An Interview with Anthony Bourdain (June 2006)

Anthony Bourdain is looking happy. He greets me with a smile, all tan and rested. ("A few days ago I was in the Kalahari desert. I’m just happy my hotel room has a toilet," he tells me.) Later that night at a book signing at the Michigan Avenue Borders in Chicago, he’s grinning and bemused at the huge crowd, opening up with "I’ll just do a short piece from the book, and then we can talk shit about Charlie Trotter."

The happiness seems incongruous with his public persona: a macho, chain-smoking hedonist who at every public appearance is asked about the time he ate the still-beating heart of a cobra. That image was mostly fueled by his memoir Kitchen Confidential, and even he admits in Nasty Bits that it’s "obnoxious, over-testosteroned." But with the success of Kitchen Confidential came the ability to retire from the kitchen and do whatever he wanted. And what he wanted was to travel. A Cook’s Tour, both a book and a television show on the Food Network, followed him through places like Thailand and Minneapolis as he looked for truly great food. When the Food Network asked him to stop going to Asia because "they talk funny" there, he took his show to the Travel Channel where they let him make all of the decisions. No Reservations has just finished its second season and has been renewed for a third.

Now he travels almost the entire year, stopping back in New York only a few days each month. His latest book The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones is a collection of essays about his travels, nostalgia for the days in Les Halles’s kitchen, and why he hates Woody Harrelson. When we finally find a place where he can smoke indoors, he starts to talk about how all of the travel has changed him.

Your essay in "Nasty Bits" about raw food was almost polite. You’ve been much more mean to vegetarians in the past, but this essay talked about how every person finds their own path. You reserve your ire for Woody Harrelson. (In the essay, Harrelson refuses a meal in Thailand in order to stick to his strict raw food diet.)

Clearly I’m angry at Woody Harrelson. I’m okay with people who are horrified by cruelty to animals. I understand that completely. Who isn’t? Well, a lot of people aren’t, but I am. I wouldn’t hunt for sport, as I’ve said. I’m grateful for annoying gadfly organizations that embarrass or use any legal pressures to encourage people to not hunt. Same with fur. Same with cosmetic testing on animals. I don’t see any reason for that. As a comedian said, however, if you tell me hooking a chimp up to a car battery is going to find a cure for AIDS, I’m all for that.

What really got me as angry as I was... I think Charlie Trotter’s comments (in the foreword to his cookbook Raw) were pretty measured and I could kind of understand and even respect what he’s doing as an intellectual exercise or a creative exercise, but I was really furious at the thought of anyone lucky enough to travel to Thailand -- lucky enough, because I am aware at how lucky I am -- to turn his nose up at the food. So rude and anti-human and contemptuous of this planet and other nations and other cultures, and that’s where I get pissed off.

I thought the Charlie Trotter book was an interesting experiment on how to make raw food edible, because there are a few enormously expensive raw food restaurants here that serve, you know, salad.

That stuff is incredibly expensive. Someone did a cost break down of what it would cost you to survive on that stuff, to buy all that equipment and just load your refrigerator with vegetables and starches to be able to replace the protein intake. Highly extravagant and difficult. I see it in a way as giving succor and comfort to the enemy. I think that Charlie Trotter... if anyone is aware of the magnificence and importance of Charlie Trotter it’s Charlie Trotter. As he’s all too happy to remind us. On one hand I think it’s important to acknowledge how talented and important he is. On the other, when he comes out against foie gras, or he personally chooses not to use it in his restaurant as he prefers to say, he gives succor and comfort to the raw food movement, I don’t think he realizes he gives political cover to the very people that I personally see as the enemy.

You know it was just banned in Chicago.

And I blame Charlie Trotter. I think he really gave them, the idiots, cover. Of course it’s an irresistible issue for PETA, it’s a win for them. Who’s going to stand up and defend it? Who’s going to be pro-foie gras? What politician, who’s your constituency there? A tiny group of food nerds and rich people. And yet it’s a terrible thing, what’s happened.