Traveling man

To anchor our annual Eat Out Awards Issue, we spoke with one of the most prominent chroniclers of food culture. Anthony Bourdain is such a staple of travel TV that some fans may not realize he’s had two other successful careers—first as a chef, then as a writer. The No Reservations host doesn’t see the inside of a professional kitchen very much anymore, but he’s still writing; his new book of essays, Medium Raw, which is rumored to contain a loving chapter on David Chang and a critical one on Alice Waters, comes out in June. Bourdain, 53, will offer a preview of the book when he tells stories at the Chicago Theatre on April 24.

You’ve got a new book, the Food Network has a new channel, and a new food website seems to launch every week. How much food media can this country handle?
If there’s an end to this, we don’t seem to have touched it yet.

You’ve been critical of some food media. Do you think the more we get, the more quality we get?
I think the more the better, honestly. I totally disagree with those who are still crying about the Internet: “They’re not experts.” When you’re talking about “is a restaurant good or not ?” or “where should I eat in Saigon?”—you read enough bloggers, you will arrive at a reasonable consensus. The old system, where you had lions of food criticism—that was a totally corrupt and moribund system. It was just one big clusterfuck of the same people at the same restaurants, using the same adjectives.

Maybe there’s a democracy of food writers emerging, but among chefs, aren’t we going the other way? There are the chefs we worship, and then there are the rest. Was it that way 30 years ago when you graduated from the Culinary Institute of America?
Society’s evaluation of a chef has completely changed. It used to be the name of the maître d’ you knew. Now everybody’s interested in the back. The balance of power has changed from the customer always being right to: What is the chef good at, and what does the chef want us to eat? Those are good things! The celebrity-chef thing, even at its worst, its most annoying, its silliest, its goofiest, its most egregious and cynical, has been a good thing.

When you talk about celebrity chefs, you mean people on TV?
Bobby Flay is both a celebrity and a working chef, so he would certainly fit that description. But David Chang is a celebrity chef, too, and he doesn’t even have a TV show. In the old days, all you had to do was co-opt, coerce, bribe, blow or otherwise flatter a small group of powerful food writers. Now it’s a different game. You have to be pretty smart about your image.

For No Reservations, you travel all over the world. With all due respect, how do you go home to New York after visiting these beautiful places?
I love New York. I’m a guy for whom a New York accent is a comforting thing.

Haven’t you been anywhere that’s made you say, “I want to move my family out here and stay forever”?
I’m definitely looking forward to the day when I stop working—if I ever stop working. I like the idea of keeling over in my tomato vines in Sardinia or northern Italy. It won’t be on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Are there any drinking customs you’ve experienced abroad that you wish we had here?
Ummm, no. To be an honored guest in China is tough. You have to do toasts individually with everybody, so you’re drinking, like, 12 times as much as everybody else. Russia, that is no kind of drinking culture. I dreaded it. It will kill ya. We’re pretty good drinkers in this country. The Brits are just reprehensibly disgusting drinkers. The Japanese are not so good at drinking, for sure.

What about the Middle East?
Well, it’s tough. You can get a drink in Saudi Arabia. I did not. And I would not have, out of respect for my host. But they do drink in Beirut, Egypt, certainly Turkey…. I find drinking the way Italians drink fascinating. They grow up drinking wine. They drink wine with almost every meal. And you almost never see anybody embarrassingly drunk…. I like classic cocktails. Lately, I’m into the Negroni in a big way. If I’m feeling sorry for myself, something with whiskey, Scotch.

How often is that?
I don’t know…every few months. If you’re listening to Tom Waits at a bar, you want to be drinking whiskey.

You must want to feel sorry for yourself if you’re listening to Waits.
Well, if you didn’t before, you will after.

Bourdain appears at the Chicago Theatre April 24 at 8pm.

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