Sympathy for an Asshole
By Amanda Hesser
Posted Friday, July 28, 2000, at 11:08 AM ETJeffrey, hello!
All is peachy here. And it's as sunny as can be. I hear it's rainy and grim in New York.
Visiting the farm with me today were four Ritz-Carlton chefs (Andrew Carmellini from Café Boulud is arriving tomorrow). None of them had heard of Mr. Bourdain's book.
Do you know what they learn at the Ritz-Carlton? If a customer is unhappy with a dish or the service or the polish of a salad fork, they are told to ask the customer what they can do to make things better, whatever that may be (well, at least, apparently up to $2,000). I wonder what Mr. Bourdain's policy is?
Who is Hunter S. Thompson, anyway? (Just kidding.) I will have you know I was eating well when I was 7, blissfully unaware of the slop shops in Manhattan.
I never saw the Food Arts article. I was surprised to read that he had described the food at Les Halles to be "relaxed, funky, sensual, and occasionally, whimsical." In the beginning of his book, he writes that he sees cooking as an opportunity to satisfy his desire to "shock, amuse, terrify and manipulate." Maybe he should have tried working in the fashion industry.
My favorite paragraph (and yes, Jeffrey, one that made me laugh aloud) was in the section offering a list of pointers for newcomers in the business. Under "Assume the worst," he writes,
Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn't prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining. This business grows assholes: it's our principle export. I'm an asshole. You should probably be an asshole too.
So maybe he is, but there is a part of me that was starting to like him. He is a lively writer (though I would like to know what time of day he wrote: five minutes before 6 when he woke up or after a long night of cooking and boozing?), with the dumb but thrilling luck of falling again and again into the kind of scene most people would run from. It has provided him with great material.
I was beginning to pity him, too. All those years of hard labor and so very few good meals. (Day to day, it's true, cooks generally do not eat well.)
It looks like Mr. Bourdain has started a trend. Leslie Brenner is writing a book about a year in Daniel Boulud's kitchen. And just before I left, I received a new book, a tell-all about the life of a waitress. Can't wait.
Jeffrey, it's been great chatting with you this week. We should have dinner sometime soon. I'll let you choose the place. Please no rubber apples or road-kill bread.
Talk soon,
amanda
Sympathy for an Asshole
By Amanda Hesser
Posted Friday, July 28, 2000, at 11:08 AM ET
This week, a discussion of Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain (click here to buy it). Amanda Hesser is the dining reporter for the New York Times and author of The Cook and the Gardner (click here to buy it). Jeffrey Steingarten is Vogue magazine's food critic and the author of The Man Who Ate Everything (click here to buy it). Reader Response from The Fray (to be read after the final entry):
No matter how far you are from Paris, in French you have your liaison between your final consonant and your opening vowel (or silent h), so Les Halles is Lay Zahl. Does Jeffrey like his meat au juice too?
--Richard Riley
(To reply, click
here.)
I've had a theory for years (20 years in the business and culinary school) that most restaurant people end up in the business by accident. They had no idea what they really wanted to do with their life, they get jobs out of highschool as bussers, waitstaff, dishwashers and prep-cooks and just end up staying year after year wondering what they are really going to do with their lives. Some get interested enough in the creative or business end of it and focus their energies into becoming managers and chefs or even owners, but a lot of help in restaurants are frustrated, depressed, and angry people who stay for an income gained by the only work experience they've managed to acquire in life, or for the "tips" if they're waitstaff in a happening place. The long and often thankless hours of underpaid, underappreciated hot and frustrating work takes its toll. The business breeds alcoholism and drug abuse and therefore doesn't judge (right or wrong) its existence in the kitchen and dining room for the most part. If someone comes in on time, isn't obviously wasted and does a good job, he's accepted and kept as good help, because those qualities are hard to find and hard to hold on to.
I worked in an exclusive country club where the general manager got a club member who had connections with the DA to get a jailed breakfast cook on work release fast because it was a big tournament weekend and the cook was indispensable to the smooth running of it. We all got a good laugh about it. He came to work joking about the bad food in jail, ate good while he was at work, and right before he had to go back to jail for the night went out and got stoned with the dishwashers.
--Barbara
(To reply, click
here.)
What's the problem with weekend diners? As a Manhattan resident, am I not supposed to eat out on weekends? Maybe in the winter it's OK, because then I have an excuse for not being in the Hamptons?
--Confused in Manhattan
(To reply, click
here.)
[Note from the Fray Editor: Barbara--see above--came and explained the realities of weekend dining out in such a way as to persuade Confused, or in fact anybody, to eat at home those days.
And about those bathrooms at Les Halles--here's the review.]
(7/28)
Lighten up. There has been so much horror about this book--the rough and tumble lifestyle Mr Bourdain describes seems to shock certain sensibilities. Sure a kitchen, a locker room or a boardroom can be calm, courteous, sex- and drug- and punk rock-free, but, then again, folks who know nothing about the subject matter wouldn't even consider buying a book about them. This book was a lark akin to Bill Buckley's sailing adventures--I know nothing about either, but we all wish we could have been there to see for ourselves.
--Dave Quast
(To reply, click
here.)
Bourdain is typical of about 80% of chefs that I have worked for: the drugs, the chicken-orderers, the waiter-loathing. All of the above keep them in the business.
