Anthony Bourdain was more a reporter than a chef. Part of his journalism was in exposing the not-so-glamorous world of dishwashers and the subordinate cooks (the line chefs about whom nobody knew except if in the restaurant business at one time).
From the New York Times:
Anthony Bourdain entered the literary stage with an inside tip, delivered in the gruff whisper of a racetrack tout: Don’t order fish on Mondays.
It was the part that everybody remembered from his first published work, a long essay about the unglamorous and sometimes unsavory work of cooks and dishwashers that ran in The New Yorker in 1999 and that made it almost impossible for waiters to sell seafood between Sunday and Tuesday for at least a decade.
And the advice gave Mr. Bourdain, a journeyman cook and chef nobody had heard of, a new career. Before he was found dead on Friday, in what the authorities were treating as a suicide, he was the witty, connected guide who, in memoirs, cookbooks and television shows, would tell you things that others wouldn’t.
In the glossy, cheerful, relentlessly promotional realms of food and travel writing, that left him a fair number of truths he could claim as his own, and he took full advantage of the situation.
A close reader of Orwell, he modeled that first essay and the book that grew out of it, “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,” on Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London.” While other restaurant writers had helped build the cult of the creative, artistic chef, Mr. Bourdain made folk heroes out of the dishwasher and the line cook — a job description previously known only to restaurant employees. He described their lives and their day-to-day work in concrete, indelible detail.
When kitchens were being wrapped in a shimmering gauze of glamour, Mr. Bourdain got busy unwrapping them, revealing the injuries and addictions, low wages and high tempers that took a toll on workers.
Among other things, he was one of the first writers to tell the dining public that many high-profile New York restaurants would cease to function without the work and talents of Mexican employees. It was almost a casual aside, yet it suddenly opened new subjects to the purview of food writing: immigration policy, labor conditions, racism.
He identified with the grunts, portraying himself as a slinger of cheap steaks and French fries. The grunts, in turn, identified with him, not because of his contributions as a chef — who can name an Anthony Bourdain dish? — but because he told the world what the work was really like. And once he left kitchens behind for a career in travel television, he didn’t lead his camera crews on a tour of the world’s most luxurious resorts. He went to Detroit and the Bronx, Libya and Beirut.
More here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/dining/anthony-bourdain-restaurants.html
