Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook Read Free Page A

Confidential . After I was making a nice living making fun of Emeril and Bobby and Rachael. When I went to work for the bastards.
    I was still cooking every day and night. The book was on the New York Times bestseller list, but a healthy distrust, a strong suspicion that I’d better keep my day job, was still very much the order of the day. This couldn’t last, I thought. It was surely a fluke. A flash in the pan. What possible appeal could my story—something I’d written with no larger audience than New York–area line cooks, waiters, and bartenders in mind—have beyond the tristate area? And if twenty-eight years in the restaurant business had taught me anything at all, it was that if things look good today, they will most assuredly turn to shit tomorrow.
    While I doubted the longevity of my time in the sun, I was aware that I was putting up some nice numbers for my publisher. I may have been a pessimist, but I was not an idiot. So, striking while the iron is hot, as they say, I went in and pitched a second book and a decidedly fatter advance—quickly, before the bloom was off the rose and I faded inevitably back into insolvency and obscurity. I brashly suggested a book about me traveling all over the world, to all the cool places I’d ever dreamed of going, eating and drinking and getting into trouble. I would be willing to do this—and write about it, I suggested. If my publisher would pay for it.
    Shockingly, they were willing to pay for it.
    Shortly after that, two unimpressive-looking men walked into Les Halles and asked me if I’d be interested in making television. They had Kitchen Confidential in mind, no doubt, a property I had already sold off to Hollywood (to end up as a very short-lived sitcom). Undaunted by this news, they expressed interest when I told them I’d be unlikely to find time in any case—as I was about to embark on a year-long bounce around the world to fulfill my childhood fantasies of the exotic East and elsewhere.
    I have to tell you that even at this early point, still wearing my kitchen whites, I was already dubious of anyone who claimed to be offering a TV deal. I had very quickly learned that when TV or movie people tell you “we’re all big fans over here” or “we’re very excited about this project,” it usually means nothing more than that they’re planning on paying for lunch. I was even more skeptical when they mentioned Food Network as a prime candidate for acquiring the project. This notion alone suggested these two goofs had no idea what they were talking about and no juice with anybody. I’d been savagely trashing the Food Network’s principal earners for some time—it was already shtick, part of a stand-up bit that would live on long after I stopped performing it. The fact that these two would even suggest Food Network hinted at problems far beyond the usual lack of imagination. The word “delusional” came to mind.
    When, a week later, they called to tell me they’d set up a meeting, I was annoyed. Actively pissed off. No good would come of this. This, I was certain, was a waste of fucking time. I bothered to neither shave nor shower for the meeting.
    I ended up with a show titled, like the book, A Cook’s Tour . Something that necessarily and despite our best efforts quickly evolved into a sort of gonzo-travelogue of vérité footage and thrown together voice-overs. I had assumed my involvement with television would last no longer than the time it took me to write the book. And yet, amazingly enough, the show was picked up for a second season. Even more incredibly, the network, from the beginning, let me do pretty much whatever the fuck I wanted—allowing me to take the show anywhere I pleased, smoke on camera, curse as I needed—and, even more remarkably, along with the camera people/field producers, whom I became increasingly close to over many miles and many months of traveling together—tell stories any way I cared to, making, as it turned out,