Medium Raw

A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

Anthony Bourdain

19 The Fish-on-Monday Thing

I was genuinely angry most mornings, writing Kitchen Confidential. An unfocused, aim-in-a-general-direction-and-fire kind of a rage only exacerbated by the fact that my writing “regimen” (such as it was) consisted of a five thirty or six a.m. wake-up, a hurried disgorging of sentences, reminiscences, and hastily reconstructed memories from the previous night (this after a ten-or twelve-or fourteen-hour day in the kitchen, followed invariably by too much to drink and a topple into bed). I’d spit whatever words I had quickly onto the page—no agonizing over sentences for me, there wasn’t time anyway—then off to work again: put on the sauces, cut the meat, portion the fish, crack the peppercorns, cook lunch, and so on. Three thirty, two quick pints down the street, back to Les Halles, either work the line or read the board, then off to Siberia Bar—or simply sit down with the remains of the floor staff for just one more—get drunk en place. Sagged down in the back right passenger seat of a yellow Chevy Caprice, legs twisted uncomfortably behind the bulletproof partition—that’s where I did my best work, thinking about what I was going to write the next day. Window half-cracked and me halfway or fully in the bag, I’d think about my life as New York City rolled by outside.

As I lived then in Morningside Heights, on the Upper West Side, by the time I got home, my taxi would have passed through a near-comprehensive landscape of greatest hits, all my sorrows, all my joys—as I think the song goes. A densely packed checkerboard pattern of mistakes, failures, crimes, betrayals large and small. The occasional happy spot with good associations would make me smile weakly—before plunging me in the other direction as I’d recall how things got all fucked up, went wrong, or simply just came to …this. I was always glad to see the spot on Broadway where my then-wife and I had set up our books and records for sale, happy that I wasn’t doing that anymore—and that there was no longer a need for either of us to adhere to that kind of unrelentingly voracious math. But I was still angry—in the way, I suspect, that mobs get angry: angry about all the things I didn’t have and (I was sure) I would never have.

I’d never had health insurance, for one thing. Nor had my wife. And that scared the hell out of me—as getting sick was, on one hand, just not an option, and on the other, increasingly likely as we grew older. A sudden pain in the jaw requiring a root canal would hit the financial picture (such as it was) like a freight train. Total destruction. It would mean groveling. Beg the nice dentist in the filthy-looking office on the ground floor of a housing project to accept payment on the installment plan.

Car commercials made me angry, as I’d never owned a car—or so much as a scooter—and, I was quite sure by now, never would. Home ownership was a concept so beyond imagining as to be laughable. I was so far behind on rent, so ridiculously in arrears on income taxes, that on the rare occasion when I went to bed sober, I’d lie there in terror, my heart pounding in my ears, trying desperately to not think the unthinkable: that at any time, either landlord or government or the long-ignored but very much still-there folks at AmEx could take everything, everything away. That “everything” amounted only to somewhere between fourteen and four hundred dollars on a good day was cold comfort. It was only a combination of rent-stabilized apartment, a byzantine, slow-moving, and tenant-friendly housing court—and a wife who could work the system that kept a roof over our heads. And that streak of improbable good luck, too, could run out at any minute.

So, I was afraid. Very afraid. Every day and every night and every time I bothered to think about these things—which was a lot, because that’s the way a responsible person with a job who doesn’t have a drug habit was supposed to think about things: realistically. Frightened people become angry people—as history teaches us again and again. Facing “reality” after a lifetime of doing everything I could to escape it offered no rewards that I could see. Only punishment. No solution presented itself. I couldn’t go back (that way was blocked for sure), and I couldn’t go forward.

I’d quit heroin and I’d quit methadone and I’d stopped doing cocaine and stopped smoking crack—like everybody tells you to, right? And yet there I was, still broke and still frightened and in a deep financial hole I knew I would never climb out of.

And I was angry about that. Very angry.

I was angry with my wife—very angry, a long-festering and deep-seated resentment that year after year after year she didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t work. Strong, smart as hell, with a college degree from a Seven Sisters school, solid white-collar experience, and she’d long ago just…stopped looking. In nearly two decades, after a promising start, nothing but a couple of short-term, part-time gigs stocking books and sorting in-house mail for near-minimum wage. It made no sense to me and I resented it bitterly. To be fair, it consumed me out of all proportion, with the kind of smoldering, barely repressed passive-aggressive anger that poisons everything around it. And that, sure as shit, didn’t help the situation. Waking up and going to sleep with this basic fact—and the way I then handled that resentment—was contaminating everything. I just couldn’t get past it. I didn’t get past it. And I made things worse—far worse—in all the drearily predictable ways. Under-score that sentence.

