Customer Reviews

The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones

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`The Nasty Bits' by chef, novelist, and culinary bad boy TV and print journalist, Tony Bourdain is a collection of thirty-six (36) non-fiction pieces and one fictional fragment from various American and Australian English language culinary journals and other miscellaneous mags such as `Playboy' and `Rolling Stone'. The pieces are cleverly, if somewhat arbitrarily divided into six chapters, titled by the five flavors on the tongue, Salty, Sweet, Sour, Bitter, and Unami, plus `A Taste of Fiction'.

Many of the pieces are an update to the subjects Tony covers in his best known book, the memoir, `Kitchen Confidential', plus commentaries on his adventures while doing various TV shows and personal appearances since he hung up his toque as executive chef of Les Halles in New York City a few years ago. I am happy to say that while I was never very impressed by the few Bourdain pieces I read in `Gourmet', almost all of these pieces have something interesting to say to the lover of culinary gossip.

Bourdain is almost unique among the current crop of culinary celebrities. I have often seen it written that he is a better writer than he was a chef. In my reading, I think this is quite true, since I find his pieces as engaging as the very spicy memoir from Gael Greene and `almost' as literate as the writing of the great M. F. K. Fisher. His one cookbook of recipes from Les Halles is worth reading more for the way Bourdain writes about his very simple recipes than for the recipes themselves.

Bourdain's primary interest is as an iconoclast and as a guide to the dirty underbelly of the culinary world. It is no surprise that he quotes as one of his primary inspirations, a passage from George Orwell's `Down and Out in Paris and London' where we see the all the filth and acrimony behind the swinging doors in the kitchens of some very famous restaurants. Bourdain is famous, for example, of dissing the current icon, Emeril Lagasse. He also belittles England's golden boy, Jamie Oliver and even takes on the reputation of the American culinary godhead, James Beard.

My initial reaction to this debunking is to remember the comment that to a butler, the master of the house is always a smaller figure than he cuts in public, because he is only being seen from a butler's point of view. For example, I find Jamie Oliver's contribution to the culinary world to be far greater than the simple body of his recipes. Oliver is pushing the culinary envelope, much the same way as Bourdain, but in an entirely different direction. But then, I read Bourdain describe what he finds interesting and valuable about Oliver and fellow Brit, Nigella Lawson, and I discover that this is exactly what I respect about these and the other major Brit food writers, Nigel Slater and Tasmania Day-Lewis. They seem to capture the `joie-de-vivre' of everyday food in a more genuine way than our favorite American culinary cheerleaders such as Rachael Ray and Paula Deen.

So, while Bourdain's primary currency is strong opinions, I believe he is never so married to an opinion that he does not change his mind now and again. Bourdain is at his very best when he gives us his observations and opinions on life behind the swinging doors on the line at American restaurants and when he reveals that many modern culinary dogmas are as much a political position as they are a reflection of restaurant realities.

One of Bourdain's most interesting topics is the doctrine of cooking by `terroir' celebrated by many today, especially Alice Waters, based on the writings of Richard Olney. The antithesis of `terroir' is `fusion' cuisine where dishes are made up of ingredients from widely different locations around the world. The fact is that today's global produce distribution system is starting to make seasonal cooking from local ingredients look just a bit silly for all but the very well connected venues such as Chez Panisse and The French Laundry. Another glaring hole in the doctrine of using only the freshest ingredients is the fact that in order to survive, restaurant chefs will work with just about anything that is edible to make ends meet and fill in for depleted stores. This confirms the suspicion I had about the `local and fresh' dogma when I read in Jacques Pepin's `The Apprentice' about how his mother would buy all the market leftovers at the end of the day at reduced prices to keep her restaurant kitchen stocked.

Another of Bourdain's common topics, so appropriate to today's headlines, is the fact that so many of the line cooks in America's major restaurants are illegal immigrants from Mexico and places south. The ironies with this subject abound in that while white Anglo graduates of American culinary schools are flooding the market, they tend to be unwilling to dedicate the years as a prep chef to earn the chops to excel in a smoothly running culinary team. The Hispanics who do this work, on the other hand, could not afford to eat in the restaurants they serve and they are totally absent from galas held at the James Beard house.

So, Bourdain's writing is interesting more for his strong opinions about things commonly hidden behind the scenes, while maintaining a reasonably open mind about these opinions. He is probably not always right, since it is obvious that he indulges in exaggeration now and again (such as, I suspect, when he describes a very disheveled colleague, Michael Ruhlman in a dirty T-shirt in a Las Vegas casino). But, he is always entertaining and thought provoking.

Excellent read for culinary gossip junkies and foodies in general.

What do you get when an author who feels like a character out of Spinal Tap and makes an earnest attempt at food porn? Has to be Anthony Bourdain. This is a funny collection of both published and unpublished material Bourdain has done over the few years since the publication of his much talked about book Kitchen Confidential.It is rude, irreverent and honest and will make you wish he didn't wait so damn long to publish again. Be warned though if you take offense easily at vulgarity, don't have a sense of humor or adventure this is not a good book to start with or maybe read at all. Those who are familiar with Chef Bourdain's style of writing and have seen his show No Reservations on the Travel Channel will no doubt enjoy this collection.

