We’re sitting in the verdant 17th-century Hotel Posada San Francisco, in the beautiful colonial Mexican town of Tlaxcala, waiting for a bad mood to hit.
We’re here because Tony Bourdain, chef and best-selling author of Kitchen Confidential, has a theory that the finest French cooks in New York come, not from Paris or Provence, but from Mexico, more specifically from this state, Puebla. But while Puebla may be renowned for its signature dish, mole poblano, it isn’t a rich culinary tradition that drives its men to the Great Kitchens of El Norte, it’s poverty. Along with sugarcane and mangoes, Puebla’s major export is cheap, hard-toiling labor.
And among its native sons is Edilberto Perez, Tony’s sous-chef at Manhattan’s Brasserie Les Halles. Eddie left his home village, Tlapanala, about 12 years ago, when he snuck over the border. Having worked his way up from dishwasher to the top of the kitchen ladder, he is proof that the American Dream lives on. Today, at age 32, he owns two homes in Mexico and rents an apartment, with his wife and two daughters, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He’s just one of the 500 or so citizens from Tlapanala (population 3,000) who work across the border every year. Walking through the quiet streets, it’s easy to detect the other husbandless homes—they’re the ones with satellite dishes on the roof.
Also with us are two cameramen, Matthew Barbato and Jerry Risius, who are shooting the trip—the highlight of which will be a traditional Mexican barbecue hosted by Eddie’s family—for a 22-part series for the Food Network. The show, A Cook’s Tour, will tie in with the publication of Tony’s upcoming book of the same name (due out this November). At heart, it will be a sociocultural essay on the role food plays in various cultures, but what’s going to get everyone’s attention is the extreme eating that Tony engages in.
Like the jumiles, the edible ants that the production office in New York has assured us we’ll find in abundance here. The little critters are served in paper cones—you drop a squeeze of lime and a pinch of salt on your tongue, tip the cone, and out they march, right into your mouth, all nice and crunchy. It’ll make great television—or would have four months ago, when jumiles were in season.
The bigger problem appears to be Tony himself. Like the host who invites you to dinner and then retreats to the kitchen to wonder when the hell you’re going to leave, Tony can be a grinch. He treats the camera like a prying neighbor, he doesn’t smile naturally, and he is, in his own words, “incapable of being adorable for extended periods of time.”
“I don’t want to be a friend to millions of Americans,” he tells me. “I truly don’t give a f— about the show making it or being renewed, or about ever working in TV again.”
So why’s he doing it?
“The access, man. It’s irresistible.”
That access has allowed Tony to swallow a live cobra’s heart in Saigon (“Tastes like an oyster, only throbbing”) and shaved pig ear, snout, and cheek tacos in Oaxaca. It’s also brought him into situations normally closed to foreigners: a sumo wrestler camp in Tokyo and a lamb slaughter in the Moroccan desert that took place nine hours by car, one hour by Land Rover, and two hours by camel from the nearest village. Two nights ago, in Puerto Angel, the locals prepared boiled iguana, and as guest of honor, Tony was served the head. Being a ninja eater, he dug right in, though he admits the texture was “akin to chewing on GI Joe” and the taste reminiscent of “the bottom of your childhood turtle tank.”
In a TV landscape dominated by Survivor, A Cook’s Tour could be a hit in spite of its star. “You’ve seen the perky programs,” says Eileen Opatut, senior vice president for programming and production at the Food Network. “Tony’s not perky. He’s critical, and at the same time he’s a pilgrim, an essayist.”
Put another way, if Emeril is the Food Network’s spice, and Jamie Oliver is the sugar, Tony Bourdain will be the salt.
Today, our star is on edge. He’s just untangled his six-foot four-inch frame from the back of a tiny knee-squeezer after a grueling three-hour drive. We’ve come here to Tlaxcala to sample two beloved pre-Hispanic delicacies: escamoles (ant eggs) and gusanos de maguey (the worms that burrow in the maguey cactus). Except Tony refuses to go into the kitchen to meet the chef. “I don’t like outsiders in my kitchen,” he says. The only good sign is that he’s sent back his espresso in favor of a Margarita. Maybe the tequila will lighten the mood.
