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Popular Culture Review
host Anthony Bourdain. His two programs—A Cook 's Tow\ no longer on the
Food Network, and No Resei'vations on the Travel Channel—have frequently
served as platforms for the down-and-dirty chef tales and character analyses that
Bourdain first made memorable in his bestselling book, Kitchen Confidential
(2000). Whether he is visiting his kitchen staffs home turf of Puebla, Mexico,
trotting the globe to sample every known fomi of street-stall food, or
contemplating the working innards of world-famous kitchens in his TV shows,
he rarely fails to sound Kitchen ConfidentiaFs central theme of the chefs craft
devotion under harsh conditions.
With the rising interest in chefs among the lay population, a wealth of
literature has emerged to verify this view of what it takes to become a chef
Interspersed throughout the walls of cookbooks at the local Barnes & Noble are
chef biographies, autobiographies, and industry exposes that reveal every bit and
then some of the trials of the trade, and from distinct perspectives. Books giving
the chef angle, among them Doug Psaltis’s The Seasoning of a Chef (2005) and
Bourdain’s own landmark Kitchen Confidential, make it a central point. So do
intrepid accounts of journalists who made the commitment to culinary school or
apprenticeships in professional kitchens in order to earn enough of their own
battle scars to be able to tell about it. Michael Ruhlman’s The Making of a Chef
(1997) and Bill Buford’s Heat (2006) are fine examples. We also find evidence
of the chefs tendency toward workaholism in biographies of chefs such as
Rudolf Chelminski’s The Perfectionist (2005), which pins French chef Bernard
Loiseau’s suicide on his manic pursuit and maintenance of a third Michelin star.
Even Marcia Layton Turner’s Emeiil! (2004), a more cheerleading story,
implies that it takes a superhuman level of drive and dedication to do what
Lagasse did to build his business to the point of empire. The behind-the-scenes
accounts all reveal the same truth: You don’t become that successful, or even get
to work “on the line” of an ambitious kitchen without putting in fifteen-hour
days, working nearly every day, hardly ever taking a vacation, working when
others play, and working on holidays.
Most people can’t or don’t want to withstand the extremity of these
temis and the misanthropic bent of these schedules. In fact, a 2004 article in the
Wall Street Journal quoted the director of educational development at the
American Culinary Federation as saying that between 50 and 60 percent of
culinary-school students quit working in kitchens within three years of
graduation because the work is too grueling.‘^ This is the case even though many
accounts of chef careers agree that conditions are less torturous for initiates than
they were a generation ago.
Paradoxically, however, despite the fact that the chefs TV image as
dedicated professional openly parades some of the truth of chefs’ personal-life
sacrifices, that image magically coexists alongside an equally forceful TV
portrait of the chef as heroic homemaker. Even Turner’s biography of Lagasse,
written by a self-described “fan” of the chef, had to admit that the chef paid for
his years of work on overdrive with two divorces. And yet, on Eineril Live, the