As partners in crime, we’d been—in my mind, anyway—a Great Couple. As solid citizens? Neither of us seemed to know how.

I was angry, too, that all my little-boy dreams of travel and adventure would for absolutely sure never come true—that I’d never see Paris as a grown-up or Vietnam, or the South Pacific, or India, or even Rome. From my vantage point, standing behind the stove at Les Halles, that much was perfectly clear. And, to tell the truth, I only became angrier when my boss, Philippe, sent me to Tokyo for a week to consult, because now I knew what I was missing. Which was—as anyone who’s been lucky enough to see those places knows—everything. It was as if someone had opened a happy, trippy, groovy, and exotic version of Pandora’s box, allowed me to peek inside, into another dimension, an alternate life, and then slammed the thing shut.

I’m sure that many middle-aged, divorced guys could describe a drunken snog with a female croupier in similarly lush—and even apocalyptic—terms. And any “epiphany” I had in Asia was, at the end of the day, already the subject of about a thousand not very good movies. I can only say that once I’d stumbled around Asia’s impenetrably “foreign” streets, surrounded only by people whose language I would never understand, nostrils filled with strange and wondrous smells, eyes boggling at everything I saw, eating things I’d never dreamed could be so good…well…I was doomed. I would ultimately have done anything to get some more of that. (Not that anyone was offering.) I knew, too, somewhere deep inside, that sharing would be out of the question. That’s a bad thing to learn about yourself.

I was angry, too, in the usual ways: with my mom for having me, for being stupid enough to love me. With my brother for not being a fuckup like me. With my father for dying.

And, naturally, I was angry with myself most of all (people like us always are, aren’t we? It’s a Lifetime movie almost anyone can star in)—for being forty-four years old and still one phone call, one paycheck away from eviction. For fucking up, pissing away, sabotaging my life in every possible way.

Five years earlier, after the kind of once-in-a-lifetime, freakishly lucky breaks that have been all too common in my life, the kind of thing most aspiring writers only dream of, I’d published two spectacularly unsuccessful novels that had disappeared without a trace, never making it into paperback. This, the general wisdom taught me, effectively finished me in publishing. About this—and maybe only this—I was actually not angry. It had been a nice ride, I’d felt, one on which I’d embarked with zero expectations. I’d kept my day job—never imagining I’d do otherwise. The whole enterprise had dropped in my lap, felt like a scam from the get-go, so I’d thankfully never suffered from any delusions of being a “writer.” Two uninterrupted hours of sitting at an empty table in a Northridge, California, Barnes and Noble on a one-stop, crackpot and equally crack-brained, self-financed book tour had quickly disabused me of such notions.

When I sat down at my desk every morning to write Kitchen Confidential and began clacking away at the keyboard, I was both gloriously free of hope that it would ever be read outside of a small subculture of restaurant people in New York City—and boiling with the general ill-will of the unsatisfied, the envious, and the marginal. Let it be funny for cooks and waiters—and fuck everybody else, was pretty much my thinking at the time.

Which worked out okay in the end, as I never could have written the thing had I thought people would actually read it.

So, the result was an angry book in a lot of ways—and, over time, that’s what people have come to expect from me. The angry, cynical, snarky guy who says mean things on Top Chef—and I guess it would be pretty easy to keep going with that: a long-running lounge act, the exasperatedly enraged food guy. “Rachael Ray? What’s up with that?!” (Cue snare drum here.) To a great extent, that’s already happened.

But looking back at those hurried, hungover early mornings, sitting at my desk with unbrushed teeth, a cigarette in my mouth, and a bad attitude, what was I angry about that I’m still angry about today? Who, of all the people and all the things I railed at in that book, really deserved my scorn?

I certainly wasn’t angry at Emeril. And the many dreamers and crackpots I wrote about who’d employed me over the years—whatever their sins—are certainly no worse characters than I’d been. In fact, I loved them for their craziness, their excesses, their foolishness—their shrewdness or guile, their wastefulness, even their criminality. In almost every case, their choice of the restaurant business as a lifestyle option had cost them far, far more than it had ever cost me.

