The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones by Anthony Bourdain Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones
Book Review: Nasty Bits, not like a bone in the throat.
Summary: 5 Stars
The Nasty Bits by Anthony Bourdain is Bourdain's best. Essentially this is a rant, a rant of the highest order, one called forth from the deepest recesses of a strung-out chef who has seen it all, done it all and doesn't care what your opinion is. A rant is a statement above all else, let the reader beware.
The Nasty Bits wasn't written for you, like Bourdain's other works. No, this book was written for HIM, a sort of culinary/literary catharsis. Bourdain, to repeat myself, doesn't care what you think, but he does let you know what's on his mind.
Unlike his two other serious books, the faux-memoir and underground cult guide to the culinary history of this wonderful mad-man, Kitchen Confidential, or his behind-the-scenes look of A Cooks Tour, this book has no plot, no theme, not even a point. It is the sum of Anthony Bourdains visceral reactions to everything from undocumented workers to fast food to what he REALLY feels about Emeril Lagasse (something much more nuanced and than you would believe).
In The Nasty Bits, when Bourdain explains the terrible hang-overs he has experienced in all the head-throbbing details, the reader will surely start to experience the first tell-tale cold-sweat of that too-much-gin-yes-I-know-it-is-made-from-poison-berries feeling. When he explains the gritty texture of what it is like to eat *fresh* seal-brains, you start feeling around in your mouth to see if there is any little bit of food from this mornings forgetful breakfast in there, praying that your mouth was washed out completely with that coffee you know shouldn't of drunk cold the way you do.
But there is also the amazing, only-the-way-Bourdain can tell it like sexuality of eating truly great food, like the $[...] (to start)menu-less sushi meal in New York where you sit down, shut up and let the chef bring you to a different, and altogether culinary-orgasmic state that only the greatest of food of this sort can bring on. Of course now I have to damn brother Bourdain forever, knowing full well now that such places even exist, but are really unobtainable for the proletarian lot of us. I will suffer with the hope that one day, I too, will be lifted from my mortal self and give myself over to a chef as he describes in this one short chapter of The Nasty Bits. Damn you Bourdain!
David Walters
Book Review: A Skewering, Entertaining Collection of Thoughts from the Culinary World's Resident Bad Boy
Summary: 4 Stars
Sometimes I wonder if celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain sees himself as the reincarnation of James Beard or Elmore Leonard. Similar to his terrific culinary exposé, "Kitchen Confidential", his newest book, actually a collection of thirty-six previously published magazine articles plus a brief fictional piece, exhibits elements of both (with a little Jack Kerouac thrown in) as he translates his quirky, rough-hewn personality into a highly descriptive, sometimes scabrous writing style. Here he covers a broad canvas all tied rather loosely to food and takes no prisoners in the process. One such casualty is fellow chef Rocco DiSpirito, whom Bourdain sees as a victim of his own hunger for fame.
On the whole, his view of his colleagues is relatively even-keeled since he sees the more exalted purpose of spreading fine cuisine as essential. His personal experiences on this front are quite entertaining from his sojourn as a high-end cruise ship chef to his hazy (and hair-raising) trip to Las Vegas to exotic dinners in Singapore and China (though he already covers the global scene pretty thoroughly in "A Cook's Tour"). Regardless of the various locales, he is most enlightening when he details the inner workings of his own restuarant kitchen. And even though Bourdain does not dive deeply, he does hit his intended targets squarely on the various banes of his world, namely the fast food industry and on the other end of the spectrum, the "raw food" movement.
Yet, he is not simply a critic as he gets downright poetic when waxing about the art of his French culinary specialties where he transforms the mundane to the sublime. The only times the book leaves me a bit cold is when Bourdain gets too autobiographical and goes off topic into discussions of organized crime and his expensive crack cocaine habit. I just think such recollections are probably left to his autobiography when he decides to write it. I think your enjoyment of this book will depend on how you react to his swaggering television personality, but there are few chefs if any who can write with more addictive flourish. After all, who else but Bourdain would dedicate a book not to one of his culinary predecessors but to the Ramones?
