A restaurant is a Manichean place. Two opposite worlds are joined by a partition that swings both ways. Out in the front, the diners enjoy heavenly food; in the back, those dishes are prepared in hell's kitchen - an inferno of flame, smoke, sweated labour and shouted curses. Anthony Bourdain, the chef at the Brasserie Les Halles on lower Park Avenue in New York, enjoys commuting between those two worlds. He likes to repeat the remark of a grumpy English gent who, no doubt affronted by a member of his domestic staff, once said 'God gives us meat, but the devil sends us cooks'.
Bourdain takes this as a compliment to his profession. He relishes his own satanic allure and screams at his team of Third World helpers as if wielding a pitchfork not a wooden spoon. His recent best-selling memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, like the two detective novels he wrote that preceded it, treats restaurants as scenes of perdition and pestilence - incubators for bacteria, laundries for Mafia funds, environments so foul that they serve as second homes for damned souls, 'the degraded and the debauched'. Bourdain is happy to include himself in that company.
An adversarial, unsmiling character, Bourdain has a gratuitous grudge against a society whose bourgeois comforts he long ago rejected. His father (whose French ancestry explains Bourdain's precocious acquaintance with oysters, garlic, and good crusty bread) managed a recording company, his mother worked at the New York Times. 'When I told them I'd dropped out of college to take a course at the Culinary Institute of America, they reacted as if I'd said I wanted to be an arsonist or a stick-up man.' Even after getting himself profitably employed at The Rainbow Room, in the spangled summit of Rockefeller Center, or at One Five, a restaurant at 1 Fifth Avenue decorated with salvage from the salon of a defunct ocean liner, he behaved like the loser and moral derelict he pined to be. A chef in his first novel Bone in the Throat slopes off between meals to score heroin in a blitzed tenement; Bourdain used to do the same, until - homeless on Broadway, bartering his last possessions to pay for a fix - he saved his own life by checking into a methadone clinic. Though now off drugs, he retains the jangled intensity and the fleshless physique of the addict. For a chef, he looks cadaverously under-nourished. 'It comes,' he says of his leanness, 'from three packs of cigarettes a day and a neurotic controlling nature. I am a pretty damn obnoxious character.'
Because this is Manhattan, such a comment is of course a self-preening boast. While the rest of us are what we eat, Bourdain is what he cooks, and he likes to think that his food reflects his own disgruntlement and incipient violence. 'Food is good,' he says, 'when it's the expression of a chef's sociopathic, monomaniacal personal vision. You've gotta be a micromanaging, anal-retentive control freak.' It's an invitation to read the menu at Les Halles as a psychological cipher. Here, enacting the fantasies of an executive chef who also sees himself as an executioner, they pile fricasséed duck gizzards into vol-au-vent pastry, set you to spear snails and drag them out of hiding, boil up hooves and snouts for pot au feu, and challenge you to gulp down a pig's trotter. One of Bourdain's favourite dishes is tête de veau, which could be described as the massacred face of the beast.
No wonder he writes crime novels: for him, cooking is a mode of murder. In Bone in the Throat, a Mafia victim is dismembered in a restaurant kitchen, then dumped in the garbage with fish heads and fruit peel; in his second novel Gone Bamboo, a shotgun barrel explodes and the gunman's fingers 'burst open like microwaved sausages'. Bourdain surveys the plated, sauced, impeccably presented carnage on the Les Halles menu with equanimity: 'I think we have a historical obligation to hunt down smaller, stupider creatures and kill them and then eat the fuckers.' At the entrance of his restaurant, a butcher's stall displays the bleeding, sectioned spoils of the abattoir.
Yet despite his devilish credentials - augmented by a piratical earring - Bourdain nowadays finds himself summoned out of the kitchen with its fiery, foul-mouthed camaraderie to be shown off in the glossy heaven to which America sends its celebrities. The success of Kitchen Confidential has made a commodity of him, a personality packaged for consumption on television talk shows. Accompanied by cameras, he is currently eating his way round the globe for a TV series of his own, to be called A Cook's Tour.
