[news.independent.co.uk]

Oven gloves are off as Bourdain attacks British chefs

Nigella Lawson is not a real chef, Jamie Oliver fulfils the role of a non-threatening rock star and Rick Stein has the appeal of a homely dad to grown-ups moping about lonely city apartments.

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In The Nasty Bits, a collection of his recent journalism, the heroin addict-turned-culinary adventurer tackles everything from an Innuit slashing of a seal corpse to a London pint of stout to “smug” Woody Harrelson’s devotion to raw food. But his writing is most newsworthy to a British readership in his humorous sprint around the television cooks who have hypnotised viewers on this side of the Atlantic.

Lawson, he states, is a celebrity but not a chef – which is “fine” because she is interested in the good “fun” stuff like pork fat. Lawson and Stein – the fish cook whom Bourdain describes as likeable and a “serial pyromaniac” – are likened to televisual parents to the millions of adults who live alone in flats. The big family meals seen in films look “strangely appetising”, he says, and a nesting impulse takes over.

He writes: “Let’s face it. Nigella probably cooks better than your mother. And she’s a lot better looking, and cooler. Nigella wouldn’t mind if you smoked weed in your bedroom before dinner, would she? She wouldn’t criticise you if you came home with your nose pierced and a fierce, full-back tattoo depicting St Peter and Dee Dee Ramone shovelling coal down the crack of your ass. Of course not. She’d say, ‘Remember to clean that nose with alcohol – and wash your hands for dinner! We’re having roast suckling pig with quince chutney’.”

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Following the success of Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain travelled the world from Cambodia to Brazil with a small film crew for a television series and accompanying book, A Cook’s Tour. In The Nasty Bits, he serves up not a planned meal but a literary stew, containing pieces such as his lobster-killing guilt and his recollection of scrounging the back streets of Hanoi for eel. He details his 30-course meal with Ferran Adria, the experimental Catalan chef whose peculiar dishes have led to El Bulli being voted the world’s best restaurant.a

He’s right, of course; we in the UK allow anyone to have food-celebrity status so long as they are passionate about the subject, and are reasonably entertaining. You don’t have to be a chef who’s been through the millrace of hot kitchens, failed ventures and bad reviews – instead you could just be a food writer (which is how Delia and Nigella both got started), and now it is adequate to simply be quirky foodies.

Whether this is such a bad thing – as Anthony may suggest – is debatable.

It might be an effect of the engine which has pulled British food out of the “mustn’t grumble, eat it all up” swamp in which it was stuck from between the wars until the Thatcher era.