Anthony Bourdain’s fear — well, not so much a fear as something he feels has probably come to pass — is becoming the Tony Bourdain wind-up meat puppet: pull the string and watch him say something sarcastic/nasty/witty/biting/endearingly outlandish.
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When he appeared at Barnes & Noble in Manhattan’s Union Square Tuesday to celebrate the release of his latest tome of put downs, musings, humor and rage, “Medium Raw,” fittingly, Bourdain read a passage about his waning anger, introducing the reading by saying when he started writing he thought this would be his warm and fuzzy book. His rage has dissipated, and he’s worried about becoming “a long-running lounge act, the exasperatedly enraged food guy. ‘Rachel Ray? What’s up with that?’ (Cue snare drum here.) To a great extent that’s already happened.” To wit, on one occasion he received a fruit basket from Ray.
But obviously Bourdain didn’t write a gentle light-hearted book that gives blow jobs to all his past targets. No, there is one old foe he still has genuine contempt for, and that foe comes in many guises, from Jonathan Safran Foer to Sire Paul McCartney. “Okay,” he read, “I am genuinely angry — still — at vegetarians. That’s not shtick.”
But it is shtick to a degree, albeit shtick backed up by pages upon pages of lucid explanation. And the crowd — the massive seething crowd — ate it up. They filled the entire top floor of the Barnes & Noble, panting, yelling, frothing at the mouth and swooning over Mr. Bourdain: a TV food personality who made his name lambasting TV food personalities. Of course, to the cult of Bourdain he is much more than that. More than the guy who founded meat palace Les Halles, the closest thing New York has to a classic Parisian bistro. More than an acerbic curmudgeon. More than a chef without an apron. More than a former addict. More than a New York Times best selling author, who in addition to writing the memoirs he’s known for, is also pioneering a new genre of fiction: the food crime mystery. More than a cartoon amalgam of angry man parts. More than a raised eyebrow and a smirk. More than the sum of self-satisfaction and self-loathing.
And they love him for it. All of it. He’s got groupies galore. You half expected them to start flinging bras and panties on the stage. In fact, some are so amorous that his martial-arts trained wife has learned to lean in and tell them things like “Back off or I’ll smash your fucking face,” Bourdain writes in his book.
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The staff at B&N gamely tried to keep the crowd in check, though it seemed a Sisyphean task, and during the Q&A they assembled two or three separate lines of people eager to get their books signed. The lines snaked around the room in Medusa tangles. Many of the assembled masses seemed more anxious to get the book signed than actually listening to its author speak. For example, three young ladies, even as they pushed and shoved their way onto a book-signing line, seemed incapable of shutting the fuck up for three seconds so that they or anyone around them could hear the answers to the questions asked of the illustrious author whose bones they kept talking about jumping.
Bourdain entertained questions genially and at length, though the unruly crowd tended to shout things at the stage that weren’t really questions, but more like demands for recitations. Yelling “HOW TO GRILL A STEAK” at the top of your lungs from the back of a bookstore (mind you from a distance of at least 100 yards) at Anthony Bourdain is along the lines of screaming “PLAY FREEBIRD” at a Skynyrd concert at a county fair in Des Moines.
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To his credit Bourdain just laughed and mused “Is that a question?” Though later on when someone asked (politely and with the aid of a microphone) how Bourdain makes a hamburger he dutifully obliged. (The answer, in a nutshell: one leg at a time.)
When Bourdain was asked about the true identity of Ruth Bordain, a Twitter mashup of somebody’s idea of a cross between him and Ruth Reichl, Bourdain said he’s got some idea of who he or she might be — some suspects — but that he thinks it’s hilarious and he hopes the tweeter, who has been going strong since March and has more than 8,000 followers, goes on forever.
“I’ve been a parody of myself for so long, it’s good to have an official parody,” Bourdain quipped.
He joked that he could end up with some sort of two part William Shatner career, where he spends the second half making fun of the first half.
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During the grueling book-signing portion of the even-tempered Bourdain remained affable tapping his cowboy boots along to the Stones “Exile on Main Street” (which played through twice in its entirety). He played the rogue at times, as the bookstore staff went through the motions of hiding-but-not-hiding the Brooklyn Lager they filled his mug with (which explains the smile). He seemed like nothing so much as a politician, shaking hands, smiling for all the pictures, and, yes, even cooing at and kissing babies.
Sign. Smile. Repeat. This is what becomes a man who maybe was driven by some demons once. Who drank snorted, sniffed and smoked his way into a caricature. Who now has eased into himself and is a aging gracefully.
“It’s Sandra Lee’s world. It’s Rachel [Ray's] world. Me? You? We’re just living in it,” Bourdain writes in the new book. It’s a good line, but he’s wrong. It’s Tony’s world. Sandra and Rachel? Well, they’re renting with an option to buy.