Joe McNamee: There is much more to cheffing than macho stereotypes

Joe McNamee shares his view on Anthony Bourdain's book 'Kitchen Confidential', following the release of 'Tony', a biopic on Bourdain

I hummed and hawed so long over Tony, the Anthony Bourdain biopic, that it left the local cinema by the time I still hadn’t made up my mind. Yet Bourdain was indirectly responsible for my own career with this paper beginning almost a quarter of a century ago, a quasi-review of Kitchen Confidential.

The commissioning editor specifically asked me, a former chef, to confirm whether Bourdain’s tales of hell-raising excess rang true, if restaurant kitchens really were the last refuge of the damned.

The late Cork-born photographer Bob Carlos Clarke had birthed the template for “chef-as-rockstar” a decade earlier with his visceral black and white shots of Marco Pierre White in the seminal White Heat cookbook. The cover of Kitchen Confidential moved that look into the realms of pastiche. Bourdain and compadre chefs in whites lean against a graffitied wall. Bourdain and one companion are buried under tousled, tumbling black curls, the third wears the bristling moustache of a badlands bandito. All three casually sport cimeters, butcher’s knives, with long curving blades, cutlass as much as cooking accessory, cementing their status as renegade outlaws living beyond the law. It birthed a visual code that persists to this day in myriad chef snaps: Edgy, dour demeanour; multiple tattoos; big dangerous knives; bonus points for a carcass; top marks for wearing a carcass like some bloody, porcine stole.

Kitchen Confidential is a book about cooking with no recipes save, perhaps, the mix of amphetamines and alcohol required to navigate a 48-hour shift. As a summer dishwasher in a seaside restaurant staffed by ex-hippies and a Vietnam vet, churning out hundreds of covers a day on a diet of pills, booze, and marijuana, Bourdain found his vocation. Seeing the head chef deflower a bride in the backyard while the groom and wedding party blithely eat the wedding feast inside is a moment of epiphany. It never lets up, food/cooking ever second to endless dissolution, alcohol, drugs, sex, and violence, verbal and physical. However, the real measure of a chef is enduring this punishing regime of self-abuse while still delivering on the plate, culinary angels in devil’s clothing.

So why did I not overly care for Kitchen Confidential? Yes, I confirmed I had witnessed, sometimes participated in, similar, even worse in London kitchens in the ’80s.

Yes, cheffing is physically and mentally brutal to an extraordinary degree. Yes, the moral code in kitchens back then was mostly formed in a territory beyond the bounds of convention. And yet it didn’t quite ring true. What grated was the age-old ethos of the “greatest artists” living fast and dying young applied to the restaurant kitchen, a notion increasingly puerile the more you run out of life to live. I am no stranger to a party but, over time, post-party war stories of gratuitous excess and subsequent consequences too often blur into nothing more than the same old tedious story, other than from truly gifted raconteurs or the truly insane, or a combination of both, such as Hunter S Thompson.

A Sunday broadsheet recently ran an extract from Knives and Spoons: A Chef’s Story of Kitchens, Addictions, and Mayhem (Pan Macmillan), by Alasdair Gill, son of late food critic AA Gill. Though ultimately Gill Jr’s redemption story of recovery from addiction, the extract primarily focuses on gory details of his gargantuan substance consumption while still cooking like an angel. The staged photo of now clean and sober Gill see him in his whites, earring, and scruffy, unkempt hair, festooned with tattoos, moodily contemplating a glittering cleaver.

All these years on, and the Kitchen Confidential stereotype still holds firm. That stereotype has drawn many an aspiring Bourdain to a career in the belief that only a culinary Keith Richards can be the true artist, a belief often only later dismantled in an addiction clinic.

My attitude to Bourdain thawed over time. His New Yorker article, My Aim is True, about Justo Thomas, a fish butcher at Michelin three-starred Le Bernardin in New York, is a bravura food writing masterclass, and his TV series saw him grow into a rather wonderful human being, flawed yet possessed of great integrity and compassionate humanity. I’d liked to have shared a pint with that older man and asked him what he thought of Kitchen Confidential after all these years.

Table Talk

Freshly returned from a wild and wonderful weekend at a wedding in Ballydehob, I also managed to sample the very fine fare in chef Simon Kershaw’s fledgling Kitchen Stories restaurant, in the West Cork village.

The talented Kershaw was formerly sous chef to chef Bob Cairns of Camus Farm Field Kitchen and also operated Ron D’s food truck in Ballydehob serving the finest toasties in Ireland, beginning with his own sourdough. Kitchen Stories is tiny but in this bijou space, Kershaw is churning out a produce-driven menu with flavours big enough to fill a battleship.

Very definitely one to watch.

Instagram: @kitchenstorieswestcork

A series of exclusive art, wining and dining events at the equally exclusive Ballyfin begins on October 7 with a collaboration with Cos d’Estournel, the renowned Saint-Estèphe chateau.

Kicking off with champagne and canapes, head chef Richard Picard-Edwards will deliver a six-course tasting menu after in collaboration with Château Cos d’Estournel commercial directorCharles Thomas, each course paired to the estate’s wines, including vintages from 2010 and 2018.

• ballyfin.com

Today’s Special

Cloud Picker Coffee’s cold brew coffee range

This was the summer when I finally caught up with my offspring and embraced the iced coffee as part of my daily caffeine intake and it was all down to Cloud Picker Coffee’s cold brew coffee range (250ml can, €4). All vegan, it includes Oat Matcha Latte and Oat Caramel Latte but it was the original Nitro Cold Brew that gave me the perfect lift on a sunny day. With sweet notes of nutty, dark, fruity chocolate and a lively silken mouthfeel, it is quite divine with ice. As temperatures cool, I have been employing it as a key ingredient in an evening cocktail, especially fine with a measure of Rebel City Distillery’s Maherani Pomelo Vodka and caramel sugar syrup.

• cloudpickercoffee.ie