Art-cuisine one-upsmanship is incresingly out of hand. Showcase restaurants are more and more divorced from the roots of good eating: the economical, parsimonious, and HUNGRY tradition of farm, field, and woods. When Anthony Bourdain writes, whether it be about commercial kitchens, or Bistro food, or artsy platings, or variety meats, or his adventures to the culinary hinterlands, he is always criticizing one thing: the sissifying of food [and chefs] in the art-cuisine market. He disdains the fussy, the hyper-refined, and the decorative. His criticisms in Nasty Bits are just as spot-on damning and funny as we've come to expect after reading Kitchen Confidential and The Les Halles Cookbook. He enthusiastically celebrates the simple pleasures of skillfully-prepared simple dishes, returning time and again to our hunger and our need for sustenance and flavor.

In Nasty Bits he travels the world in search of intense and intimate food adventures. He eats seal with an Inuit family, and his description is alive to the newness and immediacy of the experience. But these world travels do not, by any means, lead to an embrace of 'fusion' cuisine with all of its forced assimilations and jarring collisions. He is a food realist: he operates within the larger economy, as nearly all of us do, but with a real regard for the basic dishes that evolved out of specific places before refrigeration and multinationals. Without indulging in specious pseudo-intellectual arguments, pro or con, as so many food writers-cum-cultural critics do, he references appetite and taste. These are certainly the first and second reasons we eat.

What he disparages so eloquently are all the OTHER reasons we eat: to impress, to be seen, to scratch the itch of dilettantism, to celebrate our wealth, etc. He practices a robust, forthright, honest culinary craft in which ingredients are embraced for their sensual properties, their ability to satisfy, and even their ability to restore an effete appetite to its rightful place at the groaning board. This practice in no way rejects subtlety. In fact, his pleasure in seasonings and perfect doneness is a constant theme in his cookbook and in his accounts of adventure-eating. But he practices a CRAFT, which is not the same as ART. This approach recalls Jacques Pepin's humble and beautiful assertion that he is a technician, not an artist. The distinction is, I think, crucial: art-cooking comes out of the culinary schools and the old French hotel-kitchen traditions, while the craft Bourdain admires comes out of the tradition of farming, hunting, and foraging. His tastes run to the honest and robust. That said, he's also captivated by the chemical-whimsical innovations of Ferran Adria.

We have the luxury of choosing, of course. But it would be disingenuous to state that our choices are independent of our cultural values. Where art-cuisine celebrates the convenience and mobility of the modern world, the farmhouse tradition celebrates the settled, local traditions that often achieved a narrow perfection. As Wendell Berry pointed out, it is the settled, local traditions that have become the radical choice. They criticize and subvert the global markets, just as Bourdain criticizes and subverts our culture of fussiness and trepidation.

This is a great read.

As a huge fan of Bourdain's writing and his television shows, I was looking forward to this collection of magazine pieces from an incredibly diverse range (Financial Times, Gourmet, Town & Country, and more) published together for the first time. When Bourdain is at the top of his form, which is most of the time, his writing is crisp, entertaining, and makes you feel like he is in the room narrating the story to you. Alas, the down side of such compilations is that some of the pieces were written to earn a quick buck and would have better been left out. Although he does have commentary in the back reflecting on the pieces, alas, there is no indication of the date and magazine for each one, which would have given some more context to the audience and time. For any fans of "No Reservations" Travel Channel show, there are some very interesting behind the scenes stories. The reader is even rewarded with a short story of Bourdain fiction at the end. For someone whose life stories seem almost unbelievable, you could almost imagine his fiction to be true.

This book is a collection of essays and previously published articles. It's great to have them all in one place. If you're a true fan of Bourdain you don't have to read any further, you'll like this too-Buy it. If you're new to Bourdain, come on in the Tequila's fine!
I have always been interested in food, cooking and especially restaurants. My mom worked in, and owned a few, as I grew up. All of the jobs of my youth were in them. Her strongest desire was for me not to make a career in one. I followed her wishes and have had a successful non-restaurant career, but a part of me will always dream of what could have been. As clichéd as it sounds, the happiest and most exciting times of my life were spent in restaurants. Anthony Bourdain's books really heighten the nostalgia for my crazy, wild restaurant youth. You can't go home again, but you can reminisce about the bad old days, and smile.
I read a lot of the "chef type" books, and as the respectable 40 something lady that I am, I can put on the James Taylor, pour a great glass of Cab and thoroughly enjoy them. With Mr. Bourdain I can get out the Patron and crank up the NY Dolls. He steps to the end of the cliff, thinks better of it, and then jumps anyways. I like jumping with him.

This book doesn't have the punch of "Kitchen Confidential" or "A Cook's Tour." Part of this is that the pieces, written for different magazines at different times, just don't flow together all that well; the other part is that Tony seems to be mellowing out in his old age, and his vitriol isn't as entertainingly bitter as in previous books. The book jacket alleges that there are critiques of Rocco DiSpirito and Mario Batali, but in truth they're more of an apologium for DiSpirito and some vaguely interesting personal information on Batali. Not the best introduction to Bourdain; of some interest to the diehard fan.

