Bourdain

by Laurie Woolever

  STEVEN TEMPEL: He was not shy. He was not anxious. He was not depressed. He used to walk around going, “I’m Tony Motherfucking Bourdain—you got a problem?”

  MATT WALSH, TV FIXER AND TRANSLATOR: He was a New York archetype that I was very familiar with. I think a lot of people around the rest of America, and perhaps around the world, found Tony’s voice to be like nothing they’d ever heard. His persona. And, to a certain extent, that’s true. Tony was very talented in that regard. But there’s also something about that unique voice that I found familiar. The type of expressions that he used, his view of life, I knew a hundred guys in New York just like that. It’s very well informed, very articulate, but also bad boy, not part of an intelligentsia crowd, standing around art galleries, stroking their chin. It was just so familiar. I think a lot of people ascribe to that being Tony’s. I think that the cultural milieu that is New York has a claim on Tony Bourdain’s vibe.

  BETH ARETSKY, NEW YORK KITCHEN COLLEAGUE AND FORMER ASSISTANT: I met Tony about ’94 or ’95, when I was working at One Fifth Avenue [restaurant in Manhattan]; I think it was called Vince and Linda’s at the time. The chef had quit, and a bunch of staff walked out with him, except for me and a couple others. Tony came in, with Steven Tempel. He liked me enough to keep me, so I stayed, because I needed a job.

  As a boss, he was very cool. He was an asshole only to the waiters, and not even really an asshole, just snarky, you know, with his sharp tongue, calling them bed-wetting shit stains. That was probably the most commonly used phrase: “You incompetent, bed-wetting shit stain.” Right to their face.

  Back then, there was no HR, no nothing. Lots of drugs prevalent in the kitchen. Smoking was allowed on the line. Tony was always smoking in his office. He had a little desk in the kitchen, so he’d always be sitting there, smoking.

  We would go to the Stoned Crow [bar] on Washington Place after work. Tony was always telling stories about Provincetown, and all kinds of kitchens, before anyone knew he was writing anything. He was always the center of attention, the best at telling stories.

  I left One Fifth Avenue to open up Butterfield 81 with my dad [restaurateur Ken Aretsky], then Tony became unemployed and came to me, looking for a job. I said, “There’s no way I can hire you, Tony, you’re my chef. That would be awkward, and you’re way too tall for the line. You’ll hit your head on the exhaust.”

  He totally understood. Later, I went with him to Coco Pazzo Teatro. Then I became the chef at Carola’s, on Sixtieth between Park and Lex. He was still the chef at Coco Pazzo Teatro. We both got reviewed in the New York Post on the same day; we both got two stars.

  I never felt competitive with him. We were friends, and I was never attracted to him. From the first time he walked in the door, I thought, He’s really tall, he’s really skinny, and he’s got a long head. He’s not my type.

  PATTI JACKSON: You know, working in a kitchen with a bunch of guys, like— Tony was always really respectful of the girls. He never had that— I don’t know whether it’s an insecurity thing, or an ego thing, or whatever makes men be absolute pigs—he didn’t have that.

  BETH ARETSKY: I ended up with him over at Sullivan’s. It was a very lax kitchen, I’ll put it that way. Whoever was smoking was smoking on the line. If someone wanted a steak well done, we always took the steak that had the most sinew in it, made it as well done as possible, sent it out, and if it came back saying it wasn’t well done enough, Tony would tell me to drop it in the fryer, burn it into a shoe.

  PATTI JACKSON: Years later, watching him become the piece of art he became, watching him doing interviews and on TV, people would say to me, “Oh my god, I read Kitchen Confidential. What’s Tony Bourdain like?” And I’d say, “What you see is what he’s like. He loves a good story. He loves a good meal. He loves to smoke a Lark.”

  8

  “Such Was My Lust to See My Name in Print”

  HELEN LANG: All the energy he’d put into trying to destroy himself, he put that into building himself back up. All that negative energy became something else. He became so serious, and so driven and focused. He worked really hard.

  It takes a lot of determination to wake up early in the morning and write, and then go to a job in the kitchen, and come home at god knows what hour, and get up the next morning and do it again. He was a fiend. One time, he said about his disciplined writing regimen, “Such was my lust to see my name in print.” He threw himself into his work in a manner that I found astonishing.

