Life's rich for chef who spilled beans

Acclaimed chef and writer Anthony Bourdain outside Les Halles, his fashionable New York restaurant. Picture / Richard Robinson

"Writing comes easy, I write like I talk, I haven't been toiling away," says Anthony Bourdain. Lucky devil. Even in New York this guy in his big black coat, with a gleam of grey in his hair and a glitter in his brown eyes, is seriously cool.

Restaurant punters take sidelong glances as he sits in the window at Les Halles restaurant in New York, telling his amazing story.

In the 70s, Bourdain seems to have been so boozed and drugged he lost job after job. His stories about standing in restaurant lines (the kitchen work space in commercial eateries) slipping in fat and vegetable peelings, rats running over his feet would put you off eating out for life.

And now, as he says, he lives the dream. His contract here at Les Halles, one of the classier bistro-style French restaurants in New York, is sweet.

Soon he plans a move to the dreamy city of Hoi An in Vietnam for a year to cook and write a book on Vietnamese food.

In the meantime he intends travelling the world, including New Zealand this month, to promote Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook: strategies, recipes and techniques of classic bistro cooking. He returns in May to head a line-up of international and local food and wine masters at Savour New Zealand in Christchurch.

It was when Bourdain put the inside story of New York eateries on paper that his dream run began. It started with an article he sent to the New Yorker in 1999, titled Don't eat before reading this. Within three days Bourdain had a book deal with Bloomsbury Publishing in London. That book, Kitchen Confidential, sold one million copies worldwide.

The amazing thing is that Bourdain was not lynched, or at least dipped in a vat of boiling oil by fellow chefs and restaurateurs he exposed in the book. Instead the industry seemed to like the outing given to it by Bourdain. And restaurant-goers loved it.

Among his messages: restaurants tend get rid of stale food over the weekend - beware brunch frittata. Don't eat fish on Monday, chances are it's been hanging around in the fridge since Thursday.

"There are two words that should leap out of you when you navigate the menu," writes Bourdain. "'Monday' and 'Special"'. So here I am in New York sitting alongside this tough talking, 48-year-old chef, whose descriptions of the inner workings of New York restaurants are enough to make you shudder, and he's incredibly well mannered, well spoken, intelligent.

"Kitchen Confidential changed everything for me overnight - and I mean everything," says Bourdain, his lugubrious face permitting a smile. "It's in 23 or 24 languages, Mandarin, Moldavian, Serbian, Hebrew. I had no idea what I wrote would have any appeal outside this small, inbred world of New York restaurateurs.

"I've just been riding the tiger ever since. I go to all the cool places I've ever dreamed of going ... I'm given the opportunity to tell stories and I keep getting paid. I like that."

He's right, he does talk in the same way he writes, minus, I'm relieved to say, the slang and insults.

Bourdain's great assets are a classical chef's pedigree, a work ethic ground into him by ferocious bosses and the balls to tell it like it is. Here in Manhattan, where the "have a nice day" culture blurs reality, he is like a glass of plain water.

"Do you have a lot of money now?"

"No," he says, not in terms of things like having a sports car, "But I'm having a good time. In early 2000 I'd never paid my rent on time, I'd never had health insurance, I'd never owned a house, a car, or matching furniture or been anywhere really. So this is a huge change, I'm living the dream." He's also in that enviable position of having an audience of people hungry for everything he's ever written. Three early novels have been reprinted, his Cook's Tour television series has been turned into a book, a collection of magazine articles and other unpublished pieces is on the way, the Les Halles Cookbook is selling well.

This is classic French cuisine Bourdain style. Instructions include: "When the meat is done, remove from the oven and let it rest for 5 minutes without poking, cutting, or in any way molesting it. Don't even talk loudly to it ... If you want it done medium well or well, you don't deserve to eat this dish. See you at Sizzler ... don't even think about using Cool Whip [Dairy Whip], I'll know, and I'll find you."

The seeds of what Bourdain was to become were planted in the genes. The writing side from his mother who is an editor for the New York Times, the food thing from his French-born father who took his sons home to France when they were small. It was on the Queen Mary sailing to Europe that 9-year-old Anthony sampled his first vichyssoise which, rather than tasting yucky as it would to 99 per cent of kids, "resonated on his lips". When they arrived in the Gironde, and he was left ignominiously in the car while his parents had lunch at Les Pyramides, he developed a voracious taste for French food that has stayed with him for life.

Today, Bourdain's eyes sparkle when he walks on to the line at Les Halles. And yes, all the best French cooks in New York are Mexican: "He works, I take the credit," says Bourdain introducing Carlos the chef. The trademark components of a Bourdain-run kitchen that I learned from Kitchen Confidential are all there: piles of clean hand towels; sauces waiting in plastic bottles ready to pipe on salads and steaks; clean and tidy work surfaces; Mexicans; the odd earring, tattoo and joke.

There are four Les Halles restaurants, two in New York, one in Washington DC, one in Florida and now the Les Halles cookbook. "They all have the same menu, they're all French with dead-on authenticity," says Bourdain. "We've broken no new culinary ground here, I'm proud to say."

It's getting dark, Bourdain is getting fidgety. Finally he escapes outside for a cigarette, and a bunch of people crowd round as though they've been staking the joint, all eager for a bite at the philosophy that has made him a legend in New York. Once you've got past the horror stories it's a beguiling message. Boiled down to the kind of good, rich stock that Bourdain says is the basis of great cooking, it goes like this: "Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride."

* Anthony Bourdain is hosting a literary lunch today at Langham Hotel, Symonds Street, Auckland. Tickets are sold out.