One night at Les Halles, I watch him backstage, swigging Margaritas and bawling at his wetback minions; the next day I return to watch him out front, leaning against a lectern above the bar as he regales the audience at a literary brunch with anecdotes about his writing life instead of confit de canard or crême brulée, which are his usual specialities. The aura of success he exudes is palpable, and very sweet-smelling. Kitchen Confidential is to be filmed by David Fincher, who directed Fight Club. The adaptation will be called Seared, and the scowling Bourdain is due to be reincarnated as Brad Pitt.
'I always wanted life to be like a movie,' he tells me when remembering his tearaway adolescence. Now he contemplates his own imminent fictionalisation, about which he has misgivings. After all, he defines a bad restaurant as 'a place where there's Bruce Willis memorabilia on the walls, and the waiters look like they'd rather be in a soap opera'. Shouldn't a chef be behind the scenes cooking, rather than preening for the customers as he autographs cookery books?
To make matters more complex, Bourdain's costumes reverse the two Manichean realms in which he operates. In the kitchen, buttoned into the chef's proud uniform, he wears white. For the brunch, he changes to black, compulsory for fashionable Manhattanites. It must be confusing to shuttle from hell to heaven, with only a swing door between them.
My introduction to Bourdain happens in hell. During the rush on a Saturday night, he looks as if he is overseeing traumatised, scurrying troops during a bombardment. He enjoys comparing his kitchen subordinates, cramped in a steamy claustrophobic corridor, to the crew of a submarine. Under siege from the invisible, clamorous customers, they appear as if reacting to depth charges which shake their little, leaky vessel of stainable steel.
'In here,' says Bourdain, changing metaphors as he yelled commands, 'I'm just the air-traffic controller.' If so, he is not very good at preventing mid-air collisions. Mexicans scamper, squeal, drop plates, and play with fire as if it is edible. A frying pan suddenly explodes into flames, like the jungle napalmed by choppers in Apocalypse Now (which is, as it happens, one of Bourdain's favourite films). 'More fire!' shrieks Bourdain, as a rare steak is returned by a customer who wants it better done. He quite easily could be quoting from Robert Duvall's Colonel Kilgore in the Coppola film, who salivates when he smells napalm on the morning air.
Actually, as Bourdain admits, the character in Apocalypse Now he mostly identifies with is the spaced-out cook played by Frederic Forrest. It can't be accidental that Forrest's head is chopped off at the end of the film by Brando's Kurtz, as if he were a calf destined for transmutation into tête de veau. And Bourdain the unashamed carnivore might well consider his own affinities with Kurtz, who has been initiated into cannibalism by his tribal subjects. 'Would I eat another human being?' Bourdain asks himself at my request. 'Yeah, if the stiff was marinated in red wine overnight.' He chuckles grimly. He scorns vegetarians, maintaining that we derive our sense of humour from a diet high in animal protein.
He then proceeds to give me an exhibition of his skills - rhetorical not culinary. These days he leaves the cooking to others; his role as chef is to be an expeditor. He expedites, you might say, with extreme prejudice, using a barrage of semi-Spanish invective, which he combines with some sporty target practice. Whenever a plate is ready for delivery, he screws up its pink order slip and lobs it across the room towards a garbage bin, awarding himself points for accuracy of his aim. Then he returns to the creative task of inventing abuse.
'Refire,' he bellows, 'for the syphilitic on table 16. Una mas endive! Tortuga, get a move on! Who do I have to fuck to get some service round here? Manuel will be outa jail before that steak is ready. Hey, maybe he'll stay on in there, he's getting free sex after all. Guys, we've gotta send him more condoms. Algo mas? Garnish, garnish, garnish. That plate looks shithouse. Remember this fucking place is a temple of cuisine. You see the cleavage on that woman at table six? What a set of incredible breasts! Give her more cheese. Assassino!' he shrieks as a plate crashes to the floor. 'You useless unemployable fuck, you're destroying my life.That soup is like the mucus oozing outa my dead grandmother. Who fucking made this shit? It looks like I projectile vomited on it. Find me someone to sack, we're getting jammed up in here. Mas blinis, por favor. Hey, Mohammed, I love your ass.' Mohammed, a lone Bangladeshi, smiles submissively. 'Yeah, it looked great in the last issue of Zipper magazine. Man, it looked good enough to eat!' 'Ah,' says Bourdain, turning to me, 'what can I tell you? Me and my boys! We're just like one happy family back here.'