  DAVID ROSENTHAL, BOOK PUBLISHER: I was at what we called “the old Random House,” the pre-Bertelsmann Random House, when it was owned by the Newhouse family. I had made a deal to do a distribution of The Old Farmer’s Almanac and some spin-off books. The person who repped The Old Farmer’s Almanac was one Gordon Howard; he was a licensing guy.

  HELEN LANG: Gordon gave Tony some money to just go somewhere and write, and I think Gordon was very invested in the whole thing.

  DAVID ROSENTHAL: I remember Gordon telling me, “I know this guy who’s written a novel, and it’s really good. I was his college roommate,” and I’m thinking, Oh, shit, because there’s nothing worse than getting books from civilians. People don’t go through life thinking they can be a neurosurgeon, but they all think they can be an author. It’s a real problem sometimes. But I said, “Sure,” and within a relatively short period, I read it, and the big surprise was, I liked it. It was very fresh, funny, and I thought, This could be a continuing character. There wasn’t all that much work to do [on the manuscript], not too many structural things; just some beginner’s mistakes.

  I remember calling Gordon, saying I wanted to buy it, and his reaction was, “Really?” He brought Tony down to the office. I only vaguely knew that Tony was an actual chef.

  I had an amateur’s interest in cooking; I remember getting into an argument with Tony about how, in his manuscript, he had the hero making a beurre blanc, and adding cream to it, and I said, “That’s not how you make a beurre blanc.” The attitude I got was, he didn’t give a shit. He made it clear that he had some experience in, shall we say, low-rent Italian kitchens, and that they were obviously a nasty place to be, and all sorts of shit went down.

  So Bone in the Throat comes out [in 1995]. A few people at Random House liked it, but to be honest, the sales force was not behind it, which is always a liability. I remember doing a lot of mailings and calling, but I couldn’t really get the bookstores to take a bite. They bought it, of course—in those days, if you were Random House, you always were guaranteed a certain number of copies going out, but I was disappointed with the sales, because I thought we had, not a breakout with this book, but [good enough] to get up to a certain level.

  The sense I got was that Tony wasn’t nearly as disappointed as I was. He was optimistic about the whole process; he really wanted to do it, and the money I was paying him was tiny; it had to be less than $15,000 for each book, which in those days was a going rate for a debut novelist writing something that was not really gonna [sell] a hundred thousand copies.

  HELEN LANG: I went to Tony’s first book party. I hadn’t seen Gordon for many, many years. We sat in his car and talked for a little while, and he was very excited about the success of the book.

  My impression, when I spoke to Tony that night, was that he didn’t want to be tethered by Gordon, that he was more ambitious than that, and he had bigger plans. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I felt that he was maybe ready to kick Gordon to the curb. That’s a little harsh, but Gordon was just a person; he didn’t have connections, as far as I know. He was just kind of a good friend. I think Tony was ready for bigger things.

  9

  “Appalling Stories of Remorseless Criminality”

  The Stone Brothers

  In 1995, following the publication of Bone in the Throat, Tony made the acquaintance of Rob and Web Stone, Harvard-educated brothers who worked together in book and film development.

  ROB STONE, WRITING AND PUBLISHING PARTNER: We had an overall dea
l at the Walt Disney Company. Jane Rosenthal, who runs Robert De Niro’s company, invited us to take an office, practically for nothing, at the Tribeca Film Center, in order to help them develop a couple of projects that they had in mind. And they wanted us to help develop nonfiction books.

  We were sort of book producers, who developed nonfiction books. We would acquire the rights to a story, a nonfiction subject, and then Web and I would write the proposal and sample chapters, and then hire a writer with whom we would sell the book to a publisher, for a book advance.

  The first project that Tribeca Productions wanted out of us was, they had an extremely corrupt cop, a detective first grade who’d spent a couple of decades on the job, whom De Niro believed would make an amazing movie subject, and they wanted us to develop a nonfiction book out of his story, which they would use as a launchpad for a movie.

  For that book, Tony was the first call we made. Web read a review of Bone in the Throat in the New York Times, and Tony sounded like the kind of guy who was clearly able to capture the voice of New Yorkers, and this cop was a quintessential New Yorker.

