Anthony Bourdain and…Morcheeba?
Anthony Bourdain is a chef. He’s an author and he hosts his own TV show, No Reservations, on the Travel Channel. All of this will come into play six paragraphs from now.
My wife is not a chef. My wife’s a cook. She began making puff pasty when she was in grade school, taught by the women in her family. She spent the next several decades cooking for friends, for the commune, for her first husband, for her two boys, then for me. Cooked practically every day because that’s who she is, and everything she cooks is just nailed to the damn plate.
My wife always dreamed of being a food professional, of one day maybe even opening her own place. We’d been married nine years when she informed me she’d quit her job that morning, called a local caterer before lunch, interviewed that afternoon and would start the next day.
In a profession dominated largely by borderline (or way over the border) alcoholic, false macho men, my wife was a 4’11” take-no-shit mother figure to some, sister to another, mouthy bitch to a few. It didn’t help that she clearly knew more about cooking than most of her insecure clog-wearing cohorts. She cooked her ass off, moving quickly from gig to better gig like a kid playing hopscotch. She learned the positions, learned enough Spanish to make friends with the dishwasher, learned where the bodies were buried during back-door smokes with the sauté chef. She learned who to sweet-talk, who to face down and who to slap down, sometimes with knife in hand. She learned how to swear in French from Pascal, who cursed the lazy Bosnian waiters and clueless owners (“Sheet! Theez sheet eez fooking sheet!”) but thought enough of her to make her de facto first commis two weeks after her hire.
She came home exhausted every night in stained whites, feet swollen and aching, smelling that damp tomato-ey garbage disposal pro kitchen smell, bitching about the busted Robot Coupe and the German knife-sharpener who stole her 10” and the coke-dealing bartender and the line cook who keeps copping her mise and how deep they nearly got in the weeds when that party of ten walked in and ordered every fucking thing on the menu a half-hour before closing. She was having an absolute ball.
Then something happened that I won’t go into here, and she had to give it all up. Overnight. That was ten years ago. She got back into it, part-time, a couple years later, but the dream of doing it full-time, by her pronouncement, is done.
Which brings us to Anthony Bourdain (told ya). On his show, No Reservations, he travels around the world, eats the local cuisine, and grouses a lot. It’s very entertaining television.
I was checking out the No Reservations website earlier today and I read the following:
“Who knew Anthony Bourdain could rap? We didn’t. But recently, while in London Tony met up with the English band Morcheeba and had his chance at the mic. Listen now.”
To Mr. Bourdain’s credit, he doesn’t rap. I get the sense he’d rather plunge steak knives into his eyes than perform any activity that might even be mistaken for rapping. What he does is read a passage from one of his books about a line cook named Lisa. I think it’s either from Kitchen Confidential or The Nasty Bits. Someone correct me if I’m wrong. And I will take the website’s word that the music beneath it was composed and performed by Morcheeba – it sounds close enough to me and I’ve no reason to believe otherwise. As a guy who digs both Mr. Bourdain and Morcheeba, this is pretty much a perfect storm of cool for me.
My wife’s name isn’t Lisa. She’s a tough chick but she’s not abusive or an alcoholic and to my knowledge she has never called anyone “pin dick.” But she’s got stripes on her arms too and I know she’s proud of them.
TNH
(Addendum: I have since learned — having finally seen the episode of No Reservations during which Mr. Bourdain recorded the piece — that “Lisa” isn’t a passage from any of his books, but is in fact a composition specific to its purpose. I would like to note, however, that my wife is real, as are her experiences. Thank you.)