We're taught to believe life is a Kodak moment, and most of us spend much of our lives trying to hold on to all the good times. It takes maturity to be in the moment and to move on, and maturity is one of those qualities I've discovered I like in Bourdain.
I've been trying to figure out what it is exactly that endears me to the man, and believe me, it's more than just charm and good looks. Despite the fact that he claims to be jaded, he always comes off as an eager host on his series, No Reservations. Even as he's being feted and dined by professional chefs, friends of friends, and indigenous people around the globe, he seems intent upon offering up his experiences to the viewer in the most authentic light, and treating them as what they are -- rarities and treasures.
I'm also drawn to the raconteur, share-all quality, the "tell-it-like-is-Joe" who is happy to be where he is and proud to share it with you. Bourdain tends to search out what's cool or unusual about a place and a cuisine. Despite his facility with words and people, his ability to fit in virtually anywhere, he continually scrutinizes himself, and this I also find appealing:
How did I come to be worthy of this great meal? Who am I to critique it? How can I honor such fanciful cuisine? Why do I, Tony of Leonia, get such a ride? The perennial teen toeing the cliff's edge of an illegal high, Bourdain still challenges himself with the important questions. He is at his most interesting and original when playing the philosophe, analyzing the guts of what really happened, how he really feels about an event, how he "got there," what it all means. The probing, the stripping down, the upturning processes can be unnerving, but the viewer -- and reader -- sense the danger, feel the risk, and want to hop on board and see experiences through with him. Stripping back facades, getting underneath their skin, getting underneath even his audience's skin has become a trademark of Bourdain's, distinguishing him as an author and as host on his series.
In a chapter titled, "It's Not You, It's Me" in Medium Raw B recalls his disappointment with a dining experience at Alinea, a restaurant run by the great Grant Achatz, who once worked with Chef Thomas Keller at The French Laundry, where Bourdain claims to have experienced "the greatest single meal" of his life. He describes the 22-course extravaganza that he cherished so much and its aftermath, in grueling detail:
"Is there something fundamentally, ethically wrong about a meal as Pantagruelian in its ambition and proportion? Other than the people are starving in Africa argument, and the ' 250,000 people lost their jobs in America last month alone' argument, there's the fact that they must necessarily trim off about 80 percent of the fish or bird, to serve that perfectly oblong nugget of deliciousness on the plate. There's the unavoidable observation that it's simply more food and alcohol than the human body is designed to handle. That you will, after even the best of times, the most wonderful of such meals, need to flop onto your bed, stomach roiling with reflux; the beginnings of a truly awful hangover forming in your skull, farting and belching like a medieval friar.
'Is this the appropriate end, the inevitable result of genius? Of an otherwise sublime experience?
'Must it end like this.'"
The question of the hour hits home, bringing the reader to an awareness of what in Buddhist terms is known as samsaric reality -- The realization that no matter how sublime an experience, its flipside lingers just around the bend. Indulge in a great meal, expect indigestion. At the edge of bliss lies suffering. No matter how extraordinary an experience, it disappears like sand between your fingers -- and sometimes, as in the case of a meal, leaves you -- literally!
Beyond Bourdain's spectacular meals, beyond the high at the end of all of our rainbows, inescapable as death, lies emptiness.
POETRY, MUSIC, ART
SILENCE HAS A NAME - Poetry Chapbook and CD, with Music by Mark Hanley
Showing posts with label Grant Achatz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grant Achatz. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Culinary Music and Magic
September 25, 2009
"Jazz is like bananas -- it must be consumed on the spot." Jean-Paul Sartre, "Jazz in America"
There's a story involving Bird, a woman, Miles Davis and fried chicken that is too bawdy even for me to tell, although you can read it, if you like, in a section on Bird in Miles Davis' autobiography. But I'll say this, the tale would surely squash anyone's notion that the experience of delicious food, great musicians, and raunchy sex guarantee a fabulous experience, or always turns out, like a great recipe.
Everything is timing; everything is consideration; everything is taste, and the best artists would tell you so.
There is food and there is music and they can be partners too, just as art and food are -- in the best kitchens. And sometimes, cooks just like cooking to a beat, as if music might be the magical ingredient.
On coastalbeat.com you can find a story about Blues man Sauce Boss, who "plays the guitar and sings the blues and mixes up a 10-gallon pot of Gumbo at the same time." Try that, you dexterous kitchen wonders!
Sauce man's been playing gigs for 20 years in order to sell his own brand of hot sauce. Audiences not only get the Blues, but a bowl of Gumbo loaded with the Sauce Boss' Liquid Summer Hot Sauce -- handed out at the end of the show!
What's the secret of the Sauce Boss' invention? -- Datil peppers, he says, which are in the habanero family and provide a slow burn.
Brilliant food evokes great music, connects to all the arts. Grant Achatz, the young Midwestern culinary genius, who, together with Nick Kokonas, opened Alinea in 2005, says that "a menu should read like sheet music." Grant, an inventor, in the tradition of the Spaniard Ferran Adria (who in fact inspired Achatz' journey into culinary scientific invention), won the Rising Star Chef Award from the James Beard Foundation in 2003, and in 2004, received four stars from the Chicago Tribune, when he was executive chef at Trio, in Evanston, Illinois. He is only 34.