I wasn’t ever angry with any of the people who worked with me. Not in a lasting way. It was they, after all—all of them, heroes and villains alike—who’d kept me in the business all those years. I may have called waiters “waitrons” and joked about abusing them, but I had always believed that if somebody who worked with me went home feeling like a jerk for giving their time and their genuine effort, then it was me who had failed them—and in a very personal, fundamental way.

No. I instinctively liked and respected anyone who cooked or served food in a restaurant and took any kind of satisfaction in the job. Still feel that way. It is the finest and noblest of toil, performed by only the very best of people.

Okay. I am genuinely angry—still—at vegetarians. That’s not shtick. Not angry at them personally, mind you—but in principle. A shocking number of vegetarians and even vegans have come to my readings, surprised me with an occasional sense of humor, refrained from hurling animal blood at me—even befriended me. I have even knowingly had sex with one, truth be told. But what I’ve seen of the world in the past nine years has, if anything, made me angrier at anyone not a Hindu who insists on turning their nose up at a friendly offer of meat.

I don’t care what you do in your home, but the idea of a vegetarian traveler in comfortable shoes waving away the hospitality—the distillation of a lifetime of training and experience—of, say, a Vietnamese pho vendor (or Italian mother-in-law, for that matter) fills me with spluttering indignation.

No principle is, to my mind, worth that; no Western concept of “is it a pet or is it meat” excuses that kind of rudeness.

I often talk about the “Grandma rule” for travelers. You may not like Grandma’s Thanksgiving turkey. It may be overcooked and dry—and her stuffing salty and studded with rubbery pellets of giblet you find unpalatable in the extreme. You may not even like turkey at all. But it’s Grandma’s turkey. And you are in Grandma’s house. So shut the fuck up and eat it. And afterward, say, “Thank you, Grandma, why, yes, yes of course I’d love seconds.”

I guess I understand if your desire for a clean conscience and cleaner colon overrules any natural lust for bacon. But taking your belief system on the road—or to other people’s houses—makes me angry. I feel too lucky—now more than ever—too acutely aware what an incredible, unexpected privilege it is to travel this world and enjoy the kindness of strangers to ever, ever be able to understand how one could do anything other than say yes, yes, yes.

I’ve tried. Really.

I can cheerfully eat vegetarian food and nothing but for about five days at a clip—if I’m in India. And I’m open to the occasional attempts by the opposition to make their case.

Unfortunately, those attempts don’t always end happily.

A very nice, truly sweet guy, the boyfriend of a producer I was doing business with a few years back, went out of his way—as gently and as undogmatically as possible—to bring me over to the other side, making it something of a personal mission to get me to acknowledge the possibility of a delicious all-vegan meal. Let me repeat that this was a nice guy, who’d made his choices for what was, I’m sure, a visceral abhorrence for meat. When he saw a pork chop on a plate, I have no doubt, what he really saw was a golden retriever that had died screaming. I’d seen the genuine love this man had for his dogs—the way the poor guy would just tear up at the mention of some awful shelter on the other side of the country. I couldn’t find it in my heart to refuse him. I went out to dinner at what was said to be New York’s premier fine-dining vegan restaurant, a favorite, I was assured, of Paul McCartney’s (not exactly a selling point—but a measure of how earnest were his efforts to get me in the door). The food was expensive and painstakingly—even artfully—prepared, and, admittedly, it did not entirely suck.

Over organic wines and much convivial conversation, I even passed on a suggestion (via my dining companion) to “Sir Paul” that I thought might be helpful in his very public efforts to save cute animals. I ventured that if he seriously wanted to see a lot of the rarest, most beautiful, and most endangered animals live longer, healthier lives—and maybe even multiply and prosper—he should, I advised, buy a few million dollars worth of Viagra and Cialis, start spreading that stuff around for free where it mattered, with accompanying public service announcements, in the parts of Asia where they think bear’s paw, rhino horn, and tiger dicks are good boner medicine. Unlike these stratospherically expensive traditional Chinese remedies—the end-products of an enormously profitable black market that rewards the killing and even slow torturing of endangered animals—Viagra will actually make your dick hard, and for cheap. Hand out a few million little blue pills to middle-aged Chinese dudes—maybe even throw in a hooker, to boot—I suggested, and you’ll see some changed hearts and minds. Break a centuries-old pattern of truly monstrous and extreme cruelty to what are often the rarest and most beautiful of animals! (I was later told that he’d actually passed this idea along. A conversation I would like to see a videotape of someday.)

