July 17, 2010

Excerpt from: Medium Raw, A Bloody Valentine To The World of Food and The People Who Cook

by Anthony Bourdain

Selling Out, cont'd

The two of them looked at me like I had two heads. Pityingly. They mocked me.

"Are you asking, ‘How much would I have to pay you to taste a booger?'" said one, as if talking to a child. The two of them resumed their conversation, comparing soft drink money to frozen pasta dinners as if I were no longer there. This, clearly, was a conversation for grownups and they considered me too clueless, too dumb, too unsophisticated about the world to be included in the conversation.

They were right. What was I talking about anyway?

The notion of "selling out" is such a quaint one, after all. At what point exactly does one—really—sell out? To the would-be anarchist fan, invariably a white guy in dreadlocks, waiting to form a band and "keepin' it real" while waiting for Mom and Dad to send a check, maybe the second he gets a job is selling out.

Certainly, anytime anyone gets up in the morning earlier than one would like, drags oneself across town to do things one wouldn't ordinarily do in one's leisure time for people one doesn't particularly like—that would be selling out—whether that activity's working in a coal mine, heating up macaroni and cheese at Popeye's—or giving tug jobs to strangers in the back of a strip club. To my mind, they are all morally equivalent. (You do what you got to do to get by.) While there is a certain stigma to sucking the cocks of strangers—because, perhaps, of particularly Western concepts of intimacy and religion—how different, how much worse—or more "wrong" is it than plunging toilets, hosing down a slaughterhouse floor, burning off polyps or endorsing Diet Coke? Who—given a choice—would do any of those things?

Who—in this world—gets to do only what they want—and what they feel consistent with their principles—and get paid for it?

Well … I guess, me—until recently.

But wait. The second I sat down for an interview, or went out on book tour to promote Kitchen Confidential … surely that was selling out of a kind, right? I didn't know Matt Lauer or Bryant Gumbel or any of these people. Why was I suddenly being nice to them? In what way was I different than a common whore, spending minutes, hours, eventually weeks of my rapidly waning life making nice to people I didn't even know? You fuck somebody for money, it's cash on the barrel. You pick up the money, you go home, you take a shower and it's gone—presumably having spent as much emotional investment as a morning dump. But what about week after week of smiling, nodding your head, pretending to laugh—telling the same stories, giving the same answers as if they'd just—only now—occurred to you for the first time?

Who's the ho, now? Me. That's who.

Jesus—I would have given Oprah a back-rub and a bikini wax had she asked me when her people called. 55,000 copies a minute—every minute Oprah's talking about your book (according to industry legend)? I know few authors who wouldn't. So I guess I knew—even back then—what my price was.

There's that old joke, I've referred to it before, where the guy at the bar asks the girl if she'd fuck him for a million dollars—and she thinks about it and finally replies, "Well, I guess for a million dollars, yeah …" At which point he quickly offers her a dollar for the same service. "Fuck you!" she says, declining, angrily. "You think I'd fuck you for a dollar?What do you think I am?" To which the guy says, "Well … we've already established you're a whore. Now we're just haggling over price."

It's a crude, hateful, sexist, wheezer of a joke—but it's as applicable to men as to women. To chefs as to any other craftsmen, artists, or laborers.

What was my problem? With my peers—no—my betters—grabbing the endorsement dollars left and right: the branded pots and pans, kitchen utensils, ghostwritten cookbooks, commercials for boil-in-a-bag dinners, toaster ovens, California raisins … I turned them all down.

I deluded myself for the longest time that there was … "integrity" involved … or something like that. But as soon as I became a Daddy, I knew better.

I'd just been haggling over price.

There'd never been any question of integrity—or ethics—or anything like that … For fuck's sake, I'd stolen money from old ladies, sold my possessions on a blanket on the street for crack, hustled bad coke and bad pills and done far worse in my life.

I started asking more people about this.

Among the more illuminating and poignant explanations came from—of all people—Emeril. We were guest hosts/roasters at a charity roast of mutual friend, Mario Batali. In a quiet moment between dick jokes, we talked—as we sometimes do, me asking with genuine curiosity why he continued to do it. He was, at the time, being treated very shabbily by the Food Network—I could see that he'd been hurt by it—and I asked him why he gave a fuck. "You've got a large, well-respected restaurant empire … the cookbooks … the cookware line"—which is actually pretty high-quality stuff—"presumably you've got plenty of loot. Why go on? Why even care about television anymore—that silly show, the hooting audience of no-necked strangers? (I was you)," I went on, "it would take people two weeks to reach me on the phone … I'd be so far off the fucking grid, you'd never see me in shoes again … I'd live in a sarong somewhere where nobody would ever find me—all this? A distant memory."

He didn't elaborate. He smiled tolerantly then began listing the number of children, ex-wives, employees (in the hundreds) working for Emeril Inc., establishing for me in quick, broad—and slightly sad strokes—the sheer size of the Beast that had to be fed every day in order to be Responsible Emeril—all the people who'd helped him along the way—and now relied on him—in one form or another for their living. His success had become an organic, ever-expanding thing—growing naturally larger—as it had to—for to shrink—or even stay the same—would be to die.

