Hannah Goldfield on Anthony Bourdain’s “Don’t Eat Before Reading This”
I’m not kidding when I say I remember exactly where I was when I first discovered Anthony Bourdain. It was the summer of 2002, two years after he published “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,” a seminal and unflinching account of life as a chef in restaurant kitchens. I was fifteen years old and on vacation with a friend and her family on Long Island. My friend’s father was reading the paperback and sharing out loud one of the book’s dirty secrets, which we all immediately took as gospel: you should never order fish on Monday.
Bourdain’s elaborate passage explaining why this was true was first published in The New Yorkerin the 1999 essay “Don’t Eat Before You Read This,” which he quickly expanded on in “Kitchen Confidential.” (The short answer was that “many fish suppliers don’t deliver on Saturdays, so it’s likely that the tuna you want on Monday night has been sitting in the kitchen since Friday morning, in God knows what conditions”; the long answer immersed you in the culture and psychology of the restaurant industry.) He wrote it, originally, for an alternative weekly called New York. Presswho had planned it as a cover story before the editor killed it at the last minute. Bourdain imagined his audience would be insular and small: “I thought I’m going to write something that will entertain other cooks, maybe I’ll get a hundred dollars, and my fry cook will think it’s funny,” he recalled in 2017, during an appearance at the New Yorker Festival. When the article found its place in The New Yorker—after Bourdain’s mother suggested to a New Yorker Times colleague, Esther Fein, that Fein’s husband, David Remnick, the magazine’s new editor, might want to take a look: “It transformed my life in two days,” he said.
One might explain this splash by emphasizing the revelatory nature of the essay, the invitation it offered into an exciting and seedy world that was right under everyone’s noses. The chefs who prepare your meal don’t wear gloves or hairnets; servers recycle leftovers from your bread basket; on average, you probably consume a stick of butter per restaurant meal: “sauces are enriched with softening and emulsifying butter. Pastas are tightened with it. Meats and fish are seared with a mixture of butter and oil. Shallots and chicken are caramelized in butter. It’s the first and last thing in almost every pan: the final hit is called ‘rise in butter.’ But Bourdain was much more than a whistleblower, even at the very beginning of what would become his very important second career. The lurid way in which he sometimes told the story of writing the essay and its publication belied the years he had spent pursuing his literary ambitions, even while working on the subject and maintaining a heroin addiction; in 1985, he took a workshop with the famous editor Gordon Lish, and before becoming The New Yorker he had published two novels, including a crime thriller, and was studying a short story based on his experiences in the kitchen.
The voice he introduced in “Don’t Eat Before You Read This” is not only brash and bold; it resonates with style and poetry, from its tantalizing opening lines: “Good food, good nutrition, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and rot. It’s about sodium-laden pork fat, stinking triple cream cheeses, tender thymuses and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger, about risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese and shellfish.” Although it was Bourdain’s documentary television shows that made him extraordinarily famous — the kind of celebrity whose face is on fancy votive candles and tattooed on people’s biceps, who persuades a sitting president to eat grilled pork and noodles and drink beer on a plastic stool in Vietnam — “Kitchen Confidential” became canonical, and everything he did was written about, keenly observed and critically questioned. incisive.
As Bourdain himself pointed out, before his death by suicide in 2018, the rule banning fish on Mondays expired many years ago, thanks to improvements in the supply chain. What will far outlast him is his example, his unusual ability to show tricky things as they were without ever making them look ugly. ♦
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