AHD celebrates Bourdain Day
Last of the Mohicans
As we settle into the twenty first century we are witnessing the death of celebrity chefs as we know it.
Anthony Bourdain’s death was met with an unparalleled outpouring of both shock and grief. As unexpected as it was tragic, Bourdain was a potent champion of all that is wonderful about food. He was both a celebrated chef, but more importantly in the second half of his career, a symbol of what it is to be a consumer, or more fittingly an experiencer of worldly pleasures.
It is telling that in today’s age of hyper consumption, the consumer has taken over as the hero from the actual producer. Bourdain was both, which is one of the reasons he became such a popular figure. He was also perhaps the last of the big dick swinging, ball busting, middle-finger saluting, hellraisers that have seared themselves into our collective unconscious of what it is to be a chef. The cover of his debut book, Kitchen Confidential, says it all. Bourdain and two of his kitchen colleagues, standing thick as thieves against an alley wall outside their restaurant in Provincetown in 1972. They look more like highway robbers in a line-up, with their knives consciously or not standing in for their manhood.
While this unabashed alpha male posturing stands out like a sore thumb in today’s culture of neurotic inclusivity, it has the appeal of a bygone age, a time when being a chef was all sex, drugs and mis en place. It was unequivocally a man’s domain. Until very recently, chefs have always been men, apart from a few notable exceptions. And celebrity chefs have always been men. Let’s take it back a few thousand years and replace celebrity with renown. There have always been renowned chefs whose skill and creativity made them famous, but the passage of time usually means we know little more about them than their names. From ancient Greece and Rome there is only one cookbook that survives in full attributed to the Roman cook Marcus Gavius Apicius.
The first chef in the Western world we know about is Guillaume Tirel, a man who cooked for two French Kings in the 1300s. He essentially kicked off French cuisine, wrote a famous recipe book, Le Viandier, and got knighted in the process. He also probably had great hair and swore like a sailor on shore leave. And for the next 500 years that was the template for any aspiring chef. Work your way up in the castle or palace and cook solely for the top ecclesiastical and aristocratic types of their day. The famous chefs of the time spent their entire career in the employ of individuals, meaning few people had the chance to sample their cooking.
Famous chefs for two thousand years were only famous to a very small number of people. The rest of the populous were too busy eating the soles of their shoes to care about what the one percenters were consuming. That only changed with the advent of industrialisation and the birth of restaurants.
Georges Escoffier was the father of French cooking as we know it, and the only reason we know it is because he was active at that point in history that allowed for the birth of the restaurant. Up until that point eating out was a convenience; an ale and a leg of mutton at the local inn. Escoffier’s collaboration with Cesar Ritz, manager of the Savoy in London and the Ritz Hotel in Paris, gave birth to the great hotel restaurant. As industrialisation spread its tentacles across Europe, it spawned a new class of minted mercantiles and industrialists and an army of factory floor foot soldiers, who although weren’t pulling in the tidy sums of their bosses, now had something that the general population had never seen before – discretionary income. The twentieth century ushered in the rise of the consumer and with it a new breed of celebrity.
The middle of the twentieth century saw the first celebrity chef in Paul Bocusse, but it was a fame built on reverence for technique rather than his personality. However, as the power of critics waned and new mediums of communication sprang up, it was the public that soon found themselves in the driver’s seat of who to anoint as knights of the modern cooking world.
Television in particular shaped our understanding of cooking giving us unparalleled access to the previously closed world of the restaurant kitchen. Marco Pierre White was the first chef to blaze a trail in the new medium. His renaissance good looks, intensity and bad boy antics seared him into the public imagination, with his autobiography White Heat bringing him to a much larger audience than just those lucky few who could afford to eat at his three Michelin star restaurant. His extraordinary talent came hand in hand with a hair trigger temper that elevated the intensity of any working kitchen into the realm of theatre. Cooking became a life and death struggle and the public couldn’t get enough of it. It was only fitting that the pressure cooker environment of his kitchen should produce the next in line to claim the throne in the shape of another potty-mouthed alpha male – Gordon Ramsay.
While his restaurant empire has seen rises and falls, the constant of Ramsay is his ability to swear himself into the public consciousness. His blistering F-word tirades are seen as an authentic expression of his dedication to his craft. But how many of his Kitchen Nightmares viewers have actually eaten at any of his restaurants?
Like art, cooking has decoupled from the production to personality. The fragmentation of culinary authority and absence of any agreed upon code since the 1970s meant the focus shifted from the dish to the chef. Much like art, where the focus flipped from the art to the artist. Who can actually pick a Picasso out from Braque? At some point achieving fame detached from cooking and relied on personality. Jamie Oliver used television to catapult himself into the public conscious as a social champion trying single-handedly to change the eating habits of an entire nation and was actually knighted in the process.
But their day is over. Pierre White has lost the intensity along with the good looks and is only tempted from his English country estate by the easy money of a MasterChef walk on. Ramsay’s appeal as equal parts bully and saviour is waning the more he relies on botox and hair dye. And as the boyish good looks are replaced with the face of middle aged publican who won the lottery, Oliver’s saintly appeal is no longer enough to keep his restaurant chain solvent.
So where does that leave the role of celebrity chefs in today’s over saturated media landscape of 30 second attention spans? It leaves us with Salt Bae. The Turkish internet sensation who intuitively understands that to be great you need to be able to get your message across in 45 seconds, the ideal length of an Instagram story. And that’s where we come full circle. Bourdain was torch bearer for every wannabe global food junkie who wanted her life to be lived through experience rather than the accumulation of stuff. But now he’s gone, we are just left staring at our completely unoriginal Insta food pics wondering who’s looking anyway.
Food, unlike art, doesn’t linger in the mind. It lingers in the gut for 24 hours. Whether you ate a Big Mac or a Noma degustation it all ends the same way. Food and death are inexorably linked. From Jesus’ last supper to the condemned man’s last meal, we all know that one day we will be faced with a last meal. Maybe that’s where Bourdain’s feverish energy sprang from.
“If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die.”
Author: Sheridan Randall