After a surprisingly serviceable meal, I felt pretty good about things. I’d been a nice guy, I thought, had made an effort to be open-minded. The meal hadn’t sucked. We’d even managed to find some common ground.

But then, months later, the poor bastard sent me an e-mail asking (innocently enough) for some statement of support—I think, for the Humane Society. Now, I like the Humane Society for the most part. I may disagree violently with their policy on—and activities on behalf of—anti–foie gras legislation, but I do like cats and dogs. (I’ve adopted one shelter cat after another for much of my life.) I’m supportive of any effort to stop dog-fighting, to spay animals, and to prevent abuse of domestic animals.

I don’t like circuses and, given the chance, would probably vote against the indenturing of elephants and lions and tigers, or any other animals they might want to stand on chairs or train to juggle. I frankly think Siegfried or Roy—whichever one of those guys got mauled by a tiger—got what he deserved. Tigers, to my way of thinking, like to maul people, they’re certainly built for the job, and anything preventing them from doing that on the one hand—while tempting them with a German in a sparkly, cerulean blue suit on the other—is clearly animal cruelty. Somebody who abuses an animal for the sheer joy of it—or solely for purposes of entertainment—should receive, at very least, equal ill treatment.

I’ll go further into PETA territory:

I would have preferred that Steve Irwin, “Crocodile Hunter”—regardless of his saintly conservationist prattle—had ended up as “Crocodile Chow.” That would have been some rough but entirely appropriate justice. In my opinion, the loud, irritating little fuck was in the business of disturbing, poking, tormenting, and generally annoying animals, who would have surely been far happier had they never met him. And if Bindi Irwin lived in my neighborhood, by the way, I would have called Child Protective Services on her parents years ago.

So, contrary to my reputation, I’m like Saint Francis of Fucking Assisi compared to what you might think—a friend to animals large and small, feeder of strays, adopter of runt kittens. A man who, though opposed to vegetarian orthodoxy, is still a reasonable fellow, willing, at least, to listen to the other guy’s point of view.

Until, that is, I got back from Beirut, fresh from a war zone, to find in my inbox an earnest plea for support from my vegan dining companion. The urgency of his tone as he described what was happening to stray cats and dogs somewhere grated on me badly. As I read on, I found myself becoming angrier and angrier—soon becoming furious.

I’d just seen a city not very much unlike Miami bombed back twenty fucking years, I answered in a lather of righteous indignation. From a shameful distance, I’d watched, every day, as neighborhoods filled with people were smashed to rubble. I’d woken up and gone to sleep to the rumble of bombs and rockets rolling through the floor of my otherwise comfortable hotel room. And then seen, up close, the faces of people who’d lost everything—and sometimes everyone—in their lives: the fear and hopelessness and confusion of thousands of people, packed onto landing craft with the few possessions they could carry, off and away to uncertain futures. For nothing. For the “best” intentions, I’m sure—they always are, aren’t they? But, ultimately, for nothing.

I had come straight from that—to this: this message filled with whiny, plaintive outrage on the behalf of the strays of Denver or something like that. There were strays in Beirut, too, I spat out, beginning what I’d intended to be a measured, sympathetic response. Surely, I suggested, where people were being bombed, and whole fucking neighborhoods knocked down to rubble, some doggies got hurt, too? I went on, warming (if not overheating) to my subject, venomously musing that when whole fucking families get crushed in their homes, abandoned pets can become a problem. Having just flown from the tarmac of a floating refugee camp, I now surfed deliriously on a wave of bile. Expanding the scope of my observations to include other places I’d been and other things I’d seen in my travels, I pointed out—any vestige of measured civility gone by now—that it was, perhaps, worth noting as well that anyplace where people were treated like animals—stacked in shantytowns, favelas, communes, and hutments—that animals suffered first and worst. Nobody gives a fuck about cute doggies or cats, much less a fucking dolphin or a white rhino, for that matter, when 90 percent of your diet is fucking bread—when you’re lucky enough to get it—or pounded manioc gruel. Where charred monkey on a stick (in fur) is a life-saving gift for a family, I spewed, all those neatly anthropomorphized animals we so love—like your fucking Yorkie (this was a low blow)—are seen as nothing more than bush meat. Sadistically putting the boot in, I gave examples of places where people are concerned that men in black vans might be coming at night to put hoods over their heads and take them away. Possibly for something they may have casually said, or a neighbor might have thought they casually said—or falsely reported they may have casually said.

