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Anthony Bourdain: From rebel chef to doting dad

The bad boy chef is now an ex-cook who tells stories.

Anthony Bourdain reluctantly embraces the label at first, saying “you can call me anything you want, I’m just glad that anybody cares.” But then he wavers. That’s why he named his new book Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook.

“It’s a deliberate non sequitur — you can’t be both medium and raw,” Bourdain says Tuesday in Toronto. “I’m not a chef. I’m not a writer. I’m not the angry, snarky — what is it? — bad boy of cuisine. I’m somewhere else now. The book is about second-guessing myself, and conflicting emotions and elements that don’t exactly fit together for me.”

It has been a decade since Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly — which he calls “that obnoxious but wildly successful memoir” — changed the trajectory of Bourdain’s life.

It got him A Cook’s Tour (the book and Food Network show), followed by Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations on the Travel Channel and now Medium Raw (his 10th book). It got him out of the kitchen after 28 years of hard labour. It hastened the breakup of his first marriage, which paved the way for his second marriage and fatherhood.

That’s right. At 54 Bourdain is the blissed-out father to 3-1/2-year-old Ariane, who just started pre-kindergarten.

“I had a top-of-the-line Bugaboo (stroller) — pink,” admits an animated Bourdain during an interview at Mercury Espresso Bar in Leslieville. “I pushed it with pride. And I will tell you, with pride, that I was the star pupil in my Lamaze class. I’ve totally gone over to the warm, fuzzy side.”

Maybe he dabbles in the fuzzy side, but the lanky New Yorker still dresses in black (jeans, T-shirt and blazer) and still exclaims “nice choice” when the coffee shop blasts a song by the Stooges.

In Medium Raw, the former heroin addict admits to owning a couple of suits. He wears one of them on the cover, though it’s offset by the pockmarked brick wall behind him, the knife in his hand and the wedding band on his finger.

“I certainly didn’t want to wear a chef’s coat,” says Bourdain. “(The suit is) the uniform of my traditional enemy, who I’ve become. I just thought it was the opposite of a working hero, which I am not.”

Okay, so he lives on the Upper East Side, feeds his daughter organic food, and calls himself a “jaded, overprivileged foodie.”

He slings that at himself before anyone else has a chance.

“I think it would be hideously dishonest to not remind people of that constantly.”

Still, when given the chance to act like a world-weary foodie with an exacting coffee order, he’s downright casual, requesting only “some jumbo-sized latte with sugar.”

But speaking of jaded, Bourdain — who’s giving a public talk Wednesday night at Massey Hall — admits Monday’s sold-out show in Houston didn’t go so well because the audience simply knew too much.

“Three minutes into it, I realized they’d heard it all, between interviews, articles, blogs and the books. It was an awful moment for me. This audience was very wired in and this is the world we live in now. If you write about food too long, you run out of adjectives and, more importantly, you lose the sense of wonder. It’s a terrible thing.”

China, Bourdain figures, is the next food frontier. Even if he devotes the rest of his eating life to figuring it out, he expects to “still die knowing relatively nothing.”

Bourdain’s sense of wonder makes multiple appearances during the interview.

He worries about being that idiot who tires of foie gras and truffles, and then slides into a spirited discussion about how he and his chef friends love yakitori – Japanese, charcoal-grilled chicken parts.

Then there’s the care and feeding of his daughter. She gets hot dogs (organic), grilled cheese and pasta with butter, but she’s also well-travelled (already) and exposed to everything.

“She likes pecorino (cheese), anchovies, sardines, tuna, olives and risotto,” says Bourdain, who never forces her to eat what’s put in front of her. “And she loves raw oysters.”

Bourdain hasn’t cooked professionally for over a decade, and admits to eating out with chef friends and ordering in a lot like most New Yorkers. When he cooks at home, it’s “in one pot” and it’s probably stew, beef bourguignon, steak, calf’s liver, pasta or risotto.

Still, in Medium Raw, Bourdain advocates cooking at home whenever possible and calls basic cooking skills a virtue that should be taught as soon a child can be trusted with a knife.

It has been eight years since Bourdain visited Toronto. Back then, we got 90 minutes together for Vietnamese iced coffee, Salvadoran pupusas and Chilean corn pie in Chinatown and Kensington Market, but came up empty on his search for raw milk Canadian cheese.

This time I bring four Canadian cheeses, including two raw ones, for our 45-minute coffee interview.

Guidi predicts he’ll go for the Bleu D’Elizabeth from Quebec, “because big personalities like big blues.” She’s right.

“If I were to be a cheese it would be a really funky, slightly overripe blue cheese,” says Bourdain, breaking apart a baguette by hand and diving into the cheese. “In a perfect world, I’d be a Stilton.”

Source: TheStar.com