At the table, Eddie and Martin, our driver, are salivating in anticipation. These two dishes constitute Mexico’s natural Viagra. “They give you mucho cachondo,” says Martin. “Power for the girls.” And the taste? “Very special. They fry the worms golden brown and when you first bite in it’s crispy, like pork skin. Then you chew and…”
Tony sits down, trying not to look too grave. “I hear that word special and I get nervous.”
After two mega-Margaritas, the ant eggs, sautéed in butter and parsley, are served. They resemble a pile of orzo. Tony wonders aloud why the eggs are bigger than the ants, but before the answer comes, he’s chewing studiously. “They’re perfectly good,” he says, “with a slightly aromatic, woody background, almost fungal.”
Next the worms, which look like, well, worms. But Tony appears relieved. “At least they’re small. In Saigon I had tree grubs the size of my thumb, and it was like eating fried Twinkies. You know, soft in the middle.” He piles some on a tortilla with guacamole, bites down, and gives it the thumbs-up. “Smoky, with nice texture. They could be a hit at bars if you served them with tequila shooters,” he says, extracting a thin, silky hair from his tongue.
Just when I think Tony’s being a really good sport, Mexico’s most beloved dish, chiles en nogada, appears. Sent by Jesús, the 20-year-old chef, it consists of peppers stuffed with dried fruits, pine nuts, and cinnamon-scented meat, bathed in a white almond sauce and sprinkled with pomegranate seeds. Echoing the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag, chiles en nogada is more than a food: It’s a national heritage.
Eddie and Martin dig in. El Exigente takes a cautious bite. He looks askance at the camera and gives a brief nod. “Good.” He puts down the fork—and doesn’t pick it up again. Matthew tries to coax a better response. There’s some muttering about fruit and pine nuts, but before I can get close enough to hear, Matthew’s retired his camera, his hands flying in exasperation.
“I get so frustrated,” he confides later on. “I throw out a question and he won’t answer. The camera makes him claustrophobic—when we move in, he pulls away. We’ll run into someone and they’ll ask, ‘How was Portugal?’ and Tony will enthuse, and I’ll be kicking myself because I can’t get him to say anything while we’re there. I have to remind myself he’s a writer, not a TV guy.”
Of all the professions, chefs are probably among the least equipped to be on television. Many of them get into the restaurant business to avoid the limelight. They work in small, overheated spaces and have rotten communication skills and unlovable habits. Tony fits this profile with one exception: Though he talks street and acts tough, his vocabulary is far too advanced for him to qualify as an honest-to-goodness thug.
He grew up in the leafy suburbs of New Jersey, the son of a record-company executive and a journalist. But as early as fourth grade, he says, things started to go wrong. “I was sent to private school and thrown in with these kids who lived in giant Georgian piles and whose parents never came home.” He took his first hit of pot at 12, his first tab of acid at 13. “Suddenly,” he says, “the price of recreation became very high.”
He went to Vassar College and made a lucrative business of writing other kids’ papers and selling drugs, but he dropped out after two years. His main accomplishment of those days, he says, was hooking up with his future wife, Nancy, to whom he’s been married for 15 years. A former ad exec, Nancy devotes her time to fielding calls from journalists and determining when her husband’s prose is suitable for distribution. She is also the subject of the most frequently asked question on book tours—as in “Your wife, Nancy ... How does she put up with you?”
Like army recruits who discover a sense of self-worth on the front lines, Tony found his behind the line of a grill. “I’d go home dirty, having worked like a dog, but knowing I’d accomplished a hundred and fifty dinners. My teachers used to say I needed a controlled environment. In the kitchen I found one.”
