{"id":634231,"date":"2026-08-13T02:33:39","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T02:33:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/634231\/"},"modified":"2026-08-13T02:33:39","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T02:33:39","slug":"anthony-bourdain-needed-rules-as-much-as-he-hated-them-the-kitchen-was-perfect-for-him-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/634231\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthony Bourdain needed rules as much as he hated them. The kitchen was perfect for him \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The trope of the Angry Young Man was not born in a kitchen, but Anthony Bourdain\u2019s particular myth-making created what might be the prototype for late-20th-century masculinity. As the director of Tony, the new biopic of Bourdain focusing on his first job, has said, the film is about \u201ca magical world where nothing can go wrong and a young man who\u2019s angry about it\u201d.<\/p>\n

Bourdain arrived in that job, as a dishwasher in a restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, aged 19. He was hellbent on a life of formless, self-sabotaging rebellion, and found his tribe. But when he published his book Kitchen Confidential in 2000, a quarter of a century later, he set the ethos of that kitchen tribe in stone and attracted an ever-replenishing pool of chefs who, if they weren\u2019t already just like him, were prepared to die trying.<\/p>\n

However, that anger, like everything about Bourdain, wasn\u2019t real \u2013 it was performative, playful. He compared himself once to the chef Eric Ripert, saying they both had a \u201clive-and-let-live energy\u201d, but Ripert \u201cbelieves in karma . . . I believe in vendetta\u201d. That fabled anger never sounded quite real.<\/p>\n

Kitchen Confidential starts with Bourdain travelling through France<\/a> as a child with his brother and his moneyed American<\/a> parents of European inclinations and heritage. He is an insufferable little pain towards his family, for no reason, and he\u2019s also a git to the French kids, before returning to the US to be a jerk to flatmates and girlfriends in his private liberal arts university (Vassar) before dropping out. <\/p>\n

He\u2019s still in his teens in 1975 when he takes that lowly job in Provincetown. There, he\u2019s a minnow among absolute sharks of delinquency \u2013 a chef might turn out an impromptu service for a 100-strong post-wedding party, then bang the bride against the bins afterwards. The staff scored drugs you\u2019ve never heard of, and drugs you\u2019d never have needed if you hadn\u2019t taken all those other drugs.<\/p>\n

In that kitchen, Bourdain finds his spiritual home, \u201ca subculture whose centuries-old militaristic hierarchy and ethos of \u2018rum, buggery and the lash\u2019 make for a mix of unwavering order and nerve-shattering chaos,\u201d he wrote in Kitchen Confidential. That book, remembers the journalist, cookery writer and cook Diana Henry, 63, described \u201ca world we didn\u2019t have an in on, and suddenly we did\u201d. (Henry did, in my view, the best late-era interview with Bourdain, two years before his death.)<\/p>\n

\"AntonioAntonio Banderas as Chef and Dominic Sessa as Anthony Bourdain in Tony, the new biopic about Bourdain. Photograph: A24 <\/p>\n

Bourdain described his mission as a chef: \u201cYour body is not a temple, it\u2019s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.\u201d In his writing, as in his cooking, he prioritised pace and crunch over elegance and fuss. Relationships in this brigade system were tightly bonded and savagely caustic. \u201cAs an art form, cook talk is, like haiku or kabuki, defined by established rules,\u201d he wrote. \u201cAll comments must, out of historical necessity, concern involuntary rectal penetration, penis size, physical flaws or annoying mannerisms or defects.\u201d <\/p>\n

Between the drugs, the shagging, the late nights, the contradictory, hurtling imperatives of discipline and self-indulgence, the contempt for self-care and the penis jokes, this was a definitionally masculine ideal, and not even for so childish a reason as that you\u2019d need a dick in order to dip it in someone\u2019s Vichyssoise. There\u2019s just no female model for being beautiful, high and still smashing it at work: the women in this space (just off the top of my head, Nancy Spungen, Amy Winehouse) end up dead.<\/p>\n