He likes to compare his tirades with the morale-boosting bluster of Shakespeare's Henry V before the battle of Agincourt. The relentless teasing stiffens sinews and prepares combatants for the fray: such analogies are inescapable in Bourdain's militarised kitchen. 'Sure, I do my best to bust their balls. It's an attempt to break down the weak, like the hazing in boot camp. Cooking skills are less important than the capacity to withstand pressure. Toughness is at a premium. I bully them to see if they're gonna freak out during the rush on their first Saturday night. If they don't crash and burn, I respect them.'
A waiter briefly interrupts Bourdain's barracking of his cooks to report on the evening's clientele, as if giving a backstage assessment of a theatrical audience. 'They're good people tonight,' he says. 'And they're very proud that you're cooking.' 'Excellent,' says Bourdain with militaristic gruffness, 'outstanding.' But he looks shifty, because of course he is not cooking at all, merely shouting at those who did so. And very often over the past year - when he has been off on book junkets or in Vietnam and Australia filming his Cook's Tour - he has left his minions, as he says, to 'cover my ass'.
The proud customers don't seem to care whether he has prepared the food personally or not. What matters is that they are in his presence. Celebrities are not meant to feed you; instead, you feed on them, enviously lapping up their aura. Now a woman leaves her table and leans across the partition: a startling defiance of taboo, as if she has breached the theatrical curtain dividing two different worlds. 'Man,' she says to Bourdain with a self-conscious swagger, 'I just love your fucking book!'
The profanity announces her worthiness to invade this male stronghold. She is declaring herself a broad, a potential gun-moll - someone like Bourdain's wife Nancy (the model for Frances, the hit woman in his second novel Gone Bamboo, who ingeniously terrorises an FBI agent using only her foul mouth and a ballpoint pen). 'My wife,' according to Bourdain, 'is the kinda gal you could steal horses with. If I were to hold up a liquor store, she'd have the car motor running for the getaway. The two of us are like Bonnie and Clyde.' His fan pushes Kitchen Confidential across the partition. 'Here, can you sign my copy for me? Could you write "All my love"?' He makes a brief attempt at gracious behaviour, then resumes busting Mohammed's balls while extolling his ass.
'I feel secure back there,' Bourdain says to me after the booky brunch. Seated now at a table in the restaurant's smoking section, he is itching for the kitchen. 'The school counsellors always told my parents "Anthony needs a controlled environment". That's what the kitchen is. For an undisciplined, dysfunctional guy like me, it's a world of absolutes. I like the regimentation. You either fuck up or you don't. My mission in life is conquering fear. Back there I'm strong; out here, as a civilian, I'm the biggest fucking pussycat in the world. I can go to someone else's restaurant as a customer and I'll put up with the worst abominations and still tip the waiter 20 cents at the end of the meal.'
To reconcile those identities and balance those contradictory worlds requires some ingenuity. Even in the kitchen, Bourdain feels himself to be in a false position; aggressive bravado and loud-mouthed bravura are his means of self-defence. It's all very well to liken a restaurant to the army, but mess cooks seldom win medals for bravery. Bourdain's vocational choice confronts him with the perennial crisis of masculinity. How do you prevent the other guys from teasing you because you wear an apron?
He resembles the nerdy corporate employee played by Edward Norton in Fight Club, who re-empowers himself under the fascist tutelage of Brad Pitt: you can see why David Fincher views Kitchen Confidential as Fight Club II. Bourdain recently watched full-contact boxers bludgeon one another almost to death in underground clubs run by the Mafia in Moscow. 'I can still hear the sound of those fists smashing into skulls,' he says to me with a shudder of unholy rapture. It is a culinary noise, after all. The pugilists might have been tenderising slices of veal.