By the beginning of the go-go ’80s, Tony had moved to New York City, where he watched ten restaurants go under, observed plenty of underworld crime, and met the other loves of his life: heroin and cocaine. He did those drugs like he did all things, to the extreme (one year he dropped a $70,000 inheritance on cocaine), but after two robberies at knifepoint and “all the usual horror stories,” he finally bottomed out. He kicked the drugs in the mid-’80s, retired his rebel image (at least temporarily), and then entered a fallow period of job jumping and depression that he refers to as his “wilderness years.” He also published two novels that disappeared without any notice.
In 1998, just after he’d signed on as executive chef at Les Halles, he began an article about the restaurant business that he hoped to sell for $100 to a local city paper. At his mother’s suggestion, he sent it to one of her friends at The New Yorker. A month later, the phone rang in the kitchen of Les Halles; it was David Remnick, the magazine’s editor in chief. Three months later, the article appeared in print. Titled “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” it was like a punch in the stomach to every New Yorker who had ever eaten in a restaurant (i.e., everybody).
He told readers never to order fish on Mondays (because the week’s final delivery is always on Friday), to eat hollandaise (“a veritable petri dish of biohazards”) only if they didn’t mind melted butter recycled from some stranger’s table, and that chefs put aside particularly tough, nerve-riddled pieces of meat for customers who order it well-done.
“You could smell the kitchen from that article,” recalls Bloomsbury USA editorial director Karen Rinaldi, who, upon finishing the piece, phoned Tony’s agent and offered him a book contract on the spot.
Kitchen Confidential was brash, bullying, and brilliantly written. In it, Tony railed against “sauce-on-the-side” vegetarians and lazy American- and French-trained cooks, and he detailed everything you never wanted to know about the business of cooking. The book sold 160,000 copies and sat on the New York Times best-seller list for 14 weeks (it has since been released in paperback). Tony became the poster boy for badly behaving cooks everywhere, and Brad Pitt is rumored to have signed on to play him in the movie version, Seared.
No one was more shocked by the book’s success than its author. “I was terrified. I saw myself in some small, horrible way becoming like Emeril. I’d go to a reading and look out and see all these adoring people out there. I’m everything they’d never let their daughters associate with! I’m a forty-five-year-old, chain-smoking ex-junkie with a less than distinguished culinary career. Bobby Flay looks like a Greek god in comparison. Why me?”
That’s the question on all our minds, many hours and wrong turns later, as we pull into a pulquería for what Tony’s been referring to as his “Under the Volcano moment.” This is where he plans to down bucketfuls of pulque, the Mexican moonshine fermented from the agua miel of the maguey cactus, which is something like a cross between between buttermilk and beer. Consumed in sufficient quantities, the stuff reputedly has hallucinogenic properties.
Tony sidles up to the bar and orders a few plastic buckets of the slimy white liquid. Matthew and Jerry look dubious. The place is painted a chalky blue and lined with faded paintings. Music screeches from an old jukebox, and a lone patron sits at a table chortling to himself. Tony appears upbeat, in a forced sort of way. “This is my kind of place,” he tells Eddie.
After a few buckets of grog, we’re still the only people, and the scene is feeling more Barfly than Under the Volcano. It turns out Mexicans like to drink pulque during the midday siesta. Right now it’s 7 p.m. and way past closing time.
Matthew encourages Tony to reminisce about John Huston’s classic film, to down another drink, but & nothing. Everything’s gone quiet and strange. Without a word, Tony gets up and rips out his mike. That’s it. The star is outta here.
For the second time today, Matthew has been thwarted. Maybe it was the mix of insect delicacies, or too much booze, or not enough booze. Or maybe it’s just the way a man who’s been cooped up in kitchens most of his life deals with the impending threat of national fame.
