Cravings

I just finished Anthony Bourdain's biography Kitchen Confidential which I highly recommend. He writes in a great conversational manner that's both intimate and hysterical. If you worked in a restaurant or some crap job in your late teens or early twenties, with a gang of similarly aged co-workers, drank too much, perhaps smoked questionable plants, probably bedded down on, um, impulse, and drove some kind of shit-mobile this book is for you. It's a great food book,visceral, gamy, sexy, and evocative in its descriptions of various meals without the sort of food writing that makes you feel that unless you can buy Egyptian cumin or some such rabble, you'll never really know what good food is.

I also really dug the memories of his being a dickhead, hanging out with other idiots and folk that really only lived for that day, for the fun, the food, the drink, the questionable behavior and I love that he totally owns up to it. He even admits to still being bit of one which in this age of I'm OK But I Pity You is quite refreshing.

I still have friends from those days, we don't see each other much but we know the part we played in each others lives, we would be there in a second at 2AM if they needed us and can tell each other the truth. We don't get to tell the truth much anymore. If you're lucky you get to have someone you can talk to about what a miserable human being you are. Someone who will tell you that what you did was dumb but what you're feeling is genuine and justified.

So I realized this is a book about friendship as much as about food, about how commitment to a single thing (feeding people) can forge an unbreakable bond, explode on contact, expose the uncommitted and, if done right, can make someone happy you don't know and never will.