A lingering dread of effeminacy provokes Bourdain to dramatise the heroism of his trade, like Hemingway casting off the precious, sedentary business of writing to go to bullfights or hunt big game. His strutting machismo, which gives him proprietory rights over those Mexican and Bangladeshi staff, turns cooking and eating into existential affairs, negotiations of risk and danger by which we prove our moral fitness. 'Boullabaisse is the kind of challenge I mean,' he says to me. 'How do you convert your fear into pleasure? It's terrifying to look at - all those bones and whiskers and exoskeletons.' He might have been quoting Hemingway on his marlin-fishing expeditions, except that Hemingway actually caught the fish before eating them.
Bourdain's excursion to south-east Asia for A Cook's Tour qualified, in his own eyes, as an initiatory blooding. He returned with a cigarette lighter left behind by a dead, anonymous GI. 'It was really heavy in north-western Cambodia, getting a full-body pat down by these guerrilla dudes in the mountains. They could have killed me, and nobody would ever have known.' But he flunked another testosterone test. His hosts offered him the still-beating heart of a recently-killed cobra, to be washed down with a draught of the reptile's blood; he passed. Of course there is an element of self-congratulation in volunteering for trials which (except in the case of the cobra heart) you successfully surmount. A butcher is not quite as heroic as one of Hemingway's matadors. Bourdain doesn't always seem to recognise this - or perhaps he does, but has decided that the pretence is essential to his act. Certainly it plays well. At the brunch, he praised ticket-holders for their 'spectacular courage' in daring to consume his food after reading his exposure of kitchen hygiene. There's nothing New Yorkers love more than to be praised for their bravery, even if the feat of valour in question consists merely in getting out of bed early on Sunday to eat French toast.
'Food is good,' he told the brunchers, 'when it is the expression of love.' That, to be sure, is Mom's belief, but is it Bourdain's? And love for whom, or what? For the food itself, arguably, but not for the eaters, who are seen in his kitchen as a nuisance, a necessary evil. 'We adore you,' said the woman who'd given him the book to sign. He pointedly did not reciprocate.
Someone else during the rush rejected a steak, demanding gravy. 'Gravy?' yells Bourdain when the request is relayed to him. 'What the fuck does he think this is, an Irish place?' He then dispatched an order of ravioli swimming in butter and goat's cheese. 'There's some heart-attack food for table 10,' he says. 'Load 'em up with cholesterol.' The customers he feeds, he tells me, are as abstract and emotionally non-existent as the animals killed to make the food. 'When a plate's up in the window just before service, then it's perfect. Once it goes out that door, it's gone.'
I wondered, when I heard Bourdain smarmily call food the expression of love, whether it couldn't also be an expression of hate. His new book, Typhoid Mary, confirms my suspicion. Mary Mallon was an Irish immigrant who cooked for various patrician households in New York early in the twentieth century. Her employers and below-stairs colleagues fell ill and died with alarming regularity, often after eating her peach ice cream. Mary, it turned out, was a carrier of typhoid fever; she remained immune to the virus, but generously passed it on to those she fed. Bourdain suggests that she did so knowingly, as an act of revenge, and proposes that any restaurant worker who has ever sneezed, spat or (yes, it happens) pissed in the soup will sympathise. Such people, he says, know 'real hate' for those they're supposedly nourishing. He once had a faddish private client who insisted on egg-white omelettes, to be cooked without butter or oil in the pan. Bourdain quit, but if he hadn't done so was sure he would have cracked the man's cranium open like an eggshell. 'I yearn to be able to solve my problems quickly,' he says to me, 'with a gun.' A chef's vengeance is deliciously delayed, but those who eat ravioli with goat's cheese (which I did, licking my lips) will in the end be killed by it, just as Mary Mallon's victims were slain by her germ-ridden ice cream.
