For Anthony Bourdain, On His Birthday

For Anthony Bourdain, good food had something to do with pain — with briney bacteria pooled at the edges of shellfish, liver, pungent cheese. Good eating was all about the hair-thin line between acrid, sour, sweet, bitter — nausea. “Your first two hundred and seven Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture,” he wrote, “but your two hundred and eighth may send you to bed.”

Like with the fare it produces, the food industry is a complicated one. With rapture comes poison. And Bourdain knew it better than anyone: the kitchen can be an ugly place. In a city like New York, where restaurants serve guests not customers, and waiters earn salaries paired with substantial health insurance policies, a high-profile kitchen invites panic — welcomes anxiety with open arms. This is not your day job, it’s your career.

“Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness,” Bourdain wrote, in a 1999 essay for The New Yorker. “The members of a tight, well-greased kitchen staff are a lot like a submarine crew. Confined for most of their waking hours in hot, airless spaces, and ruled by despotic leaders.”

It has been well over three decades since Bourdain stumbled around Manhattan, an ardent busboy. At the height of his career, he no longer stumbled anywhere. Instead, he paraded his readers and his viewers, with conviction, directly into the unsexy, overlooked crevices of the world. He published a battery of books, and hosted a franchise of successful television shows, tugging narrative after narrative out of remarkable shared meals. He told stories by way of consumption. He became our champion hedonist — our fearless consumer of ruptured guts and pickled hearts.

Last month, at age 61, Bourdain took his own life in a hotel room in Paris.

Throughout the course of his lauded career, he navigated the world, down to its grittiest corners, in pursuit of flavor. The risk factor was second, only to taste. “For a moment, or a second,” he wrote in his first full-length text, Kitchen Confidential, “the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we’ve all had to become disappears, when we’re confronted with something as simple as a plate of food.”

I have spent my own fair share of time weaving on tiptoes between two-tops in New York City restaurants, replenishing glasses of water with a near-absurd sense of urgency. Prior to the far cushier furnishings of food writing, I ran plates from sweaty Brooklyn kitchens to sunny tables crowded with less-sunny diners. I re-set tabletop after tabletop, ensuring that salt and pepper shakers occupied the same space on each surface. I learned to carry three cups of steaming coffee, cradled in one arm. I memorized specials; I knew regulars by name. What never grew rote, however, was the hurtling speed at which the kitchen operated.

In the time it took me to scrape together a tangled list of nitpicky orders from a six-top, Chef would have scrambled three plates of eggs, each studded with chives and sliced tomato, piled beneath razor thin stretches of smoked salmon.

Then would come the furious ding of the countertop bell, indicating that if I did not shepherd these plates to their destinations immediately, then I would be responsible for the less-than-satisfactory reviews. In the kitchen, they’d help up their end of the bargain. I was faltering.

In that period, panic was my neutral. The tempo of servitude rarely slowed — and when it did, I panicked about that. But even in the midst of my own frantic laps around dining room after dining room, I knew I was just on the edge of the thing — waiting at the fringe. I knew that the kitchen was the furious heart of it all.

“For a profession that’s so much about sensual joy and physical satisfaction for the end consumer, it’s hard as hell on the psyche,” writes food editor Kat Kinsman in a blog entry on her website, Chefs With Issues. Kinsman founded the online community hub after years of writing, editing, and working on the floor in the food and hospitality industries.

The stereotype here is simple and overplayed: Alcoholism runs rampant, resentments fester, and chefs rail lines of cocaine to push themselves through double shifts spent hunched over clarifying butter and bubbling stocks. Turn-over is immediate, orders arrive at breakneck speed, and less than “satisfactory” meals are returned to the kitchen, disrupting the fluid rotation of incoming tickets. High-stress does not even begin to cover the baseline.

In recent years, since Kitchen Confidential made its debut, health and employment codes have changed — kitchen staff can no longer smoke Parliaments while frying steaks in ventilation-free, mold-ridden chambers. Spitting in food is frowned upon. But nevertheless, some semblance of the dated stereotype holds: those manning the back end of a restaurant often do not receive the same form of hospitality they dole out, night after night.

“My head is heavy, my neck hurts. I have constant anxiety. Sometimes I just break down and cry,” writes a young, male, working chef, in the Chefs With Issues Facebook support group.

“I came from the very bottom — dishwasher, busboy, server,” writes another user. “I’ve been in this business for 35 years. I was a raging alcoholic, and I’ve been sober for 10 years. I’m a chef by trade. Depression is a constant, not to mention the pressure.”

As far as routine, chefs are often all but nocturnal, sleeping until midday, and working late nights, capping off evening shifts with hours spent binge-drinking heavily, ringing in sunrise with bleary eyes, arms dotted with burns from sizzling oil and careless knife tracks. The cycle is not healing, per se.