Mario, I knew, with 12 restaurants and counting, watch and clog endorsements, the cookware, the books, the bobblehead doll, NASCAR affiliation and God knows what else—nothing ever seems to be enough for the man. Above and beyond the fact that he raises millions of dollars for various charities—including his own, he's clearly not in it for the money. Always expanding, always starting new partnerships, trying new concepts. In Mario's case, I think, it's about ego—and the fact that he's got a restless mind. It's not, and never was ,enough—or even interesting—to Batali to make money. If that had been the case, he'd have never opened Babbo (or Casa Mono, or Del Posto, or Otto, or Esca), he'd have opened his version of Mario's Old Spaghetti Factories, coast to coast—and been swimming in a sea of cash by now. No.

Mario, I know for a fact, likes to swing by each of his New York restaurants at the end of the night and take a look at the receipts. He's excited by the details. He gets off on successfully filling a restaurant who everyone said was doomed, of bringing the food cost below 20 percent. He likes to do the difficult thing, the dangerous thing—like take a gamble that what America needs and wants right now is ravioli filled with brains, or pizza topped with pork fat. For Mario, I'm quite certain, to be ten times richer—twenty times—and NOT take crazy-ass chances on restaurant concepts that no one ever expressed a desire for—would cause him to expire from boredom.

All Mario enterprises are co-productions. Every restaurant begins with an alliance, a moment of truth, where Don Mario evaluates the creativity and character of another person, looks into their heart, and makes a very important decision. In this way, the success or failure of whatever venture he's embarked on is already determined long before he opens the door. So it's never just business. It's always, always, personal.

Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud—both with successful, revered, and respected mothership restaurants, have talked at various times about the necessity of holding on to talented people; the need to grow with the talents, experience and ambitions of loyal chefs de cuisine, sous-chefs and other loyal, long time employees who want and deserve to move up or to have "their own thing." It becomes the simple matter of expand—or lose them.

To some extent, I suspect, what is often the French Michelin star model might be at work here as well: The three star chef's mothership simply doesn't and can't ever make as much money as his more casual bistros or brasseries. (Those end up, in very real ways, subsidizing the more luxurious original—or at very least, offering a comfortable cushion should costs at the higher end place rise or revenues decline. You can't start laying off cooks at a three star, every time you have a bad week.)

Gordon Ramsay is a more classic example of the force that keeps well known chefs constantly, even manically expanding. In Ramsay's case, multiple television shows on both sides of the Atlantic—at the same time as a huge worldwide expansion of hotel-based restaurants. He already has the most successful cooking-competition show on TV with Hell's Kitchen. He is a millionaire many, many times over, and yet he kept expanding—to his eventual peril (none of the twelve restaurants he opened in the last few years have yet to turn a profit). No matter what your opinion of Ramsay's food, or his awful but wildly popular hit show, or his much better Kitchen Nightmares on the BBC, there is no denying that he is a workaholic. There don't seem to be enough hours in the day to contain his various endeavors and enterprises and yet he goes on.

In Gordon's case, one need only look at his childhood—as described in his autobiography. He grew up poor, constantly on the move, with an untrustworthy and unreliable dreamer of a father. No sooner had his family settled than they would have to move again—often one step ahead of the debt collectors. You know What Makes Gordon Run.

Very likely a similar impulse to that of his one time mentor and sometimes-nemesis, Marco Pierre White. Whatever riches they may have acquired or may yet acquire, there is and always will be the lingering and deeply felt suspicion that come tomorrow, it will all be gone. No amount is enough or will ever be enough because deep in the bone they know that the bastards could come knocking at any minute and take it all away.

David Chang, whose crazy-ass pony ride to the top of the heap has just begun, feels, I suspect all the above motivations; a deadly combination of too few seats at his high end standard bearer restaurant, an ever increasing number of talented loyalists, and a feeling that he'll never be truly good enough at anything.

And then, of course, there's the example of the iconic French Michelin-starred chef, one of the most celebrated and well represented (by sheer number of restaurants) in the world, who, in my presence, said simply:

"Enough bullshit. It's time to make money."

It was vanity that had kept me from being the Imodium guy. Not integrity. I wasn't "keeping it real" declining their offers—and similar ones. I was just too narcissistic and loved myself a little too much to be able to handle waking up in the morning, looking in the bathroom mirror—and seeing the guy from TV who complains about freckling the bowl with loose diarrhea (until Imodium came along to save the day!). I didn't take the cookware gig cause I didn't want to find myself in an airport someday—approached by a disgruntled customer of whatever crap central warehouse actually produces that stuff—complaining about my substandard saucepot scorching his paella. I'm the kind of guy who doesn't like to be called on bullshit—unless I'm knowingly bullshitting.

So I didn't take the forty grand a month they offered me to slap my name on a South Beach restaurant cause I figured—even if I don't have to actually do anything for the money—other than show up once in a while—there's that exposure. I could be on the other side of the world—but if the bartender at this joint, run by strangers, serves one underage girl, one customer gets slipped a roofie, one aggressive rat pops its head up out of the toilet one night and grabs a chunk of somebody's nut sack, it's gonna be "OUTRAGE AT BOURDAIN RESTAURANT" in the tabloids. And that would conflict with my image of myself as somehow, above that kind of thing.

But when my daughter came along—and I continued to say "no," I knew I wasn't saving my cherry for principle. I'd just been waiting to lose it to the right guy.