Photo: The Travel Channel, L.L.C.

Anthony Bourdain Shares What It Takes To Be A Great Chef

This story first appeared in March/April 2010

Anthony Bourdain isn’t a careful guy—in the kitchen, in print or on TV. If you’ve read his seminal, behind-the-line exposé of the restaurant business published in 2000, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, you know Bourdain, 53, never pulls any punches. The book—and his inimitable style—helped take him out of the sauté pans and into the blaze of real media stardom.

He wrote two more books (A Cook’s Tour and The Nasty Bits) and debuted on the Food Network in 2002 with A Cook’s Tour, which allowed him the opportunity to pursue culinary and cultural adventures worldwide. In 2005, he switched to the Travel Channel with Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. This year, the show features Prague, Provence, Ethiopia, Rome, China and the Central Highlands of Vietnam, among other destinations. Bourdain’s appreciation of Vietnamese culture is widely known; he hopes to move there for a year with his wife, Ottavia Busia, and their daughter, Ariane, who turns 3 in April.

You’ve been a regular judge for DC’s Capital Food Fight. Do you think young chefs today differ from those who came up when we did?
When I started out, the [profession provided] no luster, little promise of a future or any kind of success, status or money. You did it because you were either the sort of person who liked it or because it was a business that would have you. Now there are real opportunities in it, and you can gain fame, attention and praise as a chef. People are interested in chefs now, whereas they really weren’t before. Chefs are empowered, meaning they have the juice or the trust to pretty much tell their customers what to eat. In our time, we had to react to the conventional wisdom. There had to be a steak; there had to be a chicken; there had to be a salmon. Nowadays, guys like Mario Batali can say, “Hey, you’re eating sweetbreads, and you’re going to like it.” That’s a real and positive change.

And on the downside?
[There are] some unreasonable expectations among young kids and others who are perhaps a little too old to change careers and are getting themselves in pretty deep with student loans. The business has always attracted a certain number of knuckleheads and expunged pretenders, wannabes and romantics and will continue to do so. Anybody who enters the restaurant business because they saw Top Chef and they want to be famous is going to wash out just as quickly now as he or she would have 20 years ago.

We certainly have a bit of that going on here in D.C. If you haven’t paid your dues, you’ll be outed.
Yes. What’s wonderful about the cooking trade is that it’s a meritocracy. It doesn’t matter what your background is or what you say, it’s about what you do. Either you can make an omelet or you can’t. You either can keep up with a Sunday brunch or you can’t.

A few Top Chef questions. You’ve been a judge several times now. Why do contestants have a love affair with scallops?
People tend to screw up on those, don’t they? They have a basic misunderstanding of them. When I kicked Dale off in the notorious Dale episode, I cannot describe to you how awful his dish was and what a bad idea it was. Scallops are fatty, rich and buttery-tasting by nature, so to add butterscotch to that flavor profile—it was like drinking Mrs. Butterworth’s straight from the bottle.

They also think they’re going to impress [chef and Top Chef judge] Tom Colicchio with filet mignon. Any chef who has been in the business for any length of time is just bored to death by filet mignon. To see people use that as an ingredient over and over again, they lose points right away. You can see Tom die a little whenever anybody uses it.

Any truth to the rumor that putting bacon in dishes translates into an instant win?
(Laughs) It may not be true that bacon makes everything better, but it sure makes a lot of things better. If there’s anything that would get a vegetarian to cross the line, it would be the smell of bacon cooking.

What price-driven food trends have you noticed since the economy took a dive?
Fried chicken is the big thing right now. [Momofuku chef David] Chang was joking that pork belly could be the next tuna tartare. And this is from a guy who has made a lot of money from pork belly. That’s another dish, if you’re looking to take home the gold on Top Chef, to stay away from: tuna tartare. It’s a total failure of the imagination.

And yet it is on every menu.
I’m not going to any place that still has tuna tartare on a menu.

Is there anything quintessentially American that you miss when you’re abroad?
Sure. I miss Russ and Daughters. I miss pizza. But mostly I miss deli more than anything, a good pastrami sandwich. And a really good hamburger.

Yes, burgers. Another dining trend.
Which is fine as long as we’re keeping our eye on the classic. If you have really good meat and a really good bun, I don’t know that you can improve on that by adding foie gras or truffles. I get a little upset with people who are making tomato marmalade. Ketchup is just fine for me.

The Obamas have been great for business here in D.C. Did you have any good food the last time you were here?
Michel Richard, José Andrés—I’m a huge fan of both. Clearly, it’s a rapidly improving and expanding situation in D.C. You see chefs opening outposts in Washington. José is getting a lot of traction. The fact that he has so many restaurants doing well in D.C. [says a lot] about what’s going on.

I read that your daughter eats olives. Are you pushing anything in particular?
No, I’m not going to be an annoying foodie parent. I talked a lot about this with Mario Batali, who has a couple of kids. Ariane likes grilled cheese sandwiches and cookies as much as any kid; it’s just that Mommy and Daddy eat differently than a lot of other kids’ parents. She’s in and out of Italy at least a couple of times a year and, at random, she’ll see us eating things and try them. She picks up olives, good cheese and risotto and likes them, but that’s just because it was there and looked good, and she tried it.

Did you always have the ability to eat absolutely everything put in front of you, as you do on No Reservations?
I was always rewarded if I tried something unfamiliar, and that’s still the case. It’s always more polite to give people the benefit of the doubt and try it. I mean, how bad can it be? What’s the worst thing that can happen?

Death?
Well, yeah. But I generally eat what the locals are eating. If someone is serving street food to a crowd of locals, they’re not in business because they’ve been poisoning the neighbors. I think I’ve only been sick on the show twice in eight years.

So you’re covering Prague on the show?
Yes, we’re doing a show. It’s always been on the list, but I haven’t been able to get there until now. It’s been harder than we thought to find traditional Czech food, since a lot of it was eradicated during Soviet times. But it’s an interesting mix of home cooking, traditional restaurant, new Asian and some street food. We have a look in mind that we want to capture, which is always central to our show. There have been a few films, such as Guillermo del Toro’s Blade 2, which have made Prague look really interesting, and we’re going to rip off that look.

I understand you were in Provence last summer.
I knew someone with some strong family connections there—chef connections. So, it was a personality-based episode, meaning that all decisions about where we were going emanated from one person I knew and trusted. It was about the way you acquire food in France and the small, intensely pleasurable decisions that change every day. If you’re cooking a big meal at night, it means a trip to the boulangerie, the patisserie, the boucher—all of these routine actions that make Provence so wonderful.