FOOD FEATURE: Street-smart food writer Anthony Bourdain joins Tom Doorley for lunch and swears only once in 90 minutes.
It's not every day that I have lunch with someone who can tell you that bear bile is pretty disgusting to drink. Even when mixed with Chinese moonshine. Anthony Bourdain has an adventurous palate; this is the man who once ate a still-beating cobra heart in Vietnam. (A bit like a pulsating oyster, apparently.) I'll confess to being a recent convert to the Bourdain cannon, and I put the delay down to rather misleading press quotes plastered on the covers of his Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour. "Elizabeth David written by Quentin Tarantino," according to A.A. Gill. "Exposes Jamie Oliver for the choirboy that he is," claims the Glasgow Herald. "It's not exactly Delia," concludes the Guardian.
Okay, I can't but agree with the last one. In his latest book, the Les Halles Cookbook, he puts plenty of clear blue water between himself and the celebrated Norwich football fancier. "Think of food like drugs," he writes. "If you were a druggie, and you moved to a new and unfamiliar town, chances are you wouldn't know where to score your drug of choice. First thing you'd do is seek out other drug users. You'd pick out an obvious spot, like the parking lot of a methadone clinic ... Same thing with food. Kind of." People who hang around the farmers' markets of south Dublin may be slow to see the similarity.
So, it's with a certain amount of trepidation that I anticipate scoring a bite to eat with the great man. I choose somewhere off the beaten track, down a narrow street, under a grimy railway arch. Okay, so it was Frank's, one of Dublin's coolest informal restaurants.
And as I wait for the great man to arrive I remember snatches of his prose. "For the timorous and feeble-minded among you, and for any howler monkeys in the tertiary stages of syphilis ... Your butter for finishing a sauce will be ready and on station. It will be f***ing SOFT!" "If you can't properly roast a damn chicken then you're one helpless, hopeless, sorry-ass bivalve in an apron ... "
Add to this a comment in the Guardian when Kitchen Confidential appeared: "An adversarial, unsmiling character, Bourdain has a gratuitous grudge against a society whose bourgeois comforts he long ago rejected."
Needless to say, Anthony Bourdain turns out to be charming, witty, urbane and altogether the sort of person that you could safely seat beside Delia Smith at dinner. I think he says "f***" only once in an hour-and-a-half which is possibly less than me. He orders a croque monsieur and a pint of Carlsberg, explaining that book tours take the edge off his appetite. Too much rich food, and too often.
Glancing at my copy of the new book, he exclaims: "Hey, you haven't got it dirty yet! This book is meant to be used. See? The cover is brown paper. It's meant to absorb grease stains ... "
It certainly is meant to be used, and I congratulate him on listing ingredients in the exact order in which they are to be used, something that is bizarrely rare in cookbooks these days. "Not many people seem to have noticed that," he says. "I'm trying to make it easy, for chrissake. Even the kick-ass style is meant to be, you know, encouraging. I don't want to scare people."
Scaring people is one thing. Offending them is another. Bourdain's comments on vegetarians have been far from complimentary. "Yeah," he says. "You know it's not so much the vegetarians, it's the vegans who really get to me. These people who go on about having a clean colon. Colonic cleansing one day, ethnic cleansing the next is the way I see it. What do they do when they travel? Just dismiss whole cultures? Veganism is rude!"
He's also concerned that animal rights activists (he's the bête noir of People for Ethical Treatment of Animals in the States) are more concerned with animals than with people. "A few years ago," he says, "some of these guys released some endangered turtles from cages in a village in south-east Asia before the locals could eat them. But they left a bunch of young girls who were being held nearby before being sold into prostitution."
South-east Asia is dear to his heart. Anyone who has read A Cook's Tour will know that he was seduced by the food culture there, and he now intends to live in Vietnam for a year. "I'm going to write a book about the experience," he says. "So basically it's going to be about being the only tall, white guy in the village."
Bourdain's tendency to revel in all things carnivorous, especially offal ("the nasty bits, the blood and guts," as he likes to say), is only part of the story.
"I think my favourite eating has to be the street food of Vietnam and Thailand," he says. "I wouldn't dare to pretend that I can recreate it. I might take ideas and influences from it, but these guys have been running their stalls for years, decades, maybe even generations. You can't copy stuff like that; you've got to live it. I love eating it, and I'm happy just to scratch the surface. The best food in the world, for me, is Vietnamese. It's so clean, so fresh. It's even healthy, for God's sake! Healthy food that tastes really good." And, of course, some of it is vegetarian.
"You know something I notice about great food cultures?" he asks. "Extreme nationalism very often goes hand in hand with them. Look at Vietnam. Look at the Basques! Why the hell doesn't Ireland have a great food culture? You know the kinda thing: you can take all the rest but you can't take away our cooking traditions because they're part of what we really are. How come that didn't happen in Ireland?"
This was, I think, a rhetorical question, but he asks, suddenly, if food is important in very nationalist areas? I admit that I've never eaten in South Armagh but that I probably would have heard if the tapas in Crossmaglen were up there with those in San Sebastian.
We move on to some Irish cheese and a glass of Merlot. There's Cashel Blue, Milleens and Crozier, the Roquefort-like sheep's cheese. And there are slices of quince. The combination is so good, we munch together in silence for a moment. "This is food culture," he says. "Small producers making a difference."
He is not an organic convert. "If meat is good, it's good," he says. "I don't care if it's had antibiotics or growth promoters or whatever. If it tastes right, that's what matters. The French have lousy beef; in the States we have some great beef. I don't really care too much about how it's done."
But he is a fan of small producers and of the "greenmarkets" back home. "Anyone who has abandoned a career as a Wall Street lawyer to dedicate his or her life to the production of artisan sausage or goat's cheese - regardless of whatever conspiracy theories he might believe in, or her taste in music - is probably well worth knowing," he writes in the introduction to the Les Halles Cookbook.
It's rare that I come across a cookbook that contains so many recipes that I actually want to cook - classic French bistro dishes from the New York restaurant where he is executive chef. After Bourdain has gone, I notice that he has drawn a picture of a dripping knife on the title page and written "Cook Free Or Die".
Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook is published by Bloomsbury at £20 in UK
ROTI DE PORC AU LAIT
Ingredients:
3lb/1.35kg boneless pork loin roast
salt and pepper
2 tbsp/28ml olive oil
1 tbsp/14g butter
1 medium onion, chopped
1 carrot, finely chopped
1 leek, white part only, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
1 tbsp flour
2 cups/450ml whole milk
1 bouquet garni
Equipment: Dutch oven (a heavy casserole); large plate; wooden spoon; strainer; small pot; hand blender; carving knife or other very sharp knife; serving platter
Season the pork with salt and pepper. Heat the oil in the Dutch oven. When the oil is hot, add the butter. Brown the roast on all sides, six to seven minutes in total. Remove the roast from the pan and set aside on the large plate. Add the onion, carrot, leek, and garlic and stir over a high heat until soft and caramelized, about 10 minutes. Stirring constantly, add the flour and cook for two minutes, then add the milk and the bouquet garni. Bring to a boil and cook over high heat for five minutes. Add the pork and any juices that have collected on the plate. Reduce the heat to a simmer. Cover and cook over low heat for one hour, making sure to periodically rotate the pork (the sugars in the milk can cause sticking and scorching). Remove pork and allow it to rest for 15 minutes.
Remove and discard the bouquet garni. Strain the cooking liquid into a small pot and bring it to a boil. Using a hand blender, purée the sauce until foamy. Adjust seasoning as needed. Carve the pork and arrange on a serving platter. Spoon the sauce over and around the meat and serve immediately.