Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

by Anthony Bourdain

  Is there something fundamentally, ethically…wrong about a meal so Pantagruelian in its ambition and proportions? Other than the “people are starving in Africa” argument, and the “250,000 people lost their jobs in America last month alone” argument, there’s the fact that they must necessarily trim off about 80 percent of the fish or bird to serve that perfectly oblong little nugget of deliciousness on the plate. There’s the unavoidable observation that it’s simply more food and alcohol than the human body is designed to handle. That you will, after even the best of times, the most wonderful of such meals, need to flop onto your bed, stomach roiling with reflux, the beginnings of a truly awful hangover forming in your skull, farting and belching like a medieval friar.

  Is this the appropriate end, the inevitable result of genius? Of an otherwise sublime experience?

  Must it end like this?

  And should it end like this? Struggling mightily to not spray truffle-flecked chunks into the toilet?

  No one expects that anyone would eat like this every other day—or even every other month. But even as a once-a-year thing…shouldn’t how you feel afterward be a consideration?

  I should point out that there is a perfectly reasonable nine-course option. We chose to be gluttonous. But when you’re fortunate enough to be at Per Se or at the French Laundry, you just don’t want to miss anything. You eat way past the point of hitting the wall. Or I do, anyway.

  Last night, the early evening light appeared, to my jaundiced eye, unkind to Per Se. This was not a good way for me to start the meal. A dining room is a stage set, an elaborate illusion, a magician’s trick contained between four walls. Per Se’s dining room is one of the most meticulously constructed and most beautiful such spaces in New York. It looks out over Columbus Circle and Central Park. There is a wide “breezeway” of unused space between the kitchen and dining room, a luxuriously empty zone designed to serve as a peaceful, quieting transitional area where servers can have a few extra seconds to make the transition from kitchen reality to dining-room reality.

  If cooking professionally is about control, eating successfully should be about submission, about easily and without thinking giving yourself over to whatever dream they’d like you to share. In the best-case scenario, you shouldn’t be intellectualizing what you’re eating while you’re eating it. You shouldn’t be noticing things at all. You should be pleasingly oblivious to the movements of the servers in the dining area and bus stations, only dimly aware of the passage of time. Taking pictures of your food as it arrives—or, worse, jotting down brief descriptions for your blog entry later—is missing the point entirely. You shouldn’t be forced to think at all. Only feel.

  I was noticing things. Which is bad. Before darkness fell, bathing everything in sleek, sophisticated obscurity, the servers’ uniforms looked a little sad. Shiny in spots, and old. They looked like…waiters instead of the ambassadors of culinary Olympus I’d always thought of them as. A wall-mounted table at a waiter station drooped ever so slightly at an angle uneven with the floor. The wood trim on the furniture was almost imperceptibly but nonetheless visibly patchy, and the roses on the table the tiniest bit old, their petals starting to go at the edges. For one of two of the most notoriously perfect dining rooms in America, this was shocking. I felt sad and depressed and deeply ashamed of myself for noticing.

  And maybe I was detecting a sadness, too, in the voices of the servers. Jonathan Benno, the executive chef, had announced a few weeks earlier that he would be leaving, and maybe I was only imagining it, but the exuberance, the top-of-the-world pride and confidence I encountered at the French Laundry and at previous meals at Per Se seemed lacking that night, replaced by something else.

  There were goujons. Two tiny little cheese-filled pillows.

  And the famous cones of salmon tartare. Just as pretty and just as delicious as ever. But kind of like an old girlfriend by now. The thrill was gone. No word is as dead as “tartare” these days, and I found myself wondering how chef Benno really felt about the things; whether those cones, once objects of child-like wonder to even burned-out fucks like me, were now prison bars of a sort—too beloved, too famous, too expected to ever be removed or replaced by any chef.

  I had a pretty weak summer vegetable gazpacho, but my wife’s sweet carrot velouté was bright and clean, hinting of tarragon and anise.

