Anthony Bourdain sat with me in January 2016. By then he had spent the better part of two decades drawing the public’s attention to the people who work at the edges of a kitchen, first through his own years on the line, then through his writing, then through television. He died in 2018, and the book carries a note on him in its first chapter because one voice among these interviews could not go unremarked in a chapter about the calling.
Bourdain wrote openly about his own moment of recognition, which arrived when he was a boy on a French summer holiday, handed a raw oyster on a fisherman’s boat on the Bassin d’Arcachon, and discovered in the swallow that the world held a dimension he had not suspected. He spent the rest of his career chasing a version of that first taste. He was, by his own admission, not a great cook. He was a great writer about the calling, and his own calling was to translate the craft for the people outside it.
When we spoke, he put the unromantic version of the calling on the record. The profession, he said, has always accepted all kinds of people, refugees, maniacs and misfits among them, and then he drew the line that matters.
“To excel at it, only the few, the proud, and the weird will flourish” Anthony Bourdain, author, television host and culinary explorer, interviewed January 2016
The subjects in the book, almost without exception, gave me some version of the same report in their own language, from their own kitchens and lobbies, on their own continents. The underlying claim is the one Bourdain lived: this was the work he was made for, and the making turned out to be the work.
In the book, Anthony Bourdain appears in Chapter 1, The Calling, in a note that closes the chapter’s account of how the people in this book recognized the work they were made for.