Book Report: A Cook's Tour by Anthony Bourdain

A Cook's Tour: Torgo disapproves

I only finished reading this book so I could write this.

What a terrible book. Not just bad. Not just a bad book. But a book so full of awfulness -- no, that's not it. It's not just that it's terrible. It's that it's a good idea: modestly successful chef travels the world in search of the perfect meal. And Anthony Bourdain squanders it.

Why does this book suck?

First, it's a tv show. I've never seen it, but I guess when he pitched the idea to his publisher, they said no. Then the Food Network signed on, and the book was a go. He's up front about his corporate whoredom right from the get go. At first, I thought that was nice. He's being open.

But he only is open about it so he can spend 1/3 of the book whining about how hard it is to be a tv star and about how bothersome having a camera crew follow you can be. Never once does he acknowledge that without the tv show, there would be no book.

And there is no book. He goes to 30 or so places around the world and yet he writes the sloppiest, most haphazard, most poorly edited collection of ramblings and garbage imaginable.

I'm not sure if he goes to Vietnam once or 5 times. But he keeps ending up there in the internal chronology of the book. And every time he's there he fawns over Graham Greene's Quiet American and Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

Saigon. I'm still only in Saigon.

Yeah, I get it. I saw that movie, too. It was good. You're not the movie. You're not Graham Greene. You're a damn chef eating noodles and running out of adjectives by page 5.

Then there's the smoking. Ok, I know a lot of chefs smoke. Doctors smoke, too, at least outside of every hospital I've been around. It's not that he should know better. I'm not going to get morally superior. I wanted to complain about how he can't possibly taste things as well because he's a chain smoker in his middle age and by god his tongue must be like an ashtray in a Nevada truck stop. But no, that's not it.

It's that he whines incessantly about how hard it is to be a smoker. God, who cares? He hates San Francisco because he can't smoke anywhere here (and this is near the end of the book, so I'm not upset with him over this -- in fact, he credits the best chef in the world as being the guy who runs the French Laundry over in Napa).

I don't think you get the right to be condescending and smug if you're a piece of crap writer. At least not with your prose. Be smug in the kitchen.