Anthony Bourdain
You may have recognised the look on Sydney’s food lovers this past week. People were buzzing, eyes bright with excitement and there was much whispering of sweetly excited murmurs. The reason? Anthony Bourdain and A.A. Gill were in Sydney for the Sydney Writer’s Festival and Marco Pierre White was in Sydney too just for good measure. Between the three of them they had the food lovers of Sydney all a quiver.
During the Sydney Writer’s Festival there were three talks scheduled with Anthony or “Tony” as people call him. The first at Sydney Town Hall, called “Food Fighters” was held last Thursday night, the 19th of May and had Tony pitched against renowned food critic A.A. Gill with chef Tony Bilson as the moderator. Unfortunately, the love match wasn’t quite right and it ended up not fulfilling the promise, flitting from subject to subject without delving into anything particularly deeply. There was so much promise and potential there and at the end there were many who had the sense of a missed opportunity.
The aftermath wasn’t pretty with Bourdain calling it a “goat rodeo” and tweeting “it was like a slow motion colonoscopy” and chastising his good friend Matt Preston for not being there to moderate by saying “Where WERE you, f**k-nuts!? Left me to the tender mercies of Benny Hill!”. Bourdain went on to a Chaser event which he considered an antidote to the previous talk.
The second talk on Saturday the 21st of January, “9/11 I was there” was an obviously much more sobering discussion given the subject matter and featured Tony along with other International writers including James Gleick, Michael Cunningham, Emma Forrest and was chaired by Australian Lee Tulloch who was living in New York at the time but came home to live after the 2001 attacks.
Each writer had something interesting to say about how it affected them and Bourdain mentions that the first thing that he thought about when he heard about it (it was a lazy morning for him at home) was the chefs at the ‘Windows of the World’ restaurant that he knew. He also said that he has never written about 9/11 and never will as he doesn’t feel that he has the gravitas to do so. Given the subject matter, it was a vastly different mood, less rowdy certainly but not without controversy. When it came to the audience question time one audience member claimed that the U.S. deserved the attacks. This drew a horrified gasp and chiding from the rest of the audience.
The third talk that same afternoon was filled to capacity and had an atmosphere of excitement to it. For starters it was packed full and many were clutching their copies of Medium Raw or Kitchen Confidential. There were catcalls and whoops from the audience and random calling out of “Tony!” to get his attention. Facilitating was Jill Dupleix and she introduced him by quoting Urban Dictionary’s definition of Anthony Bourdain:
“Anthony Bourdain is an author, chef, and television host. This is ironic because he is also Satan. He is one of the baddest motherf**kers to grace television. His books are well written, conscious, and can be quite humorous. His restraunt (sic), Les Halles, serves amazing French cuisine and is located in New York. He has/had two television shows. The first being “A Cook’s Tour” on the Food Network. The second show, “No Reservations”, being an almost exact copy, but far better and is still being aired with new seasons being filmed.
On his shows he is known for eating way to much (yet being tall and skinny), smoking excessively, and getting drunk most everywhere he goes. He can also be extremely obnoxious and arrogant when doing any of these three things.”
The Satan quote brings a laugh from him and the audience. Jill then discussed with him the idea that food critics are corrupt, a quote he had given when he first arrived in Australia (her husband is SMH food critic Terry Durack) and he explained his quote saying that there are some food critics in the U.S. that demand free vacations and money in exchange for writing reviews. He cites a popular restaurant guide as an example of the corruptness. A restaurant may buy 6,000-7,000 copies of this guide depending on the review. And if a restaurant should lower their order of this book due to a bad review, the guide simply rectifies it by ensuring that they give the restaurant a better review so they will order more.
However he also calls himself corrupted in that he is friends with so many chefs in New York that it would make it impossible for him to be a food critic. He tells us that his palate is corrupted and that he himself is sick of truffles. On another subject he says that the fear of the Chinese owning a lot of real estate and the debt of the United States is not something that concerns him and the result is that in terms of food, the food on offer will be better. When Jill mentions his friend Marco Pierre White being in Australia to promote Continental stock pot and how it “broke her heart” seeing him do that, he quickly switches to his defence saying that the public seem to expect chefs to die broken down and flat footed in front of their stoves and why shouldn’t he make money if he can.
There are the obligatory questions about the most awful things he has eaten like the warthog anus in Namibia and the fermented shark in Iceland and when quizzed about what warthog anus tastes like apparently it tastes just as what you’d expect a warthog anus to taste like. It’s an interesting 45 minutes and he charms the albeit already charmed audience and before we know it, the time is up and it is audience question time (always my favourite part).
The audience questions come thick and fast and unlike the other two talks, there are lines of people eager to question him. There is an offer to “recalibrate his palate” by inviting him to a barbecue that evening, advice sought for a last meal given the end of the world is said to be nigh. One audience member asks him an interesting question which was whether he thought that visiting and filming some of the small places changes the place for the better or often worse and that they may lose some of the charm that initially took him there. He admits that he is aware of that and that filming anything changes it. But if you talk to some of these small business owners like the Bali Suckling Pig restaurant which is now a chain of six, they may not mind it very much at all.
After each talk there was a book signing and out of the three talks the longest line was definitely reserved for this one. Eager fans rushed to get a front spot in the line and Mr NQN and I slipped out and made out way to the room where I would be lucky enough to interview him. Unfortunately I had a sudden case of food poisoning from lunch and stabbing pains in my stomach the whole afternoon but you can believe that there was nothing short of the end of the world that was going to stand in my way!
As I had already interviewed him I wanted the questions to be different but finding a question that he hasn’t been asked before was difficult. He has been interviewed so many times and pretty much everything that you would want to ask him has already been asked or was just asked on the stage by Jill. So I took the cue from the Medium Raw talk where he mentioned that he enjoyed Quick Fires (and I thought that it would be more suited given that I knew that he was probably still jet-lagged and tired from the festival). There is video footage and that is hopefully to come (once I figure out how to edit it!) but for the interests of the many Anthony Bourdain fans out there, here is a quick fire session with the man himself where I reel off a list of words and ask for a simple word or a sentence from him on each!
Quick Fire Session With Anthony Bourdain
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