A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain
Review & Rating: Fun/10
A Cook’s Tour was a book of tales and reflections that gave me food for thought on the general topic of life and living. It was a fast and easy read. It felt like Bourdain was sitting beside me, narrating his escapades in the same sarcastic and astounded tone I saw in his shows.
The aggression and speed in his writing was similar to his first book, Kitchen Confidential. However, this was a story about a series of places I visited after experiencing commercial success. It was about his experience being the subject of a show whilst writing a book as a foreigner and explorer.
Does that make this a travel book? Maybe. I think the root of most good books is the story of people. It’s how we, as readers, hope to glean a perspective from someone else.
I think a good travel book doesn’t make the reader want to jump out and buy a plane ticket. I think a good travel book makes the reader reflect on how arrogant and ignorant he is, not just about the complex thing we call the world, but also our fellow humans we bump shoulders with daily.
The book gives insights into Bourdain’s travels to live through Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in remote regions of Cambodia and Saigon, Vietnam. It touches down in cities in Spain, Russia, France, Japan, and Portugal with adventures that won’t be shown by most travel bloggers nor written about in the censored world of Western media where opinions are accepted if it offends no one—a childish notion.
This book could very well be interpreted as the angry rants of a man whose opinions and values I find entertaining, insightful, and understandable. But I think the value is in seeing what Bourdain sees through his adventures and the stories he is able to capture of people who will not get voices in today’s media.
To put it bluntly, these kinds of books help the reader get his head out of his ass and learn to think about life as not just a fascinating miracle but also one to be approached with some damn empathy for others.
I didn’t have many notes for this book. That’s not to say it wasn’t interesting or lacking in takeaways. Rather, the messages and stories were something that was meant for the soul to absorb, more than the brain. Like a good novel, it was something to be taken in and thought through while staring out a rain-splattered window.
Book Notes:
Great meals are subjective:
“Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.”
When you sign on the dotted line. It’s done. You’ve sold out. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just accepting that there are no degrees to it. You’ve signed and you’ve sold out completely. The faster you accept that the kinder you will be to yourself.
Did you know Ho Chi Minh was a classically trained culinarian who worked at the Carlton Hotel in Paris? I didn’t. He worked for Auguste Escoffier, the man called the king of chefs and chef of kings by the French.
In Islam, you eat with your right hand, always. The right hand is used for handshakes, reaching for things, and eating. The left hand is a no-no. Fascinating.
His trip into Cambodia and learning about the remnants of the Khmer Rouge’s campaign that killed 2m+ people and left one in every 250 Cambodians with a missing limb from the landmines still spread throughout the country. Phnom Penh’s population after the Khmer Rouge death march went from 850k to 12. What a chapter worth revisiting.
Some lines I liked:
"There are no vegetarians in Portugal."
“If there’s anyone the Vietnamese hate, it’s the Russians. Apparently, after the war, a lot of their ‘advisers’ and technicians walked around the country like conquering heroes, pretending they’d won the war for the Vietnamese. They were rude.”
”I’d come to find my father. And he wasn’t there.”
About food:
“…buffets are like free money for cost-conscious chefs.”
“Those New York delis with the giant salad bars where all the health-conscious office workers go for their light sensible lunches? You’re eating more bacteria than the guy standing outside eating mystery meat on a stick.”
“Go to Wisconsin. Spend an hour in an airport or a food court in the Midwest; watch the pale, doughy masses of pasty-faced Pringle-fattened, morbidly obese teenagers. Then tell me I’m worried about nothing. These are the end products of the Masterminds of Safety and Ethics, bulked up on cheese that contains no cheese, chips fried in oil that isn’t really oil, overcooked gray disks of what night once upon a time have been meat, a steady diet of Ho-Hos and muffins, butterless popcorn, sugarless soda, flavorless light beer, A docile, uncomprehending herd, led slowly to a dumb, lingering, and joyless slaughter.”
“But is meat ‘murder’? Fuck no. Murder, as one of my Khmer pals might tell you, is what his next-door neighbor did to his whole family back in the seventies…Murder is what Hutus do to Tutsis, Serbs to Croats, Russians to Uzbeks, Crips to Bloods.”
A beautiful phrase:
“The ranks of empty bottles near me grew from platoon to company strength, threatening to become a division.”
A great chef is:
“…your ability to cook brilliantly, day in and day out - in an environment where a thousand things can go wrong, with a crew that oftentimes would just as happily be sticking up convenience stores, in a fickle, cost-conscious, capricious world where everybody is hoping that you fail.”
Success is a fickle status where most are happy to judge you to the negative. The more successful you are, the more people you’ll disappoint. The reality of dining:
“In the cruel mathematics of two- and three-star dining establishments, a customer who has a good meal will tell two or three people about it. A person who has an unsatisfactory meal will tell ten or twenty. It makes for a much more compelling anecdote.”