  I got the French Laundry classic, “oysters and pearls,” one of Keller’s most well-known and admired creations from back in the day: a sabayon of “pearls” of tapioca with oysters and caviar. The servers absolutely lavished it with caviar at tableside. If it is possible to put too much caviar on a dish, it happened here. It seemed…disrespectful of the old girl to dress her up that much. I admit to actually tearing up when this dish was put down in front of me. Even then, early in the meal, I had this inexplicable sense that I might never see her again. Here was a true modern American classic—and a personal favorite, one I was really sentimental about. I felt I shared personal history with her—all the things you’d want your guest to feel about their food. But I was dismayed by the profligacy with which my server ladled on the caviar. It felt like they were saying, “We don’t trust the bitch to go out like that anymore, we got to put on some more lipstick”—and I was offended for her.

  Day-boat scallop sashimi with cauliflower fleurettes, sweet carrots, and pea shoots was flawless, impeccable—and everybody else is doing it, or something like it, these days.

  Marinated Atlantic squid with squash-blossom tempura and squash-blossom pesto was vibrant and new—and quickly, it was good to be alive again.

  A white-truffle-oil-infused custard with a “ragout” of black winter truffles was over the top in a good way, a happy tweak of an old favorite from The Book, joyously excessive rather than insecure about itself. It was rich, wintery, and pounded its flavor home without apology. My wife’s coddled egg with “beurre noisette” and toasted brioche was even better, too rich, too good, and too much—in the best possible ways.

  But it was the next course—a homemade “mortadella” with turnip greens and violet artichokes and mustard for me, and a “coppa di testa,” made with guanciale with cucumber and ravigote for my wife—that was the first truly thrilling moment of the meal. These were refined but still relatively austere versions of everyday Italian country staples, flavors relatively rough and forward—and it felt like the first time I’d tasted salted food all day. I found myself hoping that this was the direction of the remainder of the meal. This, I thought, was good. This…was great.

  I was brought rudely back to earth by the smoke-filled glass domes approaching our table. An otherwise wonderful “corned” veal tongue in one and a hunk of pork belly in the other, ruined by a completely unnecessary impulse to dazzle. They’d used those little smoke guns that no chefs seem able to keep their hands off these days, to pump the smoke into the specially custom-made, hand-blown glass vessels, and they shouldn’t have bothered. The veal tongue managed to shrug the smoke off with little negative effect—but it totally fucked up the pork belly. It pissed me off—a gimmick.

  There was sorbet. Then quail. A Long Island striped-bass “shank.” I had a riff on the legendary butter-poached lobster while my wife ate softshell crabs. All good and lovely to look at.

  A pasta course presented us with tagliatelle on the one hand and spinach rigatini on the other, both absolutely heaped with truffles by our waiter. Again, I wanted to say, “What the fuck are you doing? It’s too much!” but I sat mute as my delicately flavored pasta disappeared beneath a blanket of aromatic fungi. I was again kind of hurt—this time, personally—feeling suddenly like a stripper you drunkenly throw money at in the mistaken belief she’ll like you better.

  There was a flawless and impeccably sourced hunk of veal and then a much-welcome and—once again—thrilling shock.

  A large, decidedly un-Kelleresque single plate (not four plates nesting on top of one another) covered with beautiful slices of heirloom tomatoes, a rough mound of stunnin
gly creamy burrata in the middle, a drizzle of extraordinary-quality olive oil. The simplest, most ordinary fucking thing imaginable—particularly for my wife, who came over from Italy only a few years back. It was a course as “foreign” to my expectations of the Laundry or Per Se as could be. It was also the best and most welcome course of the meal. Both wake-up call and antidote to what preceded it.

  There were desserts, a lot of them. And, for the first time, I had no difficulty making room for at least a taste of each. It’s worth noting that it’s always the pastry chef at degustation-style restaurants who gets fucked—which is to say, neglected—as the customers usually hit the wall long before that department gets its opportunity to shine.

  What did I make of all this? I’m still asking myself this, the next day, still trying to come to grips with my feelings. Playing the whole meal through again in my head, trying to separate out what percentage of my reactions comes from being a jaded, contrarian asshole and what might be “legitimate” or in any way “meaningful” criticism.

