ChefAnthony Bourdainbelieves that without his checkered past of drinking, drugs and calling out other famous chefs, he wouldn’t be where he is today.
In his early days in the kitchen, “all my decisions were based on who could give me access to girls and drugs,” theParts Unknownhost said in the March issue ofWine Spectator,on newsstands now.
Instead of apprenticing in critically-acclaimed restaurants after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978, “I went right to work for as much money as I could get, with friends who did the sort of things that I liked to do, which was drugs,” Bourdain said.
But then, a chance encounter changed everything: Michael Batterberry, founder and editor ofFood Artsmagazine, met Bourdain at the restaurant in which he was working and gave him the idea to write an essay for theNew Yorker. The article, which unfolded the inner workings of kitchens, was expanded into the bookKitchen Confidential.Anthony Bourdain’s career as a culinary entertainer began.
“The notion I would ever make a living writing … that seemed, generally speaking, crazy talk,” ,” Bourdain told the magazine.
And that wasn’t Bourdain’s only fortuitous meeting. Le Bernadin chef Eric Ripert set the then-divorced Bourdain up on a blind date in 2006 with his now-wife Ottavia Busia. Today, the couple lives in N.Y.C.’s Upper East Side neighborhood with their 7-year-old daughter, Ariane. “When I am back in New York, it’s for a week or 10 days a month, and I’m not going out,” Bourdain said. “I’m home, I cook breakfast for my daughter, I walk her to school and pick her up when I can.”
The whole family also does jiujitsu together, which Ottavia took up after Ariane was born. “She does jiujitsu three or four hours a day, six days a week,” Bourdain said. “She’s not sitting at home filing her nails or shopping until I come home. She’s just fine choking grown men unconscious.”
So how does this controversial chef wish to be remembered? “Maybe that I grew up a little. That I’m a dad, that I’m not a half-bad cook, that I can make a good coq au vin. That would be nice. And not such a bad bastard after all.”
—Jillian Lucas
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source: people.com
