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And I'll generally take a stand-up mercenary who takes pride in his professionalism over an artist any day.

It can be, at times, the purest and most unselfish way of giving pleasure (though oral sex has to be a close second). Released in 2000 to wide acclaim, the book is both a professional memoir and an unfiltered look at the less glamorous aspects of high-end restaurant kitchens, which he describes as unremittingly intense, unpleasant, hazardous, and staffed by misfits. Blah, blah, blah, drugs blah, blah, fuck everyone, pork chop, fuck you all, mince, veal, drugs, blood, blah, blah, blah.The restaurant industry is hard and requires a phenomenal amount of work from its chefs, but it apparently does not, as Bourdain tries to say for hundreds of pages, require them to be assholes. Chef, author, and raconteur Anthony Bourdain is best known for traveling the globe on his TV show Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.

The timing turns out perfect for that documentary that just came out, however, and I’ll try to watch Road Runner within the next few days.

After a few weeks of this, we took a night train to Paris, where we met up with my father and a spanking new Rover Sedan Mark III, our touring car. I also have some opinions about Bourdain's last days, Asia Argento and media coverage, but I'm not sure to what extent GR still cracks down on posts that discuss authors' personal lives, so to be on the safe side I will refrain. He takes us on a journey from his first realization that food was something more than just nourishment (when as an elementary student he tasted vichyssoise on the Queen Mary) through the various restaurants he inhabited for countless hours, to the heart of Asia where he learned that New York City was not the be-all and end-all of cuisine.

This was something of a discovery for a curious fourth-grader whose entire experience of soup to this point had consisted of Campbell's cream of tomato and chicken noodle. So then the guy gives him a weird look, and the interview ends with Bourdain knowing he's not getting the job. The second thing is the frightening descriptions of his mental state, which I feel were largely overlooked as people were distracted with lushness and brilliant humor with which he described a world of restaurants. Let it suffice to say that by age eighteen I was a thoroughly undisciplined young man, blithely flunking or fading out of college (I couldn't be bothered to attend classes).I'm not sure why I picked this up, I guess because I heard Bourdain was the "punk rock chef," but besides listening to the Sex Pistols and Velvet Underground while he cooked, there's not a whole lot else going on of a punk rock nature. They took us everywhere, from restaurant to restaurant, cringing, no doubt, every time we insisted on steak haché (with ketchup, no less) and a "Coca. Head and tail of spine very slightly crumpled, pages lightly browned, front free endpaper very lightly creased with an impression the size of a thumb otherwise a clean and sound copy of a very scarce item in wrapper with slight shelf-wear to edges. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. His work has appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker, and he was a contributing authority for Food Arts magazine.