In many ways, Bourdain was just saying what he saw: this was the reality of kitchens across decades and continents. Tom Kerridge (53) describes being drawn in by exactly the same atmosphere: \u201cEvery chef will tell you the same thing \u2013 they don\u2019t come into kitchens because they love food. Chefs love the energy of being chefs. It becomes your way of life, as opposed to what you do \u2013 it\u2019s what you are.\u201d Kitchens might have their hierarchies imported from the French army, their insubordination penalties only a fraction less violent, yet at the same time, Kerridge continues, \u201cthey\u2019re building sites, they\u2019re construction zones, they\u2019re full of people using sharp things and burning themselves, who are all really tired\u201d.<\/p>\n

Andrew Clarke, 48-year-old co-owner and exec chef at Acme Fire Cult in east London<\/a>, and the founder of Glandstonbury (yes, it\u2019s an offal festival), said of his first colleagues \u2013 nowhere fancy, a pizza place in Bluewater, in the late 90s: \u201cThey were these pirates. None of them were proper chefs. They needed a job without a CV, without any qualifications \u2013 some of them had been in prison and the kitchen was very accepting of that.\u201d <\/p>\n

The word \u201cpirate\u201d is used constantly, by everyone, and the ex-con thing is real: in 2009 the Clink charity was established, opening restaurants in High Down, Brixton and a couple of other prisons, teaching prisoners skills for when they got out. And there\u2019s a reason they were trained up for professional kitchens, not ice-cream parlours.<\/p>\n

\"InIn 2017, Anthony Bourdain said: ‘If there\u2019s a harasser in the kitchen who\u2019s a jerk, chances are he\u2019s got a copy of my book on his station. And I\u2019m going to have to live with that.’ <\/p>\n

Clarke remembers arriving \u201cin a kitchen that was very French, very disciplined, very trained. Bourdain\u2019s book was just out, and I just started reading little passages, and I thought, \u2018That\u2019s me. That\u2019s the person I am, that\u2019s where I\u2019ve been, that\u2019s what I\u2019ve done.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

Sally Ab\u00e9 \u2013 age 38, former head chef at the Pem in the Conrad, St James\u2019s, London, and, lately, her own bistro, Teal \u2013 had an all-female senior team at the Pem, but did not enter the business in 2007 wanting to throw over its hyper-masculine conventions. \u201cTo be honest, I\u2019m a very stubborn, determined person,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen I was 21, I thought, \u2018I can be one of the boys,\u2019 and I got swept up in it. It was really fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet at the same time, Bourdain\u2019s writing was so vivid, his character so magnetic, his joie de vivre so complicatedly credible and so contagious, that he built the world in the act of describing it.<\/p>\n

As much as it pains me to pour cold water over it, Bourdain\u2019s myth \u2013 the bit that was neither rooted in reality, nor prefigurable by force of will \u2013 was that the quintessential chef\u2019s life could just proceed without consequence. \u201cBourdain romanticised that sort of life,\u201d Henry says, \u201ctaking coke, drinking too much.\u201d <\/p>\n

He ended up in rehab in the early 90s, but remained a heavy smoker and drinker. In kitchens the world over, says Clarke: \u201cAll roads led to the bar: a good service, you go to the bar, a bad service, you go to the bar. I saw chefs being drunk in service and quite often that was me. I\u2019d have a skinful at lunch and then do a dinner.\u201d Kerridge has talked in the past about his jaw-dropping alcohol consumption, before he went teetotal in 2013.<\/p>\n