  We felt pretty important, having an office at the Tribeca Film Center, and attracting a hot up-and-coming writer, so we wanted to have a meeting there, with Tony and Jane Rosenthal and De Niro and the cop. We would record this session to find out, in an introductory meeting, what the cop’s story was.

  Tony arrived early—he was pretty punctual, but most important, he wanted to get to the bar at the Tribeca Grill, to have a drink or two and a couple of smokes before going into the meeting. So, we’re at the bar, and this guy walks up wearing, I’d say, a $2,000 jacket, gold Piaget watch, and close-cut hair, and he’d shaved like five minutes ago. He says, “You must be the Stone brothers. And you must be Tony.” It was the cop, who’d also gotten there fifteen minutes early to have a couple of drinks and a couple of smokes.

  WEB STONE, WRITING AND PUBLISHING PARTNER: To get revved up, for the meeting.

  ROB STONE: These guys, in some ways were— it’s unfair to say “birds of a feather,” but they both were remarkable raconteurs, with a bit of a kindred spirit. Maybe the cop more as specimen, and Tony more as scientific observer.

  After a couple of drinks, in the span of fifteen to twenty minutes, we go up to De Niro’s office, and he’s super relaxed, super quiet. Jane Rosenthal—a bit uptight, a bit busybodyish—welcomes everybody in. Tony, once he walked into that room, barely said a word. I think he was pleased that an ashtray was put out on the table and he could smoke and listen, but in the company of De Niro and this character, this cop—when he walked into the room, honestly, the cop didn’t enter the office, he occupied it. He was this marauding force who walked into the room and sucked all the oxygen away from De Niro being in the room. As Tony said later, he worked his way into your brain like an insidious fungus.

  You gotta imagine, this guy is maybe six feet tall, two twenty, and he’s all muscle and gut, big, barrel-chested guy wearing this $2,000 sport jacket and Cole Haan loafers and the gold watch. And he made sure when he sits on the couch that you can see he’s packing the Glock nine. And as Tony would say later, “You tend to listen a little more intently to people carrying guns.”

  The cop just started telling these appalling stories of remorseless criminality. His entire career, starting from the academy, in which he proudly did nothing but get his instructors some blow jobs—the guy’s whole life is described in terms of greed, brutality, deception, and the constant pursuit of women. And all he did was basically rob, steal, lie, and ejaculate his way through life as a cop. And—

  WEB STONE: And Tony, in a way, disdained him.

  ROB STONE: After multiple meetings with De Niro, in which we would sit there and listen, dumbfounded, we’d then go with the cop and Tony to debrief for a couple of hours, in which we were drinking and smoking, but eventually the cop had to drive himself home, and then we got a couple more hours of debriefing with Tony. This meant that we started spending such a ridiculous amount of time with Tony that at some point he was like, “Listen, guys, you have to meet Nancy, because she’s starting to think that you’re a product of my adulterous imagination.”

  The reason the book ultimately died is that the cop had told too much of his story, and realized that, after the insanely corrupt deal that De Niro’s company had done with him, he would make practically no money, and gain possibly a little bit of fame, and he became more worried about the security of his pension than the future assets that would be derived from his book and movie deals.

  WEB STONE: At the same time, we were developing a sitcom. Tony liked crime stuff, and he liked chef stuff. The story was, “From 1984 to 1996, members of the Genovese crime family and the US government partnered to run a restaurant in New York’s Little Italy. The food was not good. This is that story.”

  He worked hard on it. At the time, he was in deep debt. He had IRS liens against him, so we wanted to pay him for some of the work he was doing, even though we were all sort of creating it, and it was our baby.

  ROB STONE: We had a deal with him, but it had to be not on paper, cash only. “You pay me, I write, that’s it. And you pay me in a brown paper bag.”

  WEB STONE: Tony loved to do things like that, like we’re all characters in The Friends of Eddie Coyle. So, we had to go to the deli across the street, to get those little brown sandwich bags, and we put real money in there, a couple thousand bucks, or whatever it was.

  ROB STONE: And we trusted him.

