Tag: Anthony Bourdain

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Film Features Film/TV

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain on location in Morgan Neville's new documentary Roadrunner.

It’s weird to talk about “the mystery” of Anthony Bourdain. The truth is, the chef-turned-author-turned-travel show star was one of the most visible and open people on the planet. At one point in Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, director Morgan Neville uses clips from a 2016 episode of the CNN travelogue show Parts Unknown in which Bourdain talks to a therapist while visiting Argentina. “I should be happy,” he says. “I have incredible luck.” 

Do you ever feel happy, the therapist asks? “No,” replies Bourdain. 

It’s true, Bourdain did have good luck. His 2000 book Kitchen Confidential defined the seedy glamour of restaurant work for a generation—more importantly, it was an inspiration to millions of talented, smart people stuck in dead end jobs. He successfully parlayed his second book, A Cook’s Tour, into a third career as a travel writer and TV host. When he died of suicide in 2018 while on a shoot in France, his friends and fans were devastated. How could a former cocaine and heroin addict who had survived 25 years in an industrial kitchen to become the voice and conscience of Americans abroad decide to check out so suddenly? 

When someone kills themselves, those of us left behind want answers. As his friend, graffiti artist David Choe says late in the film, “Tony let me down.” 

But the truth about suicide is much more mundane. Cases like Cleopatra, who killed herself because she lost the Battle of Alexandria and was about to be deposed from her throne by the Romans, are exceedingly rare. The answer to “Why did they do it?” almost never has a clear cut answer beyond lifelong mental illness. One day, things just caught up with them. 

Neville, to his credit, understands that the big risk in making this film is to focus too much on the end. This is a biography, like Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, his 2018 film on Fred Rogers. It benefits greatly from the hundreds of hours of video shot by the crews following him on his trips around the world, thanks to longtime producer and creative partner Lydia Tenaglia. Bourdain’s career arc is measured visually by the progression from blurry millennial digital video to sharp 4K. His own words, of which there are volumes, explain his growth from a rather insular New Yorker to a world traveler. “I don’t trust anything that happens out there,” he says early in the picture, gesturing to the world outside the kitchen.

But an incident in 2006, when he and his crew were trapped in a Beirut hotel while a war between Israel and Hezbollah destroyed the vibrant city around him, fundamentally changed his perspective. Later, when a Laotian man who lost limbs in an American bombing attack during the Vietnam War asks him why he used what was ostensibly a cooking show to highlight the abuses of American imperialism, he replies, “It’s the least I can do.” 

That’s the Bourdain that his audience trusted and loved: Empathetic, honest, and open about the lucky breaks he received. Yes, he was a talented writer with a magnetic persona, but he was also in the right place at the right time, and he never forgot it. Neville and editor Eileen Meyer balance potential hero worship by interviewing people who worked with him, and knew how difficult he could be to get along with in real life. Thanks to Neville’s decision not to interview actress Asia Argento, the girlfriend whose public breakup happened days before his suicide, Bourdain superfans might not find much new to learn in Roadrunner. But it was the right choice. This movie is not about “who killed Anthony Bourdain?” It is “who was Anthony Bourdain?” As the title, taken from a Jonathan Richman song, implies, he was a guy who ran all his life, until he couldn’t any more. 

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Chef Spencer McMillin to Launch Cookbook and New Website and Blog

CREDIT: Michael Donahue

Michael Donahue

Chef Spencer McMillin with chef Jonathan Magallanes from Los Tortugas at a Caritas dinner, where Magallanes was guest chef



Chef Spencer McMillin is about to release a new website and blog, which will launch his new cookbook.

As he refers to himself, “I’m just a busy body.”

Thesaltiestwords.com, which will include stories and recipes, also will be the launching pad for his upcoming The Caritas Cookbook: A Year in the Life With Recipes. Both are slated to be released in mid November.

“I write a lot and a lot of it is not publishable, but it’s stuff the general public will appreciate,” says McMillin, 50. “I’ve got a group of people who like to read the down-and-dirty stuff. The less-publishable things. I write off the top of my head.”

And, he says, “This is not Paula Deen.” He referred to his blog on a Facebook post as “the dreaded (and not for the easiest offended) blog.”

His first piece on “The Saltiest Words” blog will be Chasing Tony, which is about the “wilderness years” of his career. “Back in the early 2000s when I was between chef jobs and I was working at Bronte Bistro at Davis-Kidd Booksellers. I was kitchen manager. I was at a real low point in my life.”