  Maybe I should think about Thomas Keller like Orson Welles. It doesn’t matter what happens now—or what he does, or what I may think of his later projects. The man made Citizen Kane, for fuck’s sake! He’s cool for life. Un-deposable. He’s The Greatest. Always. Like Muhammad Ali. Why nitpick?

  Fact is, I love Keller’s more casual restaurant concept: Bouchon. I like that he’s expanded his empire—that he’s successfully moved on, loosened his reins on any one place. I think it’s good for the world and, I hope, good for him personally.

  The more I think about last night, the more I keep coming back to that mortadella, and that coppa, then that gleeful kick of that plate of tomatoes and cheese—and let me tell you, that was some pretty good motherfuckin’ cheese and some mighty good tomatoes.

  As it should be with all great dining experiences, as I’d felt throughout those first, golden hours at the French Laundry, it seemed, all too briefly, that someone was talking to me, telling me something about themselves, their past, the things they loved and remembered.

  Maybe this was Jonathan Benno, intentionally or not, saying: “This is what I’m going to be doing next. After I’m gone.” (It’s worth noting that shortly after this meal, he indeed announced his own new venture, into high-end Italian.)

  Or maybe I’m just too thick and too dumb to figure out what was going on.

  Was this meal a harbinger of anything? A sign of the apocalypse? Meaningful in any way? Or not? I don’t know.

  What I know for sure is that they comped me—and I feel like an utter snake in the grass.

  If I didn’t love that meal at Per Se, if I can’t “get” what Grant Achatz is doing, does that mean anything at all?

  Which brings me to David Chang. Whose relatively recent arrival on the scene—and spectacular rise—I’m pretty damn sure means a fuck of a lot.

  The Fury

  Build, therefore, your own world.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  What took me to cooking was that there was something honest about it,” says David Chang.

  There is no lying in the kitchen. And no god there, either. He couldn’t help you anyway. You either can—or can’t—make an omelet. You either can—or can’t—chop an onion, shake a pan, keep up with the other cooks, replicate again and again, perfectly, the dishes that need to be done. No credential, no amount of bullshit, no well-formed sentences or pleas for mercy will change the basic facts. The kitchen is the last meritocracy—a world of absolutes; one knows without any ambiguity at the end of each day how one did. “Good” and “evil” are easily and instantly recognized for what they are. Good is a cook who shows up on time and does what he said yesterday he was going to do. Evil is a cook who’s full of shit and doesn’t or can’t do what he said he was going to do. Good is a busy restaurant from which the customers go home happy and everybody makes money. Evil is a slow restaurant from which the cooks go home feeling depressed and ashamed.

  Nobody wonders, in a busy kitchen, if there is a god. Or if they’ve chosen the right god.

  Except maybe David Chang. “I run on hate and anger,” says David Chang. “It’s fueled me for the longest fucking time.”

  As usual, when I meet him, he’s got an air of frantic befuddlement about him—as if he just can’t figure out what just happened or what’s probably going to happen. He has the demeanor of a man who believes that whatever might be coming down the pike, whatever locomotive is headed his way, it’s probably not going to be a good thing.

  “Dude,” he says, “I just got a spinal tap!”

  Two days earlier, he woke up with the worst headache of his life, a sharp, driving pain in his skull so ferocious that he raced off to the hospital, convinced he was having a brain hemorrhage. He seems oddly disappointed that the tests found nothing.

