RESTAURANTS: Marco Pierre White and Anthony Bourdain discuss things they don't like
Even when the cameras aren’t rolling, Anthony Bourdain’s booming exuberance toward the highs and lows of the modern-day culinary scene (ah, the many lows) reports for duty.
Case in point: Prior to yesterday’s StarChef’s International Chefs Congress “Role of a Chef” panel at the Park Avenue Armory, we witnessed Bourdain struggle with the concept of the at-home espresso machine. “That absolutely looks like urine,” said Bourdain to a companion, referring to the jaundiced-hued liquid spewing from the apparatus stationed at the back of the media room. No boom mics around. No people, really. Just him and a bush-league mechanical barista. And he let it have it.
Bourdain has standards, striving to enjoy “the good stuff,” as he commonly cites. And when the stuff ain't good, somebody is going to hear about it.
Enter his friend Marco Pierre White, a legendary British chef with a quick temper and a similarly candid, sometimes curmudgeonly take on restaurants.
Pierre White and Bourdain were joined by moderator Michael Ruhlman to discuss the role of the chef: in the kitchen, as empire builder and on TV. The 45-minute talk kicked off with Ruhlman asking both about what “defines a chef.” White’s chef is somebody who works up the ranks from “boy cook to head of the kitchen,” stressing that the chef’s name on the door should be the person cooking the food—either stationed at the burner or working the pass. He referred to many chefs as “living lies” by not cooking in their own kitchens. Bourdain stressed chef as a “leader, who can get somebody to show up to work every day.”
Bourdain did slightly defend the Ducasse and Boulud global-franchiser ethic (aka those not always working in their three-star institutions), noting that it was “cruel and snobbish” to expect somebody at 52 to be in the kitchen 90 hours a week, half-joking that he “sure hasn’t worked in nine years.” Pierre White countered that is was a chef’s “duty to be there working the pass.” Later during the Q&A session, White straight-up called Ducasse “soulless.”
A sort of stalemate was reached and both unilaterally bitched about the absurdity of the 24-course, three-hour tasting menu. Bourdain is apparently over it, unless it featured really great sushi. He also added that the “pastry chef always gets fucked in the process, because nobody wants to eat four types of desert at the end.” There was a loud pop of applause from the pastry contingent in the auditorium.
Onto chefs on TV, a meta-topic (given the audience) and a boring topic—OK, The Food Network has some crap on-air talent, we get it. So what’s the point of the television chef? “TV is a way to inspire people to cook. People don’t learn to cook from others, they teach themselves to cook,” said Pierre White. And about Gordon Ramsay—whom White recently took over for on the British version of “Kitchen Nightmares”? “The last thing you should be doing in the kitchen is belittling people,” said Pierre White adding the barb that Ramsay even made himself cry on TV. Bourdain took the requisite Sandra Lee shot and added that Mario Batali was the most qualified stand-and-stir host the network has seen. The event’s host, Ted Allen, looked on uncomfortably during the extended lashing of chefs working in the medium. —Matt Rodbard
Photo by Jason Ough