That’s when he discovered the book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, by chef Anthony Bourdain. “I would leave the kitchen and just go sit in the book section and read that book when I should have been working.”

He didn’t just read the book. “I reached out to Tony Bourdain and struck up a friendship.”

McMillin had written a 200-page book called The Food Fighter. “That was kind of my version of Kitchen Confidential. It spanned my career from 1983 to 2001.”

He got in touch with Bourdain on line. “I noticed Tony was a poster on a food message board, eGullet.com. He had just done a Q and A with fans and he was still posting on the board. He was interacting with fans and stuff, so I started interacting with him and he kind of took to the way I wrote. He identified with it.”

McMillin sent a copy of his book to Brasserie Les Halles restaurant, where Bourdain was working in New York at the time. “He wrote Kitchen Confidential and got real famous. He just got on A Cook’s Tour. But he wasn’t too famous to interact with fans.”

Bourdain sent him some tips, McMillin says. “He sent me a couple of emails of advice after he read it that I’ll never forget. One of the things he said was, ‘Write like you talk. Speak the truth.’”

He also told him, “Write about experiences.  Don’t write about writing. That’s pretentious.”

Bourdain got McMillin in touch with Michael Ruhlman. “He wrote about chefs. He wrote The Soul of a Chef, The Reach of a Chef, The Making of a Chef, and he was one of Bourdain’s favorite writers.”

McMillin sent Ruhlman a copy of a piece he wrote about his experiences at acclaimed restaurant, The French Laundry. Ruhlman was co-author of a French Laundry cookbook with the restaurant’s owner, Thomas Keller. “He ripped me a new asshole. He told me the voice is wrong, the tone is wrong, the pacing is wrong. He just kind of put me in my place. Which was kind of the best thing that could happen. To be a published writer, you have to listen to the good, the bad, and the ugly. His criticism made me assess where I was going. It helped unleash the writer I am today.”

McMillin changed his writing  style a bit. ”I took the testosterone out  of my writing as much as I could and tried to report factually. Initially, a lot of it I tried to mimic the way Tony wrote ‘Kitchen Confidential.’”

And, he says, “I found my voice, found my tone, reported factually. I didn’t create scenarios. One thing Ruhlman said was, ‘It seems like you’re trying to create a mystique about The French Laundry that isn’t there. You need to review it objectively.’”

Grains of Salt, which “plays on the title of the blog,” will be his second blog piece, McMillin says. “It’s all about ways to save the restaurant industry.”

It includes his experiences with “Feed the Frontlines Memphis,” an initiative co-founded by McMillin and his wife, Kristin, to “feed frontline warriors — nurses, doctors — to put revenue in the pocket of restaurants,” and “The Restaurant Phoenix Project,” a program put together by the McMillins and Bobby Maupin of “collaborative chef dinners to raise money for restaurants.”

The piece, without giving names, details “who’s being smart and who’s not being smart” in regards to restaurants operating during the pandemic.

It also will include, also without giving names, “restaurants that will not be here in six months because they refuse to budge” as far as changing during the pandemic.

During the pandemic, McMillin read 30 books by authors he admires, including Elmore Leonard, Nicholas Freeling, and George Orwell. “The main thing I get is honesty. I just write like I talk. The word ‘fuck’ comes into play. I think readers that I like to read are the people that write like they talk.  I’m not trying to be a highfalutin literary genius.

“I think my writing is essentially one’s life lived. And trying to do it as honestly as possible.”

Recipes will include some he and his wife gathered on a recent vacation. “We got out for five weeks and traveled around the South gathering recipes. I did a lot of cooking in the outer banks of North Carolina.”

Spencer and Kristin McMillin in Savannah, Georgia

Some of the recipes are geared toward people cooking during the pandemic, which includes the McMillins. “Being stuck out of the farm with a pantry full of ramen noodles, some moldering cilantro, a couple of onions, and a little bit of hoisin sauce. You make ‘compost bin ramen.’ Take rotting vegetables and throw them in the compost.”

McMillin told himself he would have his first published book by the time he was 50. He describes The Caritas Cookbook: A Year in the Life With Recipes as “a snapshot or a yearbook of an amazing year in my life.”

Mcmillan, who was executive chef of Caritas Community Center in Binghampton, says the cookbook is “not a historical piece. I didn’t write the history of Caritas. I wrote it as an interloper. A guy that came toward the end of it and cooks some amazing food with some amazing people. And we fed the homeless and supported restaurants. We put out a good vibe and we made the world a better place.”