  Other successful chefs tend to screw up their faces a little bit when you mention David Chang. Even the ones who like him and like his restaurants, they wince perceptibly—exasperated, perhaps, by the unprecedented and seemingly never-ending torrent of praise for the thirty-two-year-old chef and restaurateur, the all-too quick Michelin stars, the awards—Food and Wine’s Best New Chef, GQ’s Chef of the Year, Bon Appetit’s Chef of the Year, the three James Beard Awards. They’ve watched with a mix of envy and astonishment the way he’s effortlessly brought the blogosphere to heel and mesmerized the press like so many dancing cobras. The great chefs of France and Spain—not just great ones but the cool ones—make obligatory swings by his restaurants to sit happily at the bar, eating with their hands. Ruth Reichl treats him like a son. Alice Waters treats him like a son. Martha Stewart adores him. The New Yorker gives him the full-on treatment, the kind of lengthy, in-depth, and admiring profile usually reserved for economists or statesmen. Charlie Rose invites him on the show and interviews him like A Person of Serious Importance. Throughout the entire process of his elevation to Culinary Godhead, Chang has continued, in his public life, to curse uncontrollably like a Tourette’s-afflicted Marine, rage injudiciously at and about his enemies, deny special treatment to those in the food-writing community who are used to such things, insult the very food bloggers who helped build his legend—and generally conduct himself as someone who’s just woken up to find himself holding a winning lottery ticket. If there was a David Chang catchphrase written on T-shirts, it would be “Dude! I don’t fuckin’ know!”—his best explanation for what’s happening. He continues to flirt with—and then turn down—deals that would have made him a millionaire many times over by now. His twelve-seat restaurant, Momofuku Ko, is the most sought-after and hardest-to-get reservation in America. He is, inarguably, a star.

  “He’s not that great a chef,” says one very, very famous chef with no reason, one would think, to feel threatened by Chang. Chang just hasn’t been around long enough for his taste. From his point of view, and from his hard-won, hard-fought place on the mountaintop, the man just hasn’t paid enough dues. “He’s not even that good a cook,” says another.

  Both statements miss the point entirely.

  Things are going well and yet Chang is characteristically miserable. “I continuously feel like I’m a fuck. When is this going to end?”

  Love the guy, hate the guy, overhyped or not, the simple fact is that David Chang is the most important chef in America today. It’s a significant distinction. He’s not a great chef—as he’d be the first to admit—or even a particularly experienced one, and there are many better, more talented, more technically proficient cooks in New York City. But he’s an important chef, a man who, in a ridiculously brief period of time, changed the landscape of dining, created a new kind of model for high-end eateries, and tapped once, twice, three times and counting into a zeitgeist whose parameters people are still struggling to identify (and put in a bottle, if possible). That’s what sets him above and apart from the rest—and it’s also what drives some other chefs crazy. Describing David Chang as a chef does both him and the word “chef” a disservice. David Chang is�
�something else.

  In the unforgiving restaurant universe, having a good idea is one thing. Executing that idea is harder. If you’re skilled enough and lucky enough to succeed in realizing that idea, the challenge becomes keeping it going, maybe even expanding on it, and ultimately (and most vitally) not fucking it all up somewhere along the way. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about David Chang’s growing empire is that he did fuck it up. Twice. And that fucking up was—in each case—absolutely essential to his success. His first restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, was supposed to be just that—a joint selling noodles. His second, Momofuku Ssäm, was a far more knuckleheaded concept—a place intended to sell Korean burritos. It was only when Chang and his team, looking certain doom in the face, threw up their hands and said, like a baseball team sixteen runs down in the second inning, “What the fuck…let’s just do the best we can. Let’s try and have fun,” that he twice backed into the pop-cultural Main Vein. Noodle Bar got famous for everything BUT the noodles. And nobody orders the burritos at Ssäm.

  He’s famously consumed by his restaurants—and where the whole circus is going. See him on TV and you’d think the man shell-shocked, an impression he reinforces with shrugs and a guilty, confused-looking “who, me?” smile. But somebody’s keeping the train on the tracks. And somebody’s cracking the whip, too. He is subject to notorious rages. People who’ve seen them for the first time have described them as “frightening,” “near cataleptic,” and seemingly “coming from nowhere.” These episodes often culminate with Chang punching holes in the walls of his kitchens—so many of them that they are referred to, jokingly, by his cooks as design features. He suffers periodically from paralyzing headaches, mysterious numbnesses, shingles—and every variety of stress-related affliction.