The Performance Enhanced Kitchen

Excerpts in the New Yorker, critical acclaim from the major reviewers, Anthony
Bourdains’ book Kitchen Confidential has even been touted as the new ‘Down and
Out in London and Paris’ by Newsweek.
The title is from the 1958 Jack Arnold directed cult movie classic High School
Confidential. You remember the one with Mamie Van Doren in that sweater, Russ
Tamblyn as the cool nark posing as a hepcat, Jackie Coogan [uncle Fester] as the evil
pusher and Jerry Lee Lewis as himself. Occasionally featuring as a late night double
with Reefer Madness for the stoned lounge lizard set. A film so ridiculous that nobody
took it seriously. Well, here we go again. This one is bound to be optioned.

Bourdain’s book hit the stands in Australia during the Sydney Olympics, a time when
we all got an education in performance enhancing substance abuse.
Not a bad briefing for this entertaining but equally ridiculous, purportedly true
biography.

The wild card in this very neat and well-written tale is heroin.
Bourdain’s book takes us into the “culinary underbelly” of the New York restaurant
scene, through the stoned eyes of the author. A Vassar dropout turned line cook. A
self-made bad boy, desperately trying to be a working class hero amongst the hard
men of the kitchen.

It’s all very ‘cool’ but for the assumption that this is how it is, and its OK.

We get a good lesson in New York ‘kitchenspeak’ but there is something going off in
his ‘mis en place’ or ‘meez’ as he calls the preparations for ‘service’. Something is
fishy.
A trip to France with his parents in the sixties introduces the young boy to the joys of
French food. While his folks dine at the legendary ‘Pyramide’ of M. Fernand Point at
Vienne little Anthony and his brother are left in the car.

A few days later comes the first epiphany, eating a freshly opened oyster that his
parents, who after making the pilgrimage to Point, refuse to try.
Really? If you think Point is ‘worth a detour’ do you not eat a freshly shucked
oyster?
But its all true our author keeps telling us.

Kitchen ‘lifers’ as he calls those who choose to cook for a living will start to recognise
the cracks in the pastry.
There are clever and beguiling insights into the workings of what is known in the
trade as a ‘cowboy kitchen’, but the danger is that the outsider will just confirm his
already hyped up image of kitchen culture.
We have been shown cooks to be drugged up, drunken, unstable, ego driven,
megalomaniacs.
It is easy to just accept this image, continue to build up the glamour, mythologise the
public image of a working craftsman, and then wonder in amazement why they
behave so badly.

Not a lot is written about the suicide rates and overdoses within the hospitality
industry.
National statistics are hard to find, but in Melbourne at least seven cooks died from
intravenous drug overdoses between January and September last year according to the
Coroners Court.
Inside the industry the picture is much sadder.

Soon after reading the book, I was called back to my old ‘Alma Mater’ for a spot of
temping. On a sunny day after a fine lunch service, I found myself chewing the fat
and having a smoke on the street during our break with my kitchen crew.
When a young lady, a friend of the second chef came up and told him that his mate, a
young man who had been a kitchen-hand in the hotel had killed himself early in the
week.
The looks on their faces took me back to a late night telephone call fifteen years ago
that told me I had lost my good friend and fellow cook to the pressures of our
industry.
Since that day I have seen many of my colleagues stumble, and some fall over. This
is why a seductive, saucy tale such as this has to be put into perspective.

The ‘superstar cooks’ of the nineties ‘Brit Pack’ like Marco Pierre White and Gordon
Ramsay have, in my opinion also hijacked the attention of food world with the same
assumption that all is permissible for the sake of a perfect plate.

Bullying, permanent rosters of sixteen-hour days, contempt for the needs of diners
have become entrenched into the culture of the “chef as hero” kitchen.

Young cooks like Bourdain develop a kind of blind worship for their ‘chef’. And later
as they assume ‘command’ they elicit the same from their staff.
The numbers take over. How many did you do last night?
Macho endurance marathons, boys own sex fantasies combined with a few well-
chosen icons of popular food trends show how isolated Bourdain’s kitchens are from
the real enjoyment of food in a restaurant. And also, to the joys of cooking
professionally and under pressure.

He calls himself ‘a classically trained chef’ after 4 years at the Culinary Institute of
America but choses to adopt only the rhetoric of the brigade.

In his kitchens a ‘war’ between the front of house and the kitchen rages. Spies are
employed to keep the ‘chef’ briefed as to the politics of the shop. His ‘owners, are
either stupid or cunning. Yawn.
The old adage ‘if you can’t stand the heat’ is no longer the excuse behind which abuse
can hide.

Bourdain gets his taste of terror from the ‘soufflé nazi’ at the CIA [Culinary Institute
of America].
While working the desert section in the student restaurant he watches his fellow
students humiliated but our Rambo is not fazed. In the end Bourdain respects the
bully for his culinary work ignoring the damage done to another group of young
cooks.

My experience with head chefs that like to dish out a bit of public humiliation is that
they learned the techniques from their masters.

If we examine the origins of the classical kitchen hierarchy of ‘comis’, ‘chef de

partie’, ‘sous chef and such, history will show us that it is from this extreme class
structure that the bullying of apprentices by tyrannical chefs have emerged.

There is a different way. And I am proud to say a way being practised by more and
more younger cooks who now control some very influential kitchens.

Many kitchens have also done away with the one dimensional fish-grill-veg-sauce
brigade utilising modern cooking equipment to create non-linear solutions to the same
tasks that simply are, feeding a lot of people reasonably quickly.

The new electronic technology has dramatically changed the way a restaurant
operates. Computerised ordering systems combined with very large dining rooms
have accelerated the speed at which orders hit the kitchen. With a few exceptions
most kitchens still rely on old kitchen- staff to waiter ratios that make for an artificial
but very profitable frenetic rush at peak periods.
This is sadly where the wild card comes into its’ speedy play.
The big fib in this book is the way that Bourdain choses to ignore the way that illicit
substances have become part of the ‘meez’. Choosing instead to glamorise the
recreational aspect.

There is practice of performance enhancing drug use in many kitchens. Where as 10

or 20 years ago it was booze and pot, today we may see the day start with a high
octane ‘sports drink’, lots of ristrettos, a couple of pseudo-ephedrine pills before
service and the very casual use of amphetamines. Just to keep up the pace.
And sadly heroin and cocaine are also too easy to obtain.

We can laugh at Uma Thurmann overdosing in Pulp Fiction in the same way we can
accept Bourdains confessions and turn them into cult classics, but this is where it
stops being fiction.
Most of the industry runs on a split shift system, effectively getting two days work for
one even if hourly rates are paid. Many cooks work 5 to 6 straight double shifts.
More often than not ‘chefs’ are seduced with high salaries without defined working
hours. Often proudly proclaiming a sixty plus hour working week. Machismo takes
over.

The lure of a percentage of profit, theoretically making the chef a partner is also often
used as a way to bind a cook to the shop. It’s a different story when this working
partner has a conflict with management. Investment rules. Pills pop.

Bourdain’s story is undoubtedly a good read the style is splendid and you will find
yourself laughing and getting lost in the ‘Bigs’ that is New York.
Take it with a grain of salt -

Kitchen Confidential
Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

By Anthony Bourdain
Bloomsbury 2000