Dinner With Anthony

I had dinner with Mr.Bourdain once.  Even had the chance to ask him a question.  At the time I was seeing a woman who was very much into food and cooking and a large part of our relationship was, thankfully, built around that.  She’d pushed for us to go to a “celebrity event” dinner held in SF.

I say it like that as SF was a very actionable city back then; to meet someone was to experience someone so if you met Willy Brown it would be followed with him handing you his towel at the Power Exchange (ask your parents, kids), or if you met Chris Cosentino it would be followed with being handed a fish-ice-cream-cone.   That night leaned more on the Chris Cosentino and having our fair share of urchin frosting.

The thing I should mention is that I had known about Mr.Bourdain for a while before this; I remember reading the first review of Kitchen Confidential, as it was touted as “the anti-food channel”, which was at the time that the Food Channel was soft focused on lemonade and screaming Japanese foodlords.  I remember following his first show as he would choke on iguana tamales and absolutely hate the tourist, but keep digging into the piles upon piles of cultural stew, looking for the root of a place in the blind hope of reaching that absolute point of crow-whiskey in a dixie cup and a cut of meat from a “squeezle” while everyone sat around a folding table laughing and sweating through the night.

He would treat the people themselves as if they were the ingredients, and that’s when the food would shine.  He had killed his elite darlings and troupes of privilege in the hopes of discovering the nature of the meal.  And every time, in every town, it worked. He would find what was so special by very often playing in the dirt.  This, in a way to me, was him trying to remind himself of what was meaningful. That food and the meal are the real human experience that make us predators with a soul.  

But that meaning was his fix.  The thing about Mr.Bourdain is he is an inspiration more so for what he was; an addict and a loser with no other options.  If you ever walk into the back of a kitchen and stripped the cook staff you’ll see the prison tattoos, the former hate group markings, the scars from dogs or knives or fences, the blown out septums from coke or crack.  You’ll see that a kitchen full of knives and fire is a far less dangerous place then where most of the cooks had to come from. It is an opportunity to be something, to express and be respected as the human you had been treated less then, even by yourself, for most of your life.  

In that It is easy to see why SF had such a love for Mr.Bourdain:  SF had such a pervasive vibe of when you built something, it in a way built you.  Which is one of the reasons food culture came to rule the city, came from the punk culture Anthony cherished, and came with the new beat of some very young hearts.  It was a dreamer’s math that added up all the pain of a stunted existence and made art that touched all five senses, signed by you. No wonder the paradigm of food shifted to farm to table, because, again, as Anthony had shown us, the essence of the meal grew when you played in the dirt.

And here, now, then, in SF, he was having a book release event for “No Reservations”.  We were killing time during the meet and greet with another couple that we happened upon there.  Mr.Bourdain was very uncomfortably making his way around the floor, completely out of his element and scowling at everyone everytime he had to sign something.  He towered over audience and had this look like the sober driver who was 2 hours past when his friends promised him they would leave. I do not blame him, for this was practically the scene he rejected in order to define his career/life.  He is not a celebrity, he is a chef with a wonderfully big mouth.

To our dumb luck it turned out the couple we had been getting to know were also the book reviewers of the San Francisco Chronicle…and also a good friend of Mr.Bourdain’s.  We sat with them at their table and to my right, across from me, Anthony sat with us. To my complete shock.

He spoke about everything, finally having a drink in his hand and not being stared at by the entire room.  It was a wild time in his life as he had both recently been married, was about to have a daughter and had returned from being rescued from Beirut months earlier.  Most people would want to know from him what was his best or worst meals, but he never let the night go that way as he would trail off into 20 minutes of what walking down the streets of Istanbul could mean on any given night or why pigs were so important in Vietnam.  It was heart lifting to watch a great person refuse the call to sell themselves.

And I did get to ask him a question.  When he was done going into the horrors of how fast he had first handedly watching Beirut collapse and the failures of humanity to be humane, and the table was completely silent from it, I asked him:

“Then why do you want to bring a child into this world?”

Which now, with him having taken himself out of this world, seems so damn bleak.

However, I do not want to end this there, I want to end this here:  In all of my travels I have always made an effort to find the food that makes the town.  To find the bars that get the people. Everywhere I have gone I have made a determination to seek out and have a drink with someone where-ever I may be, regardless of who we may be.  To meet someone new in every occurrence. And the one thing that has always shocked me in this pursuit is how easy it always was to start the night alone, and end it not.