Anthony Bourdain Quotes

When I die, I want to come back as a Mexican, a Poblano, a fucking grown-up.

The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts 'fringe elements', people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong.

You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.

Remember, brunch is only served once a week — on the weekends. Buzzword here, 'Brunch Menu'. Translation? 'Old, nasty odds and ends, and 12 dollars for two eggs with a free Bloody Mary'.

In another telling anomaly of the meat-grinding business, many of the larger slaughterhouses will sell their product only to grinders who agree to not test their product for E. coli contamination — until after it's run through a grinder with a whole bunch of other meat from other sources...It's like demanding of a date that she have unprotected sex with four or five other guys immediately before sleeping with you — just so she can't point the finger directly at you should she later test positive for clap.

But I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.

As well, there’s the age-old syndrome common to fans of musicians with passionate and discerning cult followings. When the objects of adulation are crass enough to become popular, they quickly become a case of “used to be good.

I learned to recognize failure.

And I had my first oyster. Now, this was a truly significant event. I remember it like I remember losing my virginity — and in many ways, more fondly.

Who had the bigger boat, wore the better outfit, got the best table seemed all that mattered. There were decade-old feuds over casual cracks long forgotten by everyone but the principals. They circled each other still — waiting to identify a weakness — looking for somewhere and some way to strike. People jockeyed for position, cut each other’s throats over the most petty, nonsensical shit imaginable. This from the people who, it gradually began to dawn on me, actually ran the world.

I’m just saying, I guess, that I got very lucky. And luck is not a business model.

If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.

The whole suggestion is predicated on a damnable fucking lie — the BIG lie, actually — one which Richman himself happily helped create and which he works hard, on a daily basis, to keep alive. See … it makes for a better article when you associate the food with a personality. Richman, along with the best and worst of his peers, built up these names, helped make them celebrities by promoting the illusion that they cook — that if you walk into one of dozens of Jean-Georges’s restaurants, he’s somehow back there on the line, personally sweating over your halibut, measuring freshly chopped herbs between thumb and forefinger. Every time someone writes “Mr. Batali is fond of strong, assertive flavors” (however true that might be) or “Jean Georges has a way with herbs” and implies or suggests that it was Mr. Batali or Mr. Vongerichten who actually cooked the dish, it ignores the reality, if not the whole history, of command and control and the creative process in restaurant kitchens. While helpful to chefs, on the one hand, in that the Big Lie builds interest and helps create an identifiable brand, it also denies the truth of what is great about them: that there are plenty of great cooks in this world — but not that many great chefs. The word “chef” means “chief.” A chef is simply a cook who leads other cooks. That quality — leadership, the ability to successfully command, inspire, and delegate work to others — is the very essence of what chefs are about. As Richman knows. But it makes better reading (and easier writing) to first propagate a lie — then, later, react with entirely feigned outrage at the reality.

I had field experience, a vocabulary and a criminal mind. I was a danger to myself and others.

I am not a fan of people who abuse service staff. In fact, I find it intolerable. It’s an unpardonable sin as far as I’m concerned, taking out personal business or some other kind of dissatisfaction on a waiter or busboy.