Funny piece about the legacy of Bourdain https://charlottecooktravel.substack.com/p/on-not-being-anthony-bourdain

Everyone wants to be the natural successor to Bourdain and nobody wants to be the natural successor to the guy from Man vs Food. Why not amalgamate the two?

"I am here, in the back streets of Chiang Mai for the world's best, Michelin star-winning Tom-You Gong soup. However, I've asked them to make me fifty bowls and then time me eating them"

Cue shots of horrified Thai people

@Taskerland One of the things about Bourdain is everyone wants to be him but they don't want to do the whole "wreck yourself and burn your hand to leather" bit of Kitchen Confidential. They want the cachet of cooking-as-warfare without the life experience.

@Printdevil He does make it very clear that being a chef is an extraordinarily shit job.

@Taskerland @Printdevil From all I heard, star cooks are one of the most toxic group of professionals out there.
It's okay for food to be adequate, and for people having to wait another five minutes. Or the restaurant having three fewer tables to the reduce the maximum number of simuoltaneous orders.
It's some cooks who insist that cooking should be a martyrdom for everyone involved.

I've known two really top professional chefs & I've always been stunned by what they can do in small, like really small prep spaces. The spatial skills, the timetabling, the sheer grasp of process just eludes me. I'm a reasonable cook, in a home sense, but I'd go crazy trying to work in the confined spaces these people produce 30+ covers a night in. One of them is intensely affable, and the other is full on aggression cooking. Generational difference in psychology of cooking

@yora @Taskerland

@Printdevil there was definitely a major swaggering arsehole slash toxic masculinity problem in the profession at one point. @yora

@Printdevil He does make it very clear that being a chef is an extraordinarily shit job.

@Taskerland @Printdevil

It requires a lot of good hand eye coordination, strength, and motor skills that don't suck. I will always have respect for the Pastry & Baking profession, but I never finished Culinary school for a reason.

@Taskerland @Printdevil

In fact looking back at the critiques of Legends and Lattes recently, I surprisingly didn't find much criticism about the idea of running cafes and food businesses as "cozy", much less discussion about the food service worker deaths due to Covid