Medium raw: a bloody valentine to the world of food and the people who cook
Description
The long-awaited follow-up to the megabestseller Kitchen Confidential
In the ten years since his classic Kitchen Confidential first alerted us to the idiosyncrasies and lurking perils of eating out, from Monday fish to the breadbasket conspiracy, much has changed for the subculture of chefs and cooks, for the restaurant business?and for Anthony Bourdain.
Medium Raw explores these changes, moving back and forth from the author's bad old days to the present. Tracking his own strange and unexpected voyage from journeyman cook to globe-traveling professional eater and drinker, and even to fatherhood, Bourdain takes no prisoners as he dissects what he's seen, pausing along the way for a series of confessions, rants, investigations, and interrogations of some of the most controversial figures in food.
Beginning with a secret and highly illegal after-hours gathering of powerful chefs that he compares to a mafia summit, Bourdain pulls back the curtain?but never pulls his punches?on the modern gastronomical revolution, as only he can. Cutting right to the bone, Bourdain sets his sights on some of the biggest names in the foodie world, including David Chang, the young superstar chef who has radicalized the fine-dining landscape; the revered Alice Waters, whom he treats with unapologetic frankness; the Top Chef winners and losers; and many more.
And always he returns to the question "Why cook?" Or the more difficult "Why cook well?" Medium Raw is the deliciously funny and shockingly delectable journey to those answers, sure to delight philistines and gourmands alike.
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9780061998065
9780061988769
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Published Reviews
Booklist Review
Bourdain, who broke into the collective food consciousness with Kitchen Confidential (2000) and has since cemented his place as one of our foremost food commentators, offers the kind of book you can write only if you've achieved the level of fame at which you can assume that people care about about whatever you have to say (which they do, and should): a loose, sometimes repetitive, always entertaining, and even at times enlightening collection of food-related ramblings and name-naming hit-pieces. The result is more or less the book equivalent of finding yourself sharing plates at a communal table with a chatty, witty, unapologetically profane, knowledgeable and well-connected member-observer of the restaurant big leagues. If, like him, you see the world's greatest chefs as somewhere between rock and porn stars, there's no way you wouldn't spend hours listening to him chew your ear off with stories of that coke-fueled weekend (or was it a month?) trapped on an island with the world's most insufferably wealthy food posers and with diatribes on how annoying Alice Waters is and how critic Alan Richman is a douchebag (the nicer of the two things Bourdain calls him) for trashing the New Orleans food scene with the city still reeling from Katrina and then turn on a dime to deliver an impassioned ode to Vietnamese pho and an admiring portrait of perhaps the world's finest fish-portioner at Le Bernardin. It might have been a narcissistic, condescending, and overly insiderish collection if it weren't for Bourdain's consistently disarming self-awareness that he's the very picture of the jaded, overprivileged foodie' (in the worst sense of that word) that he used to despise. On seeing himself through the eyes of a hungry young chef who still has to actually cook just to barely survive, he says, Look at me and my nice fucking jacket, standing there all famous and shit. Sure, others may cook better than he does, but no one can dish like he can.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2010 Booklist