Returning to the Well of Bourdain

The Nasty Bits, my second in the Bourdain triptych -- which I'm handling in a mangled middle-last-first order -- is an odd hodgepodge of material, but its scattershot approach seems to me to be the reason it works so effectively. Where A Cook's Tour consists of a fairly well-organized, defined mission (eat around the world, write about it), The Nasty Bits reflects a bit of its author's stylistic restlessness and unwillingness to stick to a Rachel-Ray-on-tour routine. It's for the best. The pieces, culled largely from previously-published articles and op-eds, sprawl from the predictable culinary travelogues to meditations on the disappointing end to colorful mobsterism in New York to reflections on the brutal realities of addiction to rants about the commercialization of the food industry (including an incisive take on Rocco DiSpirito's massive swan dive from boy genius to sellout hack) to, in its closing pages, fiction.

The travelogues, frankly, get old. There's some amusing stuff here -- a whirlwind tour through Vegas which studiously apes Fear and Loathing, down to appropriating fellow foodie author Michael Ruhlman as Bourdain's Dr. Gonzo -- but after a bit of an overload of this stuff, it just gets hard to keep getting into repetitive-if-vivid scenes of exotic street-food markets. Bourdain's much more fun when he's going off the beaten track, giving us a hint of the life he's lived outside of the kitchen (with a clear view of the underworld in New York's 70s, and some very interesting revelations about chefs' musical inspirations -- who else knew that Rick Tramonto dug contemporary Christian pop when he's out of the kitchen?) and crafting a shockingly upbeat, charming Christmas fable at the story's close. It's set in a kitchen (well, give the guy a break, he's writing what he knows) and suffers only from a bit of transparency -- we're only about 75 pages away from hearing about Rocco DiSpirito, and here's his exact doppelganger. Still, it seems pretty churlish to complain about Bourdain drawing from real life when he's gone out of his way to close this book with a warm, fairy-tale ending that even has a soft place in its heart for lousy, food-deserting sellouts like Rocco.