The Bourgeois Chef

It is while following the cuisine-culture trail for his popular show on the Discovery Travel and Living channel, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, that the celebrity chef, author and anchor hit upon places as culturally and geographically removed as Iceland, Vietnam, Korea, Australia, and finally Kolkata, Mumbai, Rajasthan and the Sundarbans in India.

He was preceded by the lore that8217;s been trailing his career in the kitchen. Bourdain began working as a dishwasher and finally moved up to the top rung of the culinary circuit in New York. What happened8212;and how it happened8212;is where the man comes in, with the full force of his kaleidoscopic character.

In North Africa Bourdain got to taste lamb testicles; ant eggs in Mexico; raw seal brain, 8216;8216;which tasted like sea urchin roe8217;8217;, in northern Canada with a tribe of Inuits; and he made a contentious decision to gobble down the heart of a live cobra in Vietnam. 8216;8216;Eating the heart of a live cobra while it is still beating is like eating a very angry oyster,8217;8217; recalls Bourdain of his experience, which went on to ruffle the feathers of more than just animal lovers.

It is thus quite understandable when Bourdain describes his dietary adventures in India8212;puri-sabzi and bhelpuri in Kolkata, a full-blown seafood meal in the Sundarbans, the Bombay Burger and Muslim street food in Mumbai, and Rajasthani thalis8212;as 8216;8216;pretty tame and nothing too crazy8217;8217;.

But for a person who digs the people and the place as much as the palate, his India visit has been satisfactory in more ways than one. 8216;8216;I8217;d describe my visit as the beginning of a long love affair. India is intoxicating, overwhelming and beautiful, and the country either gets into your blood or it doesn8217;t. It got into mine,8217;8217; says Bourdain.

Five years of travelling around the world and visiting places he had never seen before has humbled the New Yorker. 8220;Earlier I was a lot more pessimistic and nihilistic, but now I8217;m a little more hopeful about the basic goodness of the human race.8221;

Bourdain8217;s reputation as a 8216;working-class chef8217; has come riding the tags of 8216;drinker, smoker and hedonist8217; often attached to his name.

The New York Times best-selling book authored by him, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, while lending a ring of mass appeal around food writing, also candidly chronicled the goings-on in New York kitchens, where drugs and mayhem both followed and preceded the food arriving on the guests8217; tables. 8216;8216;We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in at every opportunity to 8216;conceptualise8217;. Hardly a decision was made without drugs. We worked long hours and took considerable pride in our efforts8212;the drugs, we thought, having little effect on the end-product. That was what the life we were in was about, we believed,8217;8217; Bourdain writes in Kitchen Confidential. Some years and much travelling later, his visit to India has now made Bourdain more 8216;8216;appreciative of the human spirit and the daily struggle that people go through.8221;

But while his heart has melted, his mind still continues to harbour strong opinions about the 8216;8216;global assembly-line food culture8217;8217; popularised by American fast food chains. 8216;8216;These chains are evil and they do nothing but lower expectations of people about food. The generic factory-made food they dish out, which also lacks the individual touch, is a bad representation of American food. They are bad culinary ambassadors,8217;8217; says Bourdain.

His experiences have also hardened him to the cult of celebrity hyped by the mass media; it8217;s a tag he is often labelled with. 8216;8216;It8217;s hard rising from being a dishwasher to a chef. It8217;s been years of work, humiliation, fatigue, learning through trial and error, and bad behaviour. I don8217;t know how I became a celebrity chef, but it was a hell of a lot easier than doing honest toil.8217;8217;