Caritas,which means “a love of all people,” was the concept of Onie Johns, a “Germantown housewife that got disillusioned with life in the suburbs. And she had a desire to help people. She used to go to church in that neighborhood and see guys hanging out on the steps getting in trouble. She decided to move into the neighborhood and create a neighborhood center and cafe and help people.”

The cookbook includes stories and recipes. “I believe there are 12 chefs featured. All local. Ten local farms. That’s the theme of the book. We used as many local meat producers, vegetable growers, local chefs, as we could. It’s all about supporting the local economy and supporting the local community, whether it’s the underserved or the local culinary scene.”

Michael Donahue

Spencer McMillin with chef Rick Farmer at a Caritas dinner that featured Farmer as guest chef

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Remembering Bourdain on Bourdain Day

On this day, we remember the all-sainted Anthony Bourdain on what would have been his 63rd birthday. He was funny, original, and an all-around truth teller.

Bourdain brought his Guts & Glory tour to Memphis in 2012. We were there. And we eulogized him after his untimely passing last year.

Here’s what we wrote …

From the Flyer’s Jen Clarke:

That’s why Anthony Bourdain was so beloved: He got them [servers, bartenders, chefs], too, and sought to elevate them to the status they deserve. We need food to live. Food is integral to every single culture. Nourishment is an expression of love. Bourdain arrived at the onset of the “foodie” craze with a different perspective and a mission to tell stories beyond what’s on the plate. Knowing those stories made everything taste better.

He was a bard. He was an avatar of so many wise and brilliant restaurant people who, at least in my experience, are the best people.

My review of his Orpheum show:

The nearly full house at Anthony Bourdain’s Guts & Glory show at the Orpheum Friday night was made up of many, many hardcore fans — folks who most certainly know Bourdain’s No Reservations TV show and his books Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw chapter and verse.

Indeed, the show Bourdain dished out could be viewed as reheated leftovers. Or, it could be seen as something of a greatest hits: chapters from Medium Raw reproduced just about intact, clips from No Reservations, and barbs flung at familiar targets (Paula Deen, vegetarians, Olive Garden, etc.).

But the energy from the crowd was high, and Bourdain met expectations with a sharp, often bawdy approach. Among the highlights: the bit about how to do drugs on television and the one about being a gracious guest (that means eating a poop- and hair-covered warthog’s anus).

In a word, it was fun.

The real unknown of the evening came with the audience and the concluding Q&A session.

He was asked how he learned to write and about the NYC restaurant he left when he became famous. A shout-out was given to Vassar (which he attended briefly), and he promised that he would give Memphis barbecue its proper due when he begins his new show for CNN next year. (No Reservations ends its run on Monday night.)

The show was ended when Bourdain laughed and waved off the last question posed by a super-pumped fan.

The man asked, “Who do I have to fuck to get a drink with Anthony Bourdain?”

Another review of that show, from Memphis Magazine’s Pam Denney:

While it was difficult to scribble in the dark, I did manage to write down a few more things from Bourdain’s show, which, by the way, ran more than two hours:

• Bourdain has little patience for fast food, chain restaurants, and (sorry to say) vegetarians: “Chicken Caesar Carbonara: What the fuck is that?”

• He says all travelers should follow the “Grandmother Rule: Eat whatever Grandma puts on your plate.”

• Russians drink. A lot. When filming his last show, Bourdain’s hosts drank two to three shots of vodka for breakfast, downed another seven to nine shots with lunch, and finished the day with 14 to 19 more. “It’s true,” he said. “I clocked it.”

• And finally, what would Bourdain request for his last meal? “A super high end, super fresh piece of nigiri.”

And more from the Flyer’s Hannah Sayle:

What’s that saying about breaking a few eggs to make an omelet? Well, to be the candid, shoot-from-the-hip kind of food celebrity Anthony Bourdain is, you have to a break a few eggs to make a few enemies: Paula Deen, Alice Waters, vegetarians — just to name a few.

But for his many devoted followers, Bourdain is greater than the sum of his foot-in-mouth moments and loudly professed enemies. He’s a whip-smart food fanatic, an expert in all things edible, and a fearless eater. 

