Read Online THENASTYBITS by Anthony Bourdain - Free Book Online Page B

to do. Perhaps the CIA should start a farm team in Mexico or Panama, like the Yankee organization. And every Mexican and Ecuadoran line cook in New York should get an immediate raise, amnesty from any immigration charges, a real green card—and the thanks of a grateful nation.
COUNTER CULTURE

    for a while, i thought it was just me. After years of eating well, in great restaurants, four hours at Alain Ducasse New York now felt like a year with an ugly mob. Sitting there in my high-backed chair, choking in my tie, oppressed by the dark dining room, the relentlessly hushed formality of it all . . . by the time my waiter pushed over the little cart and invited me to choose from a selection of freaking bottled waters, unironically describing the sources and attributes of each while I squirmed in agony, I felt ready for my head to explode with frustration. At Charlie Trotter's in Chicago, asking simply where I could find a bathroom, I had my napkin whisked away and was escorted to the bathroom with humiliating ceremony (all the way into the stall—where, as I recall with unease, I was also advised how I might find paper and operate a toilet). By the time the waiter had dutifully replaced the refolded napkin on my lap, surely no one in the dining room was left uninformed as to exactly where I'd been and what I'd had to do. There might as well have been a flourish of trumpets announcing "the customer at table seven has an urgent need for a piss!" While it's okay for Ferran Adria to tell me exactly how he wants me to eat each dish ("One bite! All at once!"—he is Ferran Adria, after all), some foam- and agar-agar-crazed wannabe in London or Chicago who tries to tell me how to chew my food is gonna get a pepper mill upside his head—if he even allows pepper near the table anymore. I've had it with the pomposity of it all. Restaurants are supposed to be about the food, aren't they? They're supposed to be . . . well . . . fun.
    Call it a collective yearning, a simultaneous rush of welt-schmerz, a sense of general exhaustion with the rigors of traditional fine-dining-style service, or simply a growing realization that the previously de rigeur features of the high-end dining room are too damned expensive to be practical; but thankfully, more and more culinary gurus appear to harbor similar instincts and are moving away from the idea that good food has to be served in hushed temples of gastronomy. Some of the world's best chefs, if not always entirely abandoning the churchlike atmosphere of the Michelin-starred dining room are, at the very least, successfully exploring other options. I think it's a long overdue development.
    Opening up more accessible, less formal, fashionably down-scale outlets than their signature mothership operations(s) is, of course, nothing new. Alain Ducasse spawned his Spoons for a presumably less moneyed, more on-the-go crowd looking to suck up a little reflected glory with their ben to boxes. Charlie Trotter's Trotter To Go enabled those who felt they weren't paying enough for a potato to fulfill their dreams of haute takeout. And Wolfgang Puck famously embraced the Beast entirely, opening a vast empire of airport pizza joints. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, while maintaining the impeccable Jean-Georges mothership, has frenetically (and usually successfully) flirted with a variety of dining styles and themes—everything from family-style Chinese eaten at communal tables to Singaporean street food—without noticeably diminishing the "brand." Even Thomas Keller has opened a (nonetheless Keller-ized) bistro in the heart of ugly-shorts capitalist darkness, Las Vegas.
    But the most radical moves have been taken by chefs as far apart geographically as Paris, New York, Chicago, and Montreal, chef-operators as different in temperament and training as any could be. What seems to unite them is their willingness— nay, eagerness—to dispense almost entirely with all they deem
COUNTER CULTURE
    unnecessary to the service