I believe I might have mentioned Ceausescu’s Bucharest as an example. Plowing under an entire neighborhood and displacing its residents to build a pharaoh-scale palace, the megalomaniacal dictator had created an instant and frighteningly large population of abandoned dogs. Reproducing at an astounding rate, the desperate animals begat countless roving packs of terrifying and vicious feral dogs, wild, aggressive and hungry predators who knew nothing but the streets. Parts of Bucharest became, particularly at night, a potentially dangerous jungle—with all the dog-on-dog, dog-on-man, and man-on-dog violence imaginable. Embarrassed by this all-too-visible phenomenon, the people’s representatives were urged to deal with the matter. The dogs were eventually hunted down and exterminated in great number. If the death of the “Genius of the Carpathians” and his wife is any example (thoughtfully videotaped and broadcast), one can only imagine how gently the dogs were dispatched.

I believe I ended my bilious and cruel masterwork of an e-mail with the image of the gentle and beloved bovines of India, revered, protected by a population of people who worship them as life-givers, divine. Wandering freely through the streets, always and famously with the right of way, they were free as well, I thought my friend should know, to starve slowly to death, to eat garbage already picked over many times by equally hungry humans, often settling on the discarded plastic bags ubiquitous to impoverished communities where hope is almost gone and municipal garbage removal is a sometimes—if ever—thing. The plastic bags, of course, are indigestible, I explained, gradually becoming twisted and balled up in the cow’s guts and eventually—after what is surely a long period of agonizing discomfort—killing them.

Leaving him with this awful image, I ended in FULL CAPS that given the inconvenient and annoyingly complicated relationship between the conditions in which people live and his adorable animal friends, maybe he should start thinking about people first.

Granted, my reaction was on a par with suddenly taking a baseball bat to the barista who mistakenly used skim instead of soy milk on your latte, but I was really and truly angry. Not at my poor, unsuspecting friend, undeserving of such treatment (from whom I’ve never heard since). He just wanted to save a few animals, after all. It was just his bad luck that he’d asked me for help—and at a very bad time. I was angry at all the shit he made me think about.

And I’m still angry.

But I digress.

From the softer-edged distance of a changed and far more comfortable life, I’ve searched for a root cause, a common denominator that might explain my seemingly rote, instinctive, reflexive scorn for anyone cooking on TV (or in films, for that matter) whom I see, somehow, as unworthy.

What has Guy Fieri ever done to me? Why should I care if something Sandra Lee made on her show came from a can—or arrived held aloft by celestial virgins on a cubic zirconium–encrusted sleigh straight from Tuscany or Provence or fucking Valhalla? What does it matter if Rachael can cook or not? People like her! What’s my problem? So what if the contestants on Hell’s Kitchen are transparently delusional and hopeless? I shouldn’t get mad about it, right?

But I do.

Here’s what I’d like to think.

Back when I started cooking—back in the heady, crazy, admittedly lower-standard days of the early 1970s, when it was all about speed, endurance, attitude, physical toughness, and the ability to work through every variety of self-inflicted punishment—people handled food differently. The distinction between the way a “professional” and a home cook handled food was easy to spot: the professional cook was rougher with his food. (Obviously, I’m not talking about Lutèce or the Four Seasons or the better restaurants of the day here.) The fact was, cooks tended to slap their meat around a little bit more than was absolutely necessary, to drop portions of fish onto the cutting board with an audible panache that fell something short of delicacy. Looking like you didn’t give a shit—while cranking out food with the speed and efficiency and consistency of someone who did—was something of the fashion. You saw it in the rough, easy familiarity with which professional butchers took apart a primal section, the too-cool-to-be-bothered expression that said, “I could do this in my sleep.”

Simply put, neither I nor the people I worked with—or admired—particularly “respected the ingredient,” as chefs are likely to call it these days. We were frankly brutal with our food. I don’t know exactly when that attitude changed in me—somewhere, I’m sure, around the time I started putting on airs and spouting shit from the Larousse. But over time, without my realizing it was happening, my attitude did change, hardening, eventually, into a deeply held belief that doing bad things to food, especially when one does them knowingly—or wasting perfectly good food, or, in general, disrespecting it—is fundamentally wrong, a sin (if such a thing exists), a violation of a basic contract with decency, with the world and its citizens. In a word: evil.