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Food Service: A Confidential Tie that Binds

CREDIT: Starstock | Dreamstime.com

You can always tell when a person has worked in a restaurant. There’s an empathy that can only be cultivated by those who’ve stood between a hungry mouth and a $28 pork chop, a special understanding of the way a bunch of motley misfits can be a family. Service industry work develops the “soft skills” recruiters talk about on LinkedIn — discipline, promptness, the ability to absorb criticism, and most important, how to read people like a book. The work is thankless and fun and messy, and the world would be a kinder place if more people tried it. With all due respect to my former professors, I’ve long believed I gained more knowledge in kitchens, bars, and dining rooms than any college could even hold.

Working in a restaurant, you see the full spectrum of behavior and emotions. The best is in the kitchen, where people from different backgrounds who speak different languages work together. It’s in the enduring friendships made between trips from kitchen to table — full hands both ways, of course — and fortified at the bar once the money’s been counted and the floors have been swept. It’s at the restaurant across the street, where the chef is happy to spare some rosemary because the truck didn’t show, and the bartender has a shot waiting for you when you wander over on your smoke break. It’s at family meal, a service industry tradition other fields really ought to copycat. It’s in a good review and the look in a guest’s eyes when they take that first amazing bite.

The worst is at the table, when you can barely sputter a “Good evening!” before being interrupted by a brash “DIET COKE!” It’s on the line, when you’ve screwed up so badly and you want to yell back, but you know you deserve every curse word being flung your way. It’s at a corner banquette at the end of the night, when you discover you didn’t earn enough tips to cover your car note because Table 18 wrote “Here’s a tip: you should smile more” on their credit card slip. It’s a call from your manager, waking you up before the second shift of your double, asking if you can come in early. The absolute worst is on Yelp, where everybody “really wanted to like this place” but not enough to tell anyone they had asked for sweet potato fries, not regular ones.

Starstock | Dreamstime.com

Anthony Bourdain

I haven’t tied on an apron in years, but restaurant people will always be part of my tribe. The industry attracts a certain kind of individual, whom I consider to be my people. I’m talking about chefs, bartenders, servers who choose standing for 14 hours, enthusiastically describing tonight’s fresh catch, or artfully arranging herbs on a plate as a lifestyle. I get them.

That’s why Anthony Bourdain was so beloved: He got them, too, and sought to elevate them to the status they deserve. We need food to live. Food is integral to every single culture. Nourishment is an expression of love. Bourdain arrived at the onset of the “foodie” craze with a different perspective and a mission to tell stories beyond what’s on the plate. Knowing those stories made everything taste better.

He was a bard. He was an avatar of so many wise and brilliant restaurant people who, at least in my experience, are the best people.

And the best people never seem to stick around as long as you want or need them to. I’ve attended a lot of funerals for restaurant friends who left the world too soon and for unfair reasons. So the grief felt familiar when I saw the news alert on my phone last Friday morning.

With all celebrity suicides come pleas to get help if you feel suicidal thoughts. If those pleas save one life, I’m happy to hear it. While it’s true that no one is immune, anyone who has suffered can tell you it’s not that simple. It’s hard to tell someone’s in pain when the chemicals that inspire genius in the arts — whether they’re the culinary, literary, or performing kind — are the same ones that take creators to dark places. The adrenaline of a Saturday night dinner rush mutes the voices just as an addict’s intoxicant of choice. Bringing happiness to others briefly fills the hole where one’s own joy belongs.

Instead, I’ll offer some different advice, straight from the pages of Kitchen Confidential: Never use a garlic press. And if you ever get an opportunity to talk shop with a chef, bartender, or another service industry lifer, sit down and listen. They’ve seen some stuff.

Jen Clarke is an unapologetic Memphian. Follow @jensized on Twitter.

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Anthony Bourdain at the Orpheum: Guts & Glory, Some Leftovers, and a Super Fan

bourdain.jpg

The nearly full house at Anthony Bourdain’s Guts & Glory show at the Orpheum Friday night was made up of many, many hardcore fans — folks who most certainly know Bourdain’s No Reservations TV show and his books Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw chapter and verse.

Indeed, the show Bourdain dished out could be viewed as reheated leftovers. Or, it could be seen as something of a greatest hits: chapters from Medium Raw reproduced just about intact, clips from No Reservations, and barbs flung at familiar targets (Paula Deen, vegetarians, Olive Garden, etc.).

But the energy from the crowd was high, and Bourdain met expectations with a sharp, often bawdy approach. Among the highlights: the bit about how to do drugs on television and the one about being a gracious guest (that means eating a poop- and hair-covered warthog’s anus).

In a word, it was fun.

The real unknown of the evening came with the audience and the concluding Q&A session.