Kokonas, a philosopher/techie/entrepreneur, explained recently in a blog that he and Achatz created Alinea to "touch all the senses —not only taste. The menu is composed like a symphony or a play, provoking diners, challenging them, and making sure they feel... happy, sad, nostalgia, humor... the full range of human emotion." A masterful dish should look like a work of art and evoke it.
(Coincidentally, The New Yorker just published a profile of Achatz in its Sept. 25 issue, available online).
What of the actual music of kitchens, the cooking noise that includes the metallic drumming of pots and pans and chefs' calling and shouting voices? Did composer John Cage ever dream that up for a recording?
I watched impressive footage of a bevy of meticulous cooks in Alinea's kitchen preparing food with the quiet mindfulness of monks creating a sand mandala -- Awe-inspiring, and nothing whatsoever like the Hard Rock insanity described by Bourdain in the typically loud and bawdy kitchens of his experience. If Alinea represents the new kitchen and cuisine of the future, then there is hope for humankind.
Music and art can inspire great food. But so can mindfulness and silence. Frankly, as a foodie, I'll opt for the latter. It's better for your soul and your digestion.
In those typical, rowdy kitchens, each with their own sense of dysfunctionally functional mayhem or order, there are certain chefs that insist on particular music, something to concoct by, and perhaps, keep them from losing their minds.
Bourdain -- who is more than a chef, someone who has traveled the great kitchen of the world trying to gain mastery of the sensual -- lists his own preferences on a Web site. They include hard pumping cuts from Snap -- "The Power"; The Cult -- "She Sells Sanctuary"; The Stooges' "Down On the Street (Take 15)," and slower, sexier numbers for sultry pot stirring, like Ralph Rebel's "Rumble," Bill Wither's "Use Me," and The Stones, "Gimme Shelter."
My personal favorite for cooking -- Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" -- as I think happiness is the best ingredient, perhaps the only guarantee to producing good food.
"Jazz is like bananas -- it must be consumed on the spot." Jean-Paul Sartre, "Jazz in America"
There's a story involving Bird, a woman, Miles Davis and fried chicken that is too bawdy even for me to tell, although you can read it, if you like, in a section on Bird in Miles Davis' autobiography. But I'll say this, the tale would surely squash anyone's notion that the experience of delicious food, great musicians, and raunchy sex guarantee a fabulous experience, or always turns out, like a great recipe.
Everything is timing; everything is consideration; everything is taste, and the best artists would tell you so.
There is food and there is music and they can be partners too, just as art and food are -- in the best kitchens. And sometimes, cooks just like cooking to a beat, as if music might be the magical ingredient.
On coastalbeat.com you can find a story about Blues man Sauce Boss, who "plays the guitar and sings the blues and mixes up a 10-gallon pot of Gumbo at the same time." Try that, you dexterous kitchen wonders!
Sauce man's been playing gigs for 20 years in order to sell his own brand of hot sauce. Audiences not only get the Blues, but a bowl of Gumbo loaded with the Sauce Boss' Liquid Summer Hot Sauce -- handed out at the end of the show!
What's the secret of the Sauce Boss' invention? -- Datil peppers, he says, which are in the habanero family and provide a slow burn.
Brilliant food evokes great music, connects to all the arts. Grant Achatz, the young Midwestern culinary genius, who, together with Nick Kokonas, opened Alinea in 2005, says that "a menu should read like sheet music." Grant, an inventor, in the tradition of the Spaniard Ferran Adria (who in fact inspired Achatz' journey into culinary scientific invention), won the Rising Star Chef Award from the James Beard Foundation in 2003, and in 2004, received four stars from the Chicago Tribune, when he was executive chef at Trio, in Evanston, Illinois. He is only 34.
Kokonas, a philosopher/techie/entrepreneur, explained recently in a blog that he and Achatz created Alinea to "touch all the senses —not only taste. The menu is composed like a symphony or a play, provoking diners, challenging them, and making sure they feel... happy, sad, nostalgia, humor... the full range of human emotion." A masterful dish should look like a work of art and evoke it.
(Coincidentally, The New Yorker just published a profile of Achatz in its Sept. 25 issue, available online).
What of the actual music of kitchens, the cooking noise that includes the metallic drumming of pots and pans and chefs' calling and shouting voices? Did composer John Cage ever dream that up for a recording?
I watched impressive footage of a bevy of meticulous cooks in Alinea's kitchen preparing food with the quiet mindfulness of monks creating a sand mandala -- Awe-inspiring, and nothing whatsoever like the Hard Rock insanity described by Bourdain in the typically loud and bawdy kitchens of his experience. If Alinea represents the new kitchen and cuisine of the future, then there is hope for humankind.
Music and art can inspire great food. But so can mindfulness and silence. Frankly, as a foodie, I'll opt for the latter. It's better for your soul and your digestion.
In those typical, rowdy kitchens, each with their own sense of dysfunctionally functional mayhem or order, there are certain chefs that insist on particular music, something to concoct by, and perhaps, keep them from losing their minds.
Bourdain -- who is more than a chef, someone who has traveled the great kitchen of the world trying to gain mastery of the sensual -- lists his own preferences on a Web site. They include hard pumping cuts from Snap -- "The Power"; The Cult -- "She Sells Sanctuary"; The Stooges' "Down On the Street (Take 15)," and slower, sexier numbers for sultry pot stirring, like Ralph Rebel's "Rumble," Bill Wither's "Use Me," and The Stones, "Gimme Shelter."
My personal favorite for cooking -- Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" -- as I think happiness is the best ingredient, perhaps the only guarantee to producing good food.
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