Bourdain has always rejoiced in the gruesome brutality of the food chain, and he transfers that laughing slaughter to his crime novels. 'I enjoy killing people in books. It's fun, they're just bodies moving through space picturesquely and spilling their guts as they go. I was blood-crazy as a kid. I still remember seeing Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch when it came out, with the machine gun chewing up all those Mexicans. Everything in the movies up to then was so sanitised. I'd go round telling my friends at school "Dude, you must see this, it's so cool!"'
Much of this is Bourdain playing the tough guy to intimidate anyone who might snigger at him for wearing an apron. But he does, when pressed, admit that his travels for A Cook's Tour had induced a change of heart.
'When I call up my suppliers at the meat market, what I'm doing is dialling a murder, just like Al Pacino when he takes over in The Godfather. That used to be all it was. But on these trips, I've seen a lot of animals die. It won't make me a vegetarian, but it's changed my values. In Portugal they strung a pig up and killed it for me. In Morocco we killed a lamb. They pointed it towards Mecca and slit its throat; it took so long to die. In Vietnam I saw five or six people try to strangle a duck. They choked it, twisted its neck for five minutes, finally threw it on the fire, but then it flew off so they had to start over again. I looked into that duck's eye, and saw the poor bastard decide to die. Then in Mexico they gave me a machete and made me face up to a turkey. I'm a complete wuss, but I whacked its head clean off. And then the body freaked out, it went nuts, even without the head! There was blood everywhere. So after all that, I wouldn't hold it against a cow if it hunted me. I know what it feels like to be prey.'
I question this, taking it to be nothing more than idle pathetic fallacy. But Bourdain makes good the boast. 'When I was an addict, junkies like me were prey for the crackheads. We had to go into their neighbourhoods to score; those guys were predators, they tracked us down like cattle separated from the herd and held us up, mugged us at gunpoint.'
Having lived dangerously, Bourdain finds it hard to forgive himself for relaxing into his profitable, physically undemanding literary career. 'Writing's a hustle for me, and I despise that. I'm an opportunist, I've always used words to get myself out of trouble. I'm still crafting beautiful lies. It's not the same as making a product people eat. Dish-washing was good for me, when I first worked in a restaurant. I was a spoiled kid, and I earned respect doing that. Writing feels less honourable to me than blue-collar work.'
The notion of honour is crucial for Bourdain. On another occasion he says to me 'If the cost percentage in my kitchen is good, I bring honour to my manager' This personal code is half the warrior ethic of the samurai and half the cult of honour among thieves cherished by mafiosi. Dishonour brings physical penalties, like the samurai's hari-kiri. Bourdain venerates the French chef Vatel, who fell on his own sword when a fish delivery arrived late. But once again, the only blood Bourdain himself sheds is metaphorical. 'While I'm on the road selling books or here talking to you,' he said, 'I'm haemorrhaging credibility with my crew in the kitchen.'
He then opens his palms on the table. 'Here, just look at what's happened to my hands in the last year.' They used to be calloused, scarred, nicked - damaged by accidents with knives or scorching plates, deformed by daily bouts of whisking. Bourdain was proud of these wounds, his badges of honour. This conceit might have been another homage to Hemingway: when the hit man in Gone Bamboo shows off the suture marks on his chest which are souvenirs of combat in Vietnam, Tommy wonders 'if he'd been gored by a bull.' Bourdain looks at his soft, healed skin with disgust. 'See that? I've got girlie hands, just like a writer.' He shoves them into his pockets.
I want to show him my own professional lesions - warts left on fingers that have spent a lifetime gripping pens - to convince him that writing too is manual labour. But that, I realise, would be to play his own mock-heroic game. Nevertheless, I ask myself, where his sense of his own treachery would lead, and begin to think that his shame about his new existence as a self-publicist is the most endearing thing about him.
As it turns out, he had so use for my commiseration. 'Don't worry,' he says, remembering Hemingway's death, and treating me to what I can only call a carnivorous smirk. 'It won't finish with me sticking a gun in my mouth. This is a self-loathing I can live with.' I hope he does not forget that celebrity is, as he says of food, 'a perishable asset'.