--Tamara Key
(Former waiter)
(To reply, click
here.)
The realities of being a chef are funky, down-to-earth stuff like food costs and making good food for your customers no matter how many or when. Finding a way to do whatever you can, do it well, and not put your owner out of business. I don't suppose sojourns in cooking school or that haute-cuisine French place required you to deal with a case of black chanterelles that will last just one more day unless they are "specialed" in an en croute preparation that will recoup their outrageous cost. Or that you ever had to work so hard and so fast that you cut yourself. This book is full of useful information for the diner and exuberant descriptions of the men and women who thrive in the working-class reality of restaurants.
--The Optimistic Curmudgeon
(To reply, click
here.)
I do think twice about "dropping $50 for a weeknight diner" or for a weekend dinner, or anything but maybe a really significant anniversary diner, when all the planets are in alignment, the horses all came in, and my number came up. In that kind of giddy excitement, I too might mistake the kind of art that I would drop $50 for at a restaurant for the kind of art that I expect when I pick up a book. Insulting your taste in food is not the same as writing poorly, even if you live in the rarefied air of New York.
Those people in New York who think nothing of dropping $50 for a weeknight dinner: for that, they do not expect art. They expect craft.
--Aaron Crim
(To reply, click
here.)
(7/25)
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Reader Response from The Fray (to be read after the final entry):
No matter how far you are from Paris, in French you have your liaison between your final consonant and your opening vowel (or silent h), so Les Halles is Lay Zahl. Does Jeffrey like his meat au juice too?
--Richard Riley
(To reply, click here.)
I've had a theory for years (20 years in the business and culinary school) that most restaurant people end up in the business by accident. They had no idea what they really wanted to do with their life, they get jobs out of highschool as bussers, waitstaff, dishwashers and prep-cooks and just end up staying year after year wondering what they are really going to do with their lives. Some get interested enough in the creative or business end of it and focus their energies into becoming managers and chefs or even owners, but a lot of help in restaurants are frustrated, depressed, and angry people who stay for an income gained by the only work experience they've managed to acquire in life, or for the "tips" if they're waitstaff in a happening place. The long and often thankless hours of underpaid, underappreciated hot and frustrating work takes its toll. The business breeds alcoholism and drug abuse and therefore doesn't judge (right or wrong) its existence in the kitchen and dining room for the most part. If someone comes in on time, isn't obviously wasted and does a good job, he's accepted and kept as good help, because those qualities are hard to find and hard to hold on to.
I worked in an exclusive country club where the general manager got a club member who had connections with the DA to get a jailed breakfast cook on work release fast because it was a big tournament weekend and the cook was indispensable to the smooth running of it. We all got a good laugh about it. He came to work joking about the bad food in jail, ate good while he was at work, and right before he had to go back to jail for the night went out and got stoned with the dishwashers.
--Barbara
(To reply, click here.)
What's the problem with weekend diners? As a Manhattan resident, am I not supposed to eat out on weekends? Maybe in the winter it's OK, because then I have an excuse for not being in the Hamptons?
--Confused in Manhattan
(To reply, click here.)
[Note from the Fray Editor: Barbara--see above--came and explained the realities of weekend dining out in such a way as to persuade Confused, or in fact anybody, to eat at home those days.
And about those bathrooms at Les Halles--here's the review.]
(7/28)
Lighten up. There has been so much horror about this book--the rough and tumble lifestyle Mr Bourdain describes seems to shock certain sensibilities. Sure a kitchen, a locker room or a boardroom can be calm, courteous, sex- and drug- and punk rock-free, but, then again, folks who know nothing about the subject matter wouldn't even consider buying a book about them. This book was a lark akin to Bill Buckley's sailing adventures--I know nothing about either, but we all wish we could have been there to see for ourselves.
--Dave Quast
(To reply, click here.)
Bourdain is typical of about 80% of chefs that I have worked for: the drugs, the chicken-orderers, the waiter-loathing. All of the above keep them in the business.
--Tamara Key
(Former waiter)
(To reply, click here.)
The realities of being a chef are funky, down-to-earth stuff like food costs and making good food for your customers no matter how many or when. Finding a way to do whatever you can, do it well, and not put your owner out of business. I don't suppose sojourns in cooking school or that haute-cuisine French place required you to deal with a case of black chanterelles that will last just one more day unless they are "specialed" in an en croute preparation that will recoup their outrageous cost. Or that you ever had to work so hard and so fast that you cut yourself. This book is full of useful information for the diner and exuberant descriptions of the men and women who thrive in the working-class reality of restaurants.
--The Optimistic Curmudgeon
(To reply, click here.)
I do think twice about "dropping $50 for a weeknight diner" or for a weekend dinner, or anything but maybe a really significant anniversary diner, when all the planets are in alignment, the horses all came in, and my number came up. In that kind of giddy excitement, I too might mistake the kind of art that I would drop $50 for at a restaurant for the kind of art that I expect when I pick up a book. Insulting your taste in food is not the same as writing poorly, even if you live in the rarefied air of New York.
Those people in New York who think nothing of dropping $50 for a weeknight dinner: for that, they do not expect art. They expect craft.
--Aaron Crim
(To reply, click here.)
(7/25)