If you find yourself (like me) craving a healthy serving of Tony's "No Reservations" show but the dog hid the remote, this is the next best thing. Most of it seems like ruminations about many of the episodes he filmed in the first two seasons. Like other reviewers, I didn't enjoy this as much as Kitchen Confidential... but I think I would have liked it WAY more if I had been aware of the commentary in the back. I would advise reading each section there as you finish the chapter that relates to it (hope that makes sense). It adds a nice dimension to the book and to Tony himself. Can I say that he's lovably raunchy? There. I just did. ;]

Lately, my Monday nights have been pretty well booked what with Tony Bourdain's irreverent, wild look at the world in his new series, No Reservations. I also respect him as a writer and traveler, what with his view that is no-nonsense, honest, and downright brutal at times.

This time, instead of covering a world tour, or dishing up dirt about the food industry, Bourdain assembles a collection of columns that has written throughout his career, and that were published in a series of magazines and newspapers. But if the reader is expecting a rant along the lines of what he wrote about in Kitchen Confidential, it's not quite what they are going to find. The collection opens with an introduction with Bourdain enjoying a freshly caught seal among an Inuit family in the Arctic -- it's a bit gory, but everyone's enjoyment and bonding over a shared meal is refreshingly human to see in a world where most meals are hasty affairs, with little communication.

Bourdain's columns range from life on the road, in airports, his anger at the general public, reflections on celebrity chefs -- the article about Rocco DiSpirito is one that everyone should read about the fleeting nature of fame, and the perils thereof -- from discovering that Singapore is not the hellhole that he thought it was on his first visit, a happy return to Vietnam, and of course, commentary on the state of cuisine in America. Each article is only a few pages long, and fits into a section that Bourdain has named after the five tastes - salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami -- and each reader will find something to fit their own tastes in these pages. Finally, there is a great little fiction story about a restaurant on Christmas Eve, and those savvy about New York City will recognize the characters therein.

As with nearly all of Bourdain's writing, it's not for the sensitive. He makes no apologies for his attitudes, and doesn't pander to anyone's sensibilities. His anger at political correctness in food -- especially for those who think that fois gras is wrong -- can get palpable, and at the treatment of kitchen labour, the 'raw' food movement, and the general attitude of food fads is certainly in your face. If you can handle that, and don't mind the use of Anglo-Saxon vernacular -- Bourdain is one of the few writers that I've read who can curse well and not make it sound stupid -- then this book is a feast for the senses.

But when he can talk about food that he enjoys, it's a delight. No one can write what I think of as 'food porn' as well as Bourdain. The words flow seductively, making the reader's mouth water, and start wondering about new and exotic tastes. The article on a sushi bar in New York City damn near made me blush, and heartily wish I had the megabucks to lay down for such a delightful meal. So too is the article about Ferran Adria's revolutionary work in Spain that is transforming the food world.

But his articles also inform, and for those who want to know if a restaurant is worth it at glance, I urge reading of the chapters called "Warning Signs," "A View From the Fridge," and "A Cook's Companions" to know what cooking is really like.

Think of this book as a tasting menu prepared by a chef that you know and trust, each having a special flavor of its very own. Some of them will be strange at first, a few will transform you, others educate and few will repell. But don't let Bourdain's own style scare you off. He may be rude and profane, but he's certainly your best guide to a world of new things out there.

Joyously recommended.

If you like Mr. Bourdain's show "No Reservations", you'll most likely enjoy this book. One of Tony's best attributes is his story telling ability and reading this book is just like listening to his narratives on the show. Once or twice it was a little too much like the show. The Vegas article repeated some things he said on that episode of the show a bit too much. But most of the book seemed very fresh. His honesty and sense of humor shine through constantly. He's not afraid to admit he used to like heroin while noting that no one is less sympathetic towards other people's habit struggles than an ex-addict. His point of view is cynical yet refreshing. I especially enjoyed his articles about Mexican kitchen workers. I am a white guy in an area where whites are a very small minority and it is easy to get into the "damn Mexicans" mindset. Tony reminds me I don't really want to be like that and he's right. Each of the articles in this book stand alone so you can read them in any order. They're divided into sections so you can read what you are in the mood for - light, heavy, synical, silly. It's all there. And thanks, Tony, for the Namibia episode of N.R.. I laughed so hard it hurt. As for the people who say Tony should be smarter than to eat the stuff he does in faraway lands, boy do they miss the point.

This is not the earth shaking Kitchen Confidential or A Cook's Tour or even as helpful/insightful as the Les Halles Cookbook. The three books I just mentioned are each unique, inspiring, and vitally necessary, to enthusiasts of cuisine/chow and of Tony. The latest offering is a worthy purchase only if you are a hopeless idol worshipper and can't get enough of him. If you are such an idol worshipper, then you won't be disappointed; this book is filled with Tony-isms and with Tony doing Tony. The greatest value to me came from the last section, where he reflects on his past writing. Another side of the man is shown when he questions his bravura and withering pessimism, like when he recants on Rocco.