  WEB STONE: He wasn’t morally self-righteous at all, but he was totally a moral, stand-up-for-the-underdog— I mean, you could trust him as far as the day is long.

  ROB STONE: [He was] maybe the second-most-honest person I know. We went out with him several times, and also with our mother, and drank copious amounts of alcohol with her. She had a line, one night, that was, “I respect and appreciate every human flaw, except dishonesty.” And Tony said, “I love that. You got me. I have every human flaw, but dishonesty.”

  WEB STONE: If we paid him, he did work, and it was good. Did it always work out? No, but, I mean, it was fun, and funny.

  DAVID ROSENTHAL: Gordon called and said he had another book, and he showed me: Tony had just written the first few chapters of Gone Bamboo. It was a good sequel, and the idea of moving him to the Caribbean, to a drecky place there, was kind of nice. I thought, if one was gonna do this cinematically—which is what we were thinking at the time—it’s a much better setting, gets you out of the Goodfellas realm.

  WEB STONE: And this wasn’t just his second novel; this was, in some ways, his tribute to his love for Nancy, because it was a thinly veiled memoir—not that he’d ever operated on the level of an assassin, but it was about Tony’s love of CIA covert ops, military covert operations, circa the fifties, sixties, early seventies, and this novel was, as he said many times, “Tony and Nancy meet Nick and Nora Charles, with firepower, on an island of corrupt cops and insane mafiosi.”

  ROB STONE: Henry Denard was Tony Bourdain, and Frances Denard was Nancy.

  WEB STONE: It was the ideal, what he wanted, in a way, for both of them. The highest embodiment of how Tony could see himself. There was a little bit of superhero to it.

  DAVID ROSENTHAL: We published [Gone Bamboo] through Villard. Because I was running the imprint, we gave it more attention, and I had a whole separate publicity staff, and everybody liked him. He came into the office quite a bit; he liked hanging out there.

  It was on the second book, that’s when the New York Times did a profile on him [Enid Nemy, “Potboiler Dreams: Chef Hopes to Write His Way Out of the Kitchen,” September 10, 1997]. I forget whether his mother [then a copy editor at the Times] was behind it, but it’s a great piece.

  But it’s so strange—other than that, we couldn’t get the media to bite. Here we have a working New York chef, and in his spare time he’s written a novel; you name me one other chef who has done this. It’s a big fucking deal. We had trouble getting him the attention, which was unfair, because
the book was good, and he was a great personality.

  10

  “You’ve Got a Long Con Going Here”

  The Genesis of Kitchen Confidential

  KAREN RINALDI, BOOK EDITOR AND PUBLISHER: I met Tony around 1995 or ’96 as a good friend of [my husband] Joel [Rose], when he was a working chef. I don’t know where he was then, maybe Sullivan’s.

  We had a couple of dinners there that were extraordinary, really fun and festive, and Tony was just sort of fabulous. He was working hard as a chef, and really frustrated as a writer. He wanted to be a fiction writer. He had written and published, at that point, Bone in the Throat and then Gone Bamboo. Bone in the Throat did pretty well, or at least got some notice, and Gone Bamboo was very quiet. I think he was wondering, “Why are they not doing better?”

  So when I met Tony in the restaurant environment, he had that kind of persona, and then “offstage,” I found him sweet and shy and a little awkward, and I loved that about him. I thought, this is the kind of guy who can bring it when he has to, but there’s a lot more going on, so that juxtaposition—I was charmed by it, for sure.

  PHILIPPE LAJAUNIE, OWNER OF LES HALLES RESTAURANTS: My business partner Jose [de Meirelles] told me, “I hired this new guy; his name is Anthony Bourdain.” I said, “Oh that sounds French!” I projected a short, kind of big-stomach French guy who had probably been here from France a long time and had changed his name from Antoine to Anthony. When I saw Tony in the kitchen, of course, it was the exact opposite.

  I remember the first couple of weeks, being a bit unnerved, because Tony had just come out of working in an Italian restaurant. He was OK with the menu, and we had a strong kitchen behind him, but all his specials were pastas, Italian dishes, so that was rattling my cage a little bit. He turned out to be a very good cook, and he was managing the kitchen OK, and the kitchen was very quiet.