“I stopped even wanting to see people outside of the industry,” a Brooklyn chef, who wished to remain anonymous, told me over the phone. “Even on my days off. We have nothing to talk about, anymore.”

Hard-core denizens of the industry will warn you: you can forget work-life balance, forget the maintenance of relationships with friends, family, significant others — forget interacting with anyone at all who rises with the sun, and sleeps before midnight. You offer all that up in exchange for the kitchen.

“You’re not allowed to hurt. Toughen up. What are you, a pussy? Can’t take the heat? Chug, chug, chug! Sleep? Who needs to sleep? What, you can’t hang? Just one more shot. But your customers, your diners, your readers — they can never know. It would ruin the illusion,” Kinsman writes on the Chefs With Issues home page. “Depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, OCD, addiction.”

Beyond the flashing stressors of the job itself, and the flailing irregularity of the routine, there lies a stigma. In a restaurant, you are curators of an experience. Expressing your own malady would shatter that delicate, shiny, fourth wall. However esteemed you may be, this is not about you. The customer (nay guest) is always right.

“Chefs describe abusive environments run by bullies…They talk of intimidation, of humiliations, of pain administered via burning hot tongs,” writes Jay Rayner for The Guardian.

“I’ve seen guys duking it out in the waiter station over who gets a table for six. I’ve seen a chef clamp his teeth on a waiter’s nose,” Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential. ”I’ve seen plates thrown — I’ve even thrown a few myself.”

I, too, have watched chefs hurtle loaves of fresh bread, and splash buckets of filthy water on dishwashers failing to keep a steady supply of sparkling forks available. I’ve watched the sous chef whipped with a wet dishrag, and I have feebly ignored the come-ons and the slimey hand gestures directed my way. Shattering plates won’t fly, anymore — but the dish rag was just fine.

“To speak out against powerful bosses in general is a risk. But in the food world, especially in the world of fine dining, blacklisting concerns are pervasive,” says Maimon Kirschenbaum, a New York City employment lawyer. “At the highest level, it’s a small world. Even when cases don’t make the papers, word gets around.”

When chef Lee McGrath joined the staff at the formerly Batali-run Pó in 2017, he received a warning mid-training: “Don’t even think about messing with the waitresses — they’ve been through hell with Mario.”

“You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn’t be too far off base,” Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential.

“But an ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins.”

Beyond the Chefs With Issues support group, legions of similar Facebook pages for chefs, waiters, and even chef’s spouses, populate the internet. Food service employees express their rampant issues with alcoholism, drug-abuse, anxiety, depression, and physical deterioration. Women speak out about their experiences with sexual assault, and misconduct in the workplace. But in between the pleas for help, the cries of desperation, and the admissions of despair, lies another thread: a love of food.

“Today’s finds at the Great Barrington Farmers’ Market: Lots of FRESH radishes, NY State strawberries & a choice of Mexican bebidas. Great way to clear my mind today,” writes one chef in a Facebook support group, sandwiched between distraught posts memorializing Bourdain.

“I have been reading on Appalachian sour corn all day. My mouth is watering. I aim to get some started this week…Do you think this will work?” asks another.

“Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in 1999. But like with so many great, storied artists, that very dysfunction is often the source of some brand of ingenuity. The trauma, addiction, depression, anxiety — the late nights, the cocaine binges — all feed into this grand particular notion of the complex, brilliant chef, climbing toward his Michelin star. He’s fucked up, but damn, can he cook.

“I wanted it all: the cuts and burns on hands and wrists, the ghoulish kitchen humor, the free food, the pilfered booze,” Bourdain wrote, “the camaraderie that flourished within rigid order and nerve-shattering chaos.”

In New York, restaurants shutter with the frequency of subway delays. The culinary scene, full of prestige, can be hard to crack. To cook — to cook beautifully — is an act of genius. To attract good enough reviews to keep your doors open is another form of miracle.

It has been decades since Bourdain’s last stint working full-time in a kitchen, but the formation of his career rode on the back of ten long years spent toiling in New York City restaurants — a bus boy, a back-waiter, a sous-chef, and eventually, a chef in his own right. The restaurant scene has shifted, progressed, aged — but the indignant truths he wrote of the dark underbelly of fine dining still remain. He shattered one small piece of that delicate fourth wall.

A life spent in the pursuit of sensory hedonism is not, by default, an easy one. We need to talk about this. We need to finish the conversation Bourdain began, back in 1999.

On Friday June 8th, when news of Bourdain’s suicide broke, a female user in the Chefs With Issues support group wrote, “A customer came in last night and insisted that she needed to buy a shot for the cook in honor of Anthony Bourdain. It was the most bittersweet shot of Jameson I’ve ever taken.”

But bittersweet, briney, tart — Bourdain wanted it all.

“Our movements through time and space seem somehow trivial,” he wrote in Kitchen Confidential, “compared to a heap of boiled meat in broth, the smell of saffron, garlic, fishbones and Pernod.”