Reading Bourdain

I'm reading Anthony Bourdain as suggested in this post by Steve. Herein Bourdain, a classically trained chef with an eclectic, hair-raising resume, recounts an insider's life in his trade. In this sense, Kitchen Confidential is like The Hungry Ocean by swordboat captain Linda Greenlaw. Or The Undertaking by---yes, undertaker---Thomas Lynch. Like Lynch and Greenlaw both, Bourdain is a trade professional who can really write... This book is better than well done.

Another thing joins these three authors, and that's having learned and lived their crafts long before writing about them. The writing is necessary, probably, for all of them. Writers are funny like that. But these writers have the distinction of full careers separate from their books and bigger than mere day jobs.

Bourdain, from his Preface: "I'm asked a lot what the best thing about cooking for a living is. And it's this: to be part of a subculture. To be part of a historical continuum, a secret society with its own language and customs. To enjoy the instant gratification of making something good with one's hands---using all one's senses. It can be, at times, the purest and most unselfish way of giving pleasure (though oral sex has to be a close second)."

You get a sense here of the holistic nature of Bourdain's book. It's about a life, every facet of it, as experienced through the form of one's trade.

Understandably, Bourdain credits this life with teaching all the important lessons. Here's one that caught my eye this morning. He describes in several places and with much personal experience the process of a restaurant's failure: all the red flags, the sense of doom and contagion, and the jumping ship of the rats:

"What I learned at Tom's was a sad lesson that has served me well in decades since: I learned to recognize failure. I saw, for the first time, how two beloved, funny and popular guys can end up less beloved, not so funny and much less popular after trying to do nothing more than what their friends told them they were good at. Friendships, I'm sure, were destroyed. Loyal pals stopped coming, causing real hard feelings of betrayal and embitterment. In the end, I guess, we all let them down. I found a job in the Post and jumped ship at the first opportunity."