In 2015, Clarke suffered a terrible depressive episode. When he posted about it on Instagram, a huge number of people in the industry shared their own experiences with him. He has since set up a mental health charity for people working in the hospitality industry called Pilot Light. \u201cWhile we wanted to raise awareness of mental health in the business, it inevitably led to people talking about bullying, sexism and racism in the industry. I\u2019m a chef \u2013 I wanted to keep it very clean and simple. For me it was about mental health. But it was Pandora\u2019s box.\u201d <\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth making a distinction between the ludic, juvenile macho vibe Bourdain immortalised and a more modern toxic masculinity, designed to undermine, control and exclude women (having come of age in the 90s, I could spend forever insisting on that distinction). However, Bourdain himself, a subtle and self-critical person, could see how the first provided cover for the second. As he told an audience at his alma mater, the Culinary Institute of America, in 2017: \u201cIf there\u2019s a harasser in the kitchen who\u2019s a jerk, chances are he\u2019s got a copy of my book on his station. And I\u2019m going to have to live with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were also a lot of real bullies operating under the cover of play-bullying, and it\u2019s interesting, looking back, how widely this was accepted in the industry. It was an open secret when Noma \u2013 the experimental Danish restaurant \u2013 was huge in the 2000s that its founder, Ren\u00e9 Redzepi<\/a>, terrorised his staff. When the New York Times published evidence in March that Redzepi had \u201cpunched employees in the face, jabbed them with kitchen implements and slammed them against walls\u201d leading to \u201clasting trauma from layers of psychological abuse, including intimidation, body shaming and public ridicule\u201d, the collective sound of people feigning horror at a thing that we\u2019d all known for 20 years was really something.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0What is all the controversy with Noma and why did head chef Ren\u00e9 Redzepi resign?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not just kitchens, of course. \u201cNot only does it look like an awful way to treat people, it\u2019s become unacceptable,\u201d Henry says. \u201cYou can\u2019t bully anybody anywhere.\u201d She recalls her experience working as a TV producer on food programmes. \u201cEven the way I behaved in television, making researchers stay late because they hadn\u2019t done enough, I wouldn\u2019t get away with that now. We don\u2019t like it any more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ab\u00e9 has no problem differentiating between mischief, intensity, ego and harassment. \u201cKitchens are always going to be high-pressure places \u2013 once you\u2019re in the service, you\u2019re in the service. If the food\u2019s not ready, you\u2019re an idiot. But I\u2019ve taken all those environments I worked in and turned them on their head. My kitchen\u2019s nothing like that now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AA scene from Tony, featuring Antonio Banderas (left) as Chef and Dominic Sessa as Anthony Bourdain. Photograph: A24 <\/p>\n

Clarke is done with the macho bullying (\u201cIt\u2019s deeply uncool,\u201d he says), and when he started Acme in 2022, he did a thing that would doubtless have had Bourdain, back in the day, exploding in 2,000 colourful words. \u201cWe have very physical, long days; none of us look after ourselves like athletes and perhaps we should. We were doing yoga classes in the space, checking in, talking to each other. Doing everything a little more holistically.\u201d It\u2019s not as anti-Bourdain as it sounds, Clarke says: \u201cHe got into jiu-jitsu in his 50s. He was fully at the point of: \u2018I\u2019m going to look after myself.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Bourdain never understood his own propensity for self-sabotage, as well as other-people-sabotage. It\u2019s laced through his writing: there he always is, making trouble for no good reason. And he said as much to Henry when she interviewed him. \u201cWhat is it that gave him the pain that he carried around with him?\u201d she asks. \u201cHis childhood sounded perfectly OK. He was just always a bit of a wreck until he got to be a chef. It\u2019s strict \u2013 you can\u2019t not deliver. You\u2019ve got to be in, you\u2019ve got to see your crew, you\u2019ve got to do your service. There are completely set rules and you can\u2019t disobey them.\u201d Kitchens were a haven for people who needed rules as much as they hated them, and could only reconcile those warring urges in a cacophony of appetites.<\/p>\n

Perhaps inevitably, through some combination of a little foresight and a changing world, the pirate spirit that defined kitchens for so long is being replaced by a new intellectualism. \u201cChefs nowadays are like bloody poets,\u201d Henry says. \u201cStevie Parle, Merlin Labron-Johnson \u2013 all these people have got degrees. Once they would have been doing a master\u2019s and a PhD; instead they\u2019re focusing on growth and animals and flavour combinations and technical stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a sanitised world. It surely still has the plenty of what Bourdain wrote were the fundamentals of \u201cgood food and good eating . . . blood and organs and cruelty and decay\u201d. An intellectual kitchen just doesn\u2019t invite chaos, or torment, or madcappery, but you wonder what will become of all the people who were mainly in it for those things. – Guardian<\/p>\n