Brian Fawcett has had enough of Anthony Bourdain and chefs as Darwinist culture heroes, particularly when they decide to write autobiographies.

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White Slave: The Godfather of Modern Cooking, by Marco Pierre White (with James Steen), Orion Books, HB, 306 pp. no price given

 
When Anthony Bourdain appeared on the scene a few years ago, he was a breath of, well, redolent odours of serious cooking. He took food out of the dining rooms of swish restaurants and suburban bungalows and put it where it should be first and finally-in our mouths. But every revolution has its side effects, and those from the revolution Bourdain started have some unexpectedly stinky aromas.

 Among the several things Bourdain did was to turn food preparation into a high level cultural activity. He did this, oddly enough, by giving us, in Kitchen Confidential, more of the grungy details of life in restaurant kitchens than most of us want to know. But the book was successful enough that it transformed chefs into genuine culture heroes.

 Alas, everyone forgot that in the real world, culture heroes are almost always dreadful assholes. That's why every fifth rate short-order cook in the Western World has now read his Kitchen Confidential and is acting like Marlon Brando and demanding to be treated like Maria Callas. This is not what you want from people who are generally badly educated and carry large, sharp knives.

Bourdain's best book-the one that didn't inflict collateral damage-is A Cook's Tour, his private narrative of different food cultures around the world. He was able to write the book while television's Food Network was paying him more money than either a book publisher or restaurant owner could dream of affording so it could follow him around with a video camera. The tour made decent television, because Bourdain is an entertaining guy. But A Cook's Tour-the book-liberated Bourdain's culinary curiosity from the Darwinist follies of the restaurant kitchen, and the result was ultimately more interesting than Kitchen Confidential. I think it's the best book I've ever read about food that doesn't contain recipes.

But then the other shoe dropped. The recipes in his cholesterol-caked 2004 Les Halles Cookbook revealed that Bourdain is a better food writer than chef. Then in 2006, he published The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps and Bones, which reads like a series of blogs from a man being taken over-and oppressed-by the media persona created for him. The book consists of a raft of rants so "Bourdainesque" it's overly polite to call them self-parody. It left me and more than one person I've talked to wishing Bourdain would just shut up and leave us all alone.

That's unlikely, but it's even more unlikely that the monsters he let loose are going to leave us in peace, whether we're eating or just reading about eating. Witness the truly abusive and loathsome Gordon Ramsay, the pock-marked Beelzebub of reality-television-meets-the Food-Network. Ramsay is a kind of caricature of Bourdain's worst flaws with none of his wit or charm. Then there's Marco Pierre White's ghost-written autobiography, White Slave.

Marco Pierre White is apparently the role model for Ramsay, and to a lesser extent, Bourdain. Now, I'm sure that Mr. White is a wonderful cook, as witnessed by the three Michelin stars his British restaurants have earned (which fact he reiterates on roughly every third page so we won't forget it). But he's not a writer and he's not a very deep thinker. Nor, unfortunately, is his ghost-writer, James Steen, whose other accomplishments include editing the now celebrity-addled Punch and writing gossip columns. Neither of them seem able to impart any of the secrets truths about food beyond glorifying the Darwinian violence of restaurant kitchens, and Bourdain has already overdosed readers on that count.

 Distressingly, White/Steen have even fewer insights concerning the world beyond the kitchen. White seems to think, occasionally with a simple-mindedness that's hilarious and depressing at the same time, that everything bad or difficult in both his character and his daily life is explainable by his Italian mother's death when he was six, and his subsequent Feelings of Abandonment. White has done some psychotherapy, and his therapist was evidently a doctrinaire Freudian-the paint-by-numbers kind. "Following my mother's death," White/Steen intone as an explanation of why White's first marriage crashed, "I hadn't been encouraged to talk about the burden of grief and because I was severely underdeveloped when it came to sharing my emotions I mustn't have been the most communicative husband. I'm not asking for sympathy, that's just the way I was."

Freud is also the culprit in the selection of the book jacket's photographs. The front cover features a fairly recent photograph of White posing with a fat cigar in his right hand and an expression on his kisser so over-the-top pretentious it is impossible not to giggle. On the back jacket for contrast is a 1990 photo of White dressed in his kitchen togs with a cigarette dangling from his lips. The implication, I suppose, is that the years (and the Michelin stars) have made his, er, cigar grow bigger and fatter.

Doesn't sound promising, does it? It isn't, mostly. But there are compensations, particularly if you have a weakness for Visigoth slapstick. You get a subtle but substantial whiff of that in the book's subtitle: "The Godfather of Modern Cooking". The celebrity-addled Steen and whoever edited the book clearly believe that human history began somewhere around 1975, and that the "modern" age commenced somewhere in the 1990s.

There are lots of other Visigoth pratfalls in the text, even though White and Steen seem to have little idea when their protagonist is doing his silliest ones. My favourite is the passage in which he describes what happened when the interior decorator who designed the hamburger joint White turned into his first restaurant showed up and demanded to be given a free dinner. White, who looks like a helium and steroid-inflated version of the boxer Jake LaMotta, loathed the restaurant's décor and so refused to serve the interior designer at all. When the designer was informed of this, he tried to storm the kitchen to declare his displeasure, and White beat the crap out him.

Then there's the celebrity name-dropping: "...the very next day I got a call from Madonna's assistant, asking me if I would like to join the icon for afternoon tea." White/Steen write. "I accepted. It would have been rude not to. We had tea at the Hyde Park Hotel, where she was staying, and have been friends ever since. She and her husband, Guy Ritchie, have been very special people in my life. They come to my restaurants and we go shooting together. They are exceptionally kind." His description of getting to know Paul McCartney's ex Heather Mills is only slightly less ridiculous than his story about being prevented from cooking a $10,000 a head celebrity lunch for Princess Diana by her fatal car accident. "Needless to say," the authors feel compelled to point out, "the lunch was cancelled."

This sort of stuff can be quite entertaining if you're perverse enough to enjoy witnessing people making asses of themselves. But when it comes down to it, Marco Pierre White is the sort of human being you might be gratified to know is alive and cooking, but he's also the sort of person you'd never want to meet in person. As for White Slave, the best that be said about it is that it's an entertaining example of a genre-restaurant kitchen Darwinist mysticism-that we can do without. The only place in the book where I was really convinced White and his ghost writer were knew and were able to tell the straight truth was in a late-in-the-book description of how to fry an egg properly. Unfortunately, White's method is illegal in most Canadian provinces. The rest was the brown stuff Bourdain has been slinging, except not high enough quality to be digestible.

1300 words May 28th, 2007