Traveling has only reinforced that feeling.

I’m sure that I’m not alone in feeling an almost physical pain when I see somebody cut heedlessly into an unrested steak. Most people I know who have cooked for a living will react with a groan or a wince if they see someone committing an easily preventable crime against food. But most of my friends don’t actually get angry when somebody who knows (or should know) better massacres a perfectly good dish on TV.

I do.

I don’t dislike Guy Fieri, I realized, after many viewings of his cooking shows, much soul-searching at my personal ashram, and many doses of prescription hypnotics. I just dislike—really dislike—the idea that somebody would put Texas-style barbeque inside a fucking nori roll. I was, and remain, angry that there are genuine pit-masters who’ve made a calling of getting pork shoulder just right—and sushi chefs who worked three years on rice alone before being deemed worthy to lay hands on fish—and here’s some guy on TV blithely smashing those two disciplines together like junkers in a demolition derby. A pre-chopped onion is not okay, the way I look at it—no matter what Rachael or Sandra tell you. The shit in a can is not anywhere nearly as good—and almost always more expensive—than stuff you can often make yourself just as quickly. It’s…it’s just…wrong to tell people otherwise.

It is, of course, ludicrous for me to be insulted on behalf of strangers who would probably find my outrage completely misplaced, embarrassing, and probably even deranged. I don’t claim to speak for them and am unworthy, in any case, of doing so. I’m just saying that some of the shit I see some people doing to food on television causes a physical reaction in some deeply buried reptile part of my brain—and that makes me angry. It makes me want to say mean things. It probably shortens my life every time it happens.

One might expect Thomas Keller, who famously insists on storing his fish in their natural “swimming” position, to feel this way about food being mistreated. But me? Where do I get off, one might well ask?

It’s more an affliction than the expression of any high-minded ideals.

I watch Mark Bittman enjoy a perfectly and authentically prepared Spanish paella on TV, after which he demonstrates how his viewers can do it at home—in an aluminum saucepot—and I want to shove my head through the glass of my TV screen and take a giant bite out of his skull, scoop the soft, slurry-like material inside into my paw, and then throw it right back into his smug, fireplug face. The notion that anyone would believe Catherine Zeta-Jones as an obsessively perfectionist chef (particularly given the ridiculously clumsy, 1980s-looking food) in the wretched film No Reservations made me want to vomit blood, hunt down the producers, and kick them slowly to death. (Worse was the fact that the damn thing was a remake of the unusually excellent German chef flick Mostly Martha.) On Hell’s Kitchen, when Gordon Ramsay pretends that the criminally inept, desperately unhealthy gland case in front of him could ever stand a chance in hell of surviving even three minutes as “executive chef of the new Gordon Ramsay restaurant” (the putative grand prize for the finalist), I’m inexplicably actually angry on Gordon’s behalf. And he’s the one making a quarter-million dollars an episode—very contentedly, too, from all reports.

The eye-searing “Kwanzaa Cake” clip on YouTube, of Sandra Lee doing things with store-bought angel food cake, canned frosting, and corn nuts, instead of being simply the unintentionally hilarious viral video it should be, makes me mad for all humanity. I. Just. Can’t. Help it.

I wish, really, that I was so far up my own ass that I could somehow believe myself to be some kind of standard-bearer for good eating—or ombudsman, or even the deliverer of thoughtful critique. But that wouldn’t be true, would it?

I’m just a cranky old fuck with what, I guess, could charitably be called “issues.”

And I’m still angry.

But eat the fucking fish on Monday already. Okay?

I wrote those immortal words about not going for the Monday fish, the ones that’ll haunt me long after I’m crumbs in a can, knowing nothing other than New York City. And times, to be fair, have changed. Okay, I still would advise against the fish special at T.G.I. McSweenigan’s, “A Place for Beer,” on a Monday. Fresh fish, I’d guess, is probably not the main thrust of their business. But things are different now for chefs and cooks. The odds are better than ever that the guy slinging fish and chips back there in the kitchen actually gives a shit about what he’s doing. And even if he doesn’t, these days he has to figure that you might actually know the difference.

Back when I wrote the book that changed my life, I was angriest—like a lot of chefs and cooks of my middling abilities—at my customers. They’ve changed. I’ve changed.

About them, I’m not angry anymore.