Book Review: Art-food Dismissed. Bourdain is HUNGRY.
Summary: 5 Stars
Art-cuisine one-upsmanship is incresingly out of hand. Showcase restaurants are more and more divorced from the roots of good eating: the economical, parsimonious, and HUNGRY tradition of farm, field, and woods. When Anthony Bourdain writes, whether it be about commercial kitchens, or Bistro food, or artsy platings, or variety meats, or his adventures to the culinary hinterlands, he is always criticizing one thing: the sissifying of food [and chefs] in the art-cuisine market. He disdains the fussy, the hyper-refined, and the decorative. His criticisms in Nasty Bits are just as spot-on damning and funny as we've come to expect after reading Kitchen Confidential and The Les Halles Cookbook. He enthusiastically celebrates the simple pleasures of skillfully-prepared simple dishes, returning time and again to our hunger and our need for sustenance and flavor.
In Nasty Bits he travels the world in search of intense and intimate food adventures. He eats seal with an Inuit family, and his description is alive to the newness and immediacy of the experience. But these world travels do not, by any means, lead to an embrace of 'fusion' cuisine with all of its forced assimilations and jarring collisions. He is a food realist: he operates within the larger economy, as nearly all of us do, but with a real regard for the basic dishes that evolved out of specific places before refrigeration and multinationals. Without indulging in specious pseudo-intellectual arguments, pro or con, as so many food writers-cum-cultural critics do, he references appetite and taste. These are certainly the first and second reasons we eat.
What he disparages so eloquently are all the OTHER reasons we eat: to impress, to be seen, to scratch the itch of dilettantism, to celebrate our wealth, etc. He practices a robust, forthright, honest culinary craft in which ingredients are embraced for their sensual properties, their ability to satisfy, and even their ability to restore an effete appetite to its rightful place at the groaning board. This practice in no way rejects subtlety. In fact, his pleasure in seasonings and perfect doneness is a constant theme in his cookbook and in his accounts of adventure-eating. But he practices a CRAFT, which is not the same as ART. This approach recalls Jacques Pepin's humble and beautiful assertion that he is a technician, not an artist. The distinction is, I think, crucial: art-cooking comes out of the culinary schools and the old French hotel-kitchen traditions, while the craft Bourdain admires comes out of the tradition of farming, hunting, and foraging. His tastes run to the honest and robust. That said, he's also captivated by the chemical-whimsical innovations of Ferran Adria.
We have the luxury of choosing, of course. But it would be disingenuous to state that our choices are independent of our cultural values. Where art-cuisine celebrates the convenience and mobility of the modern world, the farmhouse tradition celebrates the settled, local traditions that often achieved a narrow perfection. As Wendell Berry pointed out, it is the settled, local traditions that have become the radical choice. They criticize and subvert the global markets, just as Bourdain criticizes and subverts our culture of fussiness and trepidation.
This is a great read.
Book Review: The Nast Bits
Summary: 3 Stars
Anthony Bourdain has eaten from many plates and seen a lot of things. Some things, a regular consumer would prefer not to know about their food. The Nasty Bits reveals another side of the restaurant business, which is not so glamorous and delicious as we think. The author's style is very candid and often funny, which makes you just fly through the book in a couple of sittings. Book Review: Disappointing
Summary: 2 Stars
I love reading Bourdains work and I pre-ordered the book thinking that it would be another spectacular work. I curled
up in bed waiting to be deliciously teased,outraged,and most of all entertained by The Nasty Bits.
Alas!I quickly fell into a stupor as it was only mildly interesting and somewhat contrived as if he had been under pressure to publish something and cobbled together a few scraps without the usual Bourdain zest.
I sincerely hope that his next book will see a return to his unique entertaining style.