described in Kitchen Confidential. "Think about the last time food transported you," he writes, lingering over a lifetime of pivotal encounters with his taste buds—wild strawberries, an old girlfriend's leftover pork-fried rice. "Maybe it was just a bowl of Campbell's cream of tomato with Oysterettes, and a grilled cheese sandwich. You know what I mean." This kind of sweet faith in the universal pleasures of eating belies Bourdain's relentless bluster.
So does his regret, on his return to France, that he is emotionally incapable of re-creating that wondrous shellfish moment, try as he might. "I began to feel damaged," he writes in one of the book's most elegant, and vulnerable, passages. "Broken. As if some essential organ—my heart perhaps—had shriveled and died."
The closest the author comes to a conventional notion of the perfect meal is at the French Laundry, chef Thomas Keller's revered restaurant in the California wine country. And "conventional" is hardly the word. Famously, Keller's menus are astonishments of originality. The menu itself reads like pure poetry: coronets of salmon tartare, cauliflower panna cotta with Malpeque oyster glaze and Oscetra caviar, ricotta cheese gnocchi with a Darjeeling tea-walnut oil emulsion and shaved walnuts. For his "degenerate smoker" guest, Keller prepared a surprise—a course he called "coffee and a cigarette," featuring tobacco-infused coffee custard with foie gras. Bourdain is suitably overwhelmed. "It was an absolutely awe-inspiring meal, accompanied, I should point out, by a procession of sensational wines.... I remember a big brawny red in a cistern-sized glass, which nearly made me weep with pleasure. Cooking had crossed the line into magic," he gushes.
Though he would prefer not to be the sort of man to gush, the punk-rock author finds himself hearing a chorus of angels when food moves him. In spite of himself, the foul-mouthed Bourdain proves in the end to be a big ol' softie. In Morocco, he hauls himself to the top of a ridge in the desert. "A hundred miles of sand in every direction, a hundred miles of absolutely gorgeous, unspoiled nothingness," he recalls. "I was wondering how a miserable, manic-depressive, overage, undeserving hustler like myself—a utility chef from New York City with no particular distinction to be found in his long and egregiously checkered career—on the strength of one inexplicably large score, could find himself here, seeing this, living the dream." The answer seems obvious, if not to the man who's looking for it. His is a rare sensitivity divided equally among heart, mind and palate.
—James Sullivan
Kirkus Reviews
Over-the-top and highly diverting international culinary adventures, always to be taken with a generous grain of salt-and make it Fleur de Sel-and best consumed a bite at a time.
Look this:
Patrick O'Connell's Refined American Cuisine: The Inn at Little Washington
Author: Patrick OConnell
Patrick O'Connell is often referred to as the Pope of American Cuisine. He is one of the pioneers in our country's culinary evolution over the last quarter century. Selecting The Inn at Little Washington as one of the top ten restaurants in the world, Patricia Wells hails O'Connell as "a rare chef with a sense of near-perfect taste, like a musician with perfect pitch." As a self-taught chef who learned to cook by reading cookbooks, he has a unique ability to write recipes that are easy to follow and that produce delicious results. In this groundbreaking work, O'Connell celebrates the coming-of-age of American cooking and illustrates that we at last have our own equivalent to the haute cuisine of the great chefs of Europe. He manages to demonstrate that reproducing his versions of refined American cuisine is not only surprisingly doable but often easier than replicating the classic American dishes we grew up with.
O'Connell offers vastly refined versions of his favorite American food: Macaroni and Cheese with Virginia Country Ham, Wild Mushroom Pizza, Crab Cake "Sandwich" with Fried Green Tomatoes, Pan-Roasted Maine Lobster with Rosemary Cream, Veal Medallions with Country Ham Ravioli, and Warm Plum Torte with Sweet Corn Ice Cream. All the recipes use readily available ingredients and are written in a clear, easy-to-follow voice -- the voice of a self-taught chef who wants to share his love of food and hard-earned expertise. But even more refreshing than the delectable recipes are O'Connell's musings on his upbringing, American food, and entertaining. Reading this warm, witty book is the next best thing to dining at The Inn at Little Washington. Cooking from it is even better!
The New York Times - Korby Cummer
Although he's one of the most celebrated professional chefs in the country, O'Connell taught himself to cook by reading the best books of the late 1960's and 70's, and at heart his food is gussied-up home cooking. Today's apprentice hosts and hostesses can impress their guests with his recipes for camembert triangles in phyllo dough and veal medallions with country ham ravioli. Maybe O'Connell's ability to tell a good story -- another key to successful entertaining -- will inspire them too.
Publishers Weekly
The great chef Patrick O'Connell went to college to please his parents. "They bought into the American dream, believing that their children should never have to toil, sweat, or perform physical labor," he writes in his extraordinary new cookbook (after The Inn at Little Washington: A Consuming Passion). Like many people of their generation, O'Connell's parents considered working in a restaurant to be a lower order of work that people resorted to if they couldn't get a higher education. But O'Connell, who taught himself to cook by reading cookbooks, became part of the revolution in American cuisine over the 25 years that changed that perception. Eventually (with his partner Reinhardt Lynch), O'Connell turned a former gas station in the Virginia countryside into one of the most sumptuous and original restaurants and inns in the world. There, happily sweating and toiling, he set about refining many of the dishes of his all-American Irish Catholic childhood: fish sticks on Friday night became Sole Fingers with Green Herb Mayonnaise. The recipes collected here, which O'Connell explains with warmth and simplicity and introduces with wonderfully funny memories from his baby boomer childhood, demonstrate that the greatest American cooking is more than a version of regional cuisine. Like Alice Waters and other pioneers in the American culinary revolution, O'Connell is obsessive about using fresh local meats and produce. But he adds another ingredient-a twist of insight and witty invention. O'Connell gives us Lilliputian Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato Sandwiches; Macaroni and Cheese with Virginia Country Ham (and smoked gouda) and Spruced Up Turkey (which garnishes a brined turkey with spruce branches to impart a wild and woodsy taste). He shows that true refinement has to do with simplicity, with being exquisitely sensitive yet free enough from convention to perceive and to make just the right gesture. Arriving at a time when there is so much fear that European cultivation and ethnic depth is being wiped out by American brand name sameness, this cookbook is a jewel-and a watershed. O'Connell shows the world how deep and cultivated American cuisine can be. 230 photos. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
