Into culinary darkness

By LINDA HERRICK

For all his proclamations of fecklessness and decadence, Kitchen Confidential's Bourdain contradicts himself by sheer volume of output. Not only has he written these two books within a year, A Cook's Tour is based on his travels with a television crew for a cable series which sounds like a refreshing antithesis to the likes of the Naked Chef and Nigella.

The self-styled Oliver Stone of foodies, Bourdain goes to great pains - often literally - to seek out the heart of culinary darkness, eating his way through some of the world's more unusual cuisines with an iron-stomached constitution.

Although Bourdain has been a cook all of his erratic adult life, and is now executive chef of Les Halles in New York City, he's at pains to emphasise he's still a rock'n'roller, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking Mr Cool who can't stand sissies like Jamie Oliver. In a survey of English celebrity chefs, he says of Oliver: "I want to go back in time and bully him at school." On the other hand, Gordon Ramsay is one of his heroes because of his dedication to creativity, whatever the human cost.

Bourdain is game enough to sample deepfried Mars bars in Scotland, but his narrative really soars when he's in places like Vietnam, Cambodia and Mexico.

He adores the street food of Vietnam - although he finally sags when forced by his producer to eat bird's nest soup. He learns to be wary when offered food which will make him "very, very strong", such as a still-beating cobra heart he swallows in front of an attentive audience.

His chapters on Cambodia are less about food than real dangers from the police, Khmer Rouge and the Gun Club in Pnomh Penh, where drunken customers target-practise with AK47s. Not a fun destination. He's also appalled by a Cambodian zoo-park restaurant where Chinese and Taiwanese tourists travel to eat the animals in the cages.

Bourdain might be a tough customer, but he gets the wobbles when confronted by some of the more primeval aspects of food preparation, like the slaughter of a screaming pig in Portugal and the sacrifice of a hotel's ancient, liver-spotted pet iguana in Mexico. He ate it, but "in the thankfully brief scene you see, I look like I'm eating at gunpoint."

Bourdain's liver certainly took a pounding during the research for this book/series as he made his way through Russia (mafia club), Morocco (a whole lamb baked in the middle of the desert), Tokyo (raw fish at 4 am) and San Francisco (20-course menu at the famed French Laundry).

Where most of us would have expired from sheer surfeit, Bourdain's enthusiasm for exotic places and foods remains unquenched to the end. While his outlaw style of prose can sometimes teeter on self-parody, A Cook's Tour is a passionate and pacy offering from a man who seems as fascinated by tasting snake tripe in Saigon as with Perigord truffles in San Francisco. A brave effort - but Bourdain never does find that perfect meal.

Typhoid Mary, on the other hand, is an oddity. Based on the true story of Mary Mallon, an Irish emigre cook who allegedly infected dozens of people with typhoid in New York in 1904, Bourdain has painstakingly researched Mary's strange tale and empathises with her on the grounds that she was persecuted because she was an outsider - and a cook.

Pursued by the authorities and quarantined on a bleak island for many years before her death, Mallon - depicted in the media as Typhoid Mary - was presented during those times as a cause celebre who deliberately infected her victims. But Bourdain digs deeper: poor Irish immigrant, a stroppy single woman, probably a very good cook because of her steady employment, reduced to menial, humiliating work while "on the lam." Then a sordid death and burial in St Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx, which Bourdain visits, burying his ancient chef's knife in her grave - "a gift. Cook to cook."

Mildly interesting as Mary's story might be 100 years on, I couldn't help wonder why Bourdain bothered. Typhoid Mary comes across as an irrelevant personal mission, almost like a college thesis, with generally intelligent and cogent writing occasionally let down by language such as, "She was now thoroughly and profoundly screwed" - as if Bourdain needs to remind us that although he's writing a serious work of non-fiction, he's still hip.

Anthony Bourdain:A Cook's T: In Search of the Perfect Meal; Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical

Bloomsbury $36.95, $49.95

* Linda Herrick is the Herald arts editor.