Eddie’s ranch, a smattering of concrete buildings bordering a central yard, overlooks a tiny village surrounded by pipe-organ cacti and a few grazing goats. By the time we arrive, several rancheros are loading the barbacoa pit they dug this morning. At the bottom of the pit, the men position giant pots to collect the juices they’ll use as stock for the goat’s-head soup. Gently, they lower in five freshly butterflied goats, blanketing them in avocado leaves and laced branches that will drip pinesap into the brew. The stomachs have been extracted and stuffed with mint, onions, carrots, and blood for a smoky, rustic version of boudin noir. Five girls in communion dresses gently rest the skinned goat skulls atop the pile, as if putting their dollies to bed.
The midday heat is shoe-melting, but all around the yard women have staked their positions over open fires: One boils rice; another pinches cornmeal masa, slapping and pressing it into tortillas; a third de-spines and roasts nopales. It’s like an army in action, connected by young girls running messages, bowls, and knives between them. A sweet, floppy-eared baby goat has found its way into Tony’s arms, and the star is enjoying an uncharacteristic moment of cuteness.
“You hated the chiles en nogada yesterday, didn’t you?” I ask once we’ve staked out a patch in the shade.
“I hated hated HATED it.”
“So why not say so?”
“Because that chef was an adorable kid just starting out, running an impeccably clean kitchen. I didn’t want him to go home feeling bad just so I could provide amusement for the camera.”
“Why couldn’t you say, ‘I don’t like it because it has fruit and pine nuts in it?’ ” asks Matthew.
“Look, I may not like what Grandma makes, but I’m certainly not gonna tell Grandma. I’m gonna smile and shove it down.”
All of which makes me think we got Tony totally wrong. He wasn’t being difficult. He was being decent.
Many hours and several beers later, the goats have been hoisted, a soundstage has been rigged, an impromptu press conference has been convened, and the mariachis are tuning their guitars. A crowd starts to gather. Eddie is nervous. (“A little drunk, too.”) The mayor’s arrived, along with 50 other majordomos, and they’re all seated at a long banquet table beneath a straw palapa.
The goat’s-head soup is served, and Tony dutifully smacks his lips, first for the camera (“It’s fine”), then for me (“It’s incredible! This is INCREDIBLE!! I mean f—ing incredible!!!”).
He goes on to connect a few cross-cultural culinary dots. “In Morocco, eating happens in small groups. And there’s very little verbal communication between husband and wife. It’s said that you can tell your wife’s mood by her cooking. A lot of information goes into how well the couscous is fluffed that day.
“But Mexico is like Vietnam. It’s ten or twelve people eating at a twelve-top, the kids and Grandpa tearing into food, having a great time, dropping shells on the floor, drinking and smoking. Both are family-based social structures with matriarchies. In our culture, the whole point is to get away from Mom as soon as possible. We come at food counterclockwise, which is why we need some chef to show us how to eat a great meatloaf.”
Next come Flintstones-size portions of hacked goat, roasted nopal salad, and blood pudding; towers of fresh tortillas; and a fragrant, sharp avocado and pasilla chile salsa that I’d pay Albina to bottle. The mariachis sing, and a guy in deerskin pants executes some major lariat moves with his rope. This is followed by a singing cowboy in a sombrero the size of a small satellite dish sitting on a shiny fawn palomino that sidesteps, two-steps, and lays on its side at the vaquero’s command. The scene is a magic-realist dream, set in a house that steak frites built. It’s going to make great television.
Everyone’s delirious, especially Tony, who looks almost teary-eyed when he turns to me. “This is the best, man. It’s what I’ve been talking about all along. Food is about love and family and friendship. I can’t believe I can see my dishwasher’s face in that woman dancing.”
By now, it’s clear to me that despite any success he might have as a best-selling writer or outrageous TV personality, Tony Bourdain is still, at heart, a cook. What matters to him is being here with Eddie, just as what matters in New York isn’t eating in four-star restaurants or schmoozing with the world’s leading culinary lights. It’s being able to go to a restaurant at midnight and pull up to the bar with the other guys in whites. To him, cooking is about the camaraderie that goes on behind the kitchen doors and around the table. The food is almost the least of it.