The Macho Chef Memoir

We've liked them (like the works of Anthony Bourdain, pictured above). Eaten them up, we have. But is it a genre we should be fed up with? The Guardian discusses it.

From the piece...

There have been books that purport to tell the story of what goes on behind the swing doors. George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London is probably the masterwork and Hotel Bemelmans gave another perspective. But these were accounts of another time. It was Tony Bourdain who really spoke to this generation. Like many of us he'd grown up with the New Journalism, with Hunter S Thompson and the astonishing tours de force of American writing from Vietnam as his influences. He wrote about kitchens like Michael Herr wrote about Khe Sahn and about the restaurant industry like Dr Gonzo did Vegas.

In doing so he spoke directly to a whole cohort of forgotten male cooks and shook food writing out of the hands of women's magazine columnists and elitist bon viveurs. (By the way, anyone who thinks food writing isn't still affected by gender, watch the first series of Val Warner's What To Eat Now. Watching a man built like a blindside flanker reading a script about lavender meringues called 'Fairy Tits' can cause enough cognitive dissonance to make your nose bleed.)

Now the wraps are off. Everyone knows that kitchens are hell-holes, that brigades operate to the social conventions of a pack of dogs and that cheffing is like rock and roll precisely because it's populated by boys who do too many drugs and refuse to grow up. Bourdain wrote that story, and to my mind broke the mould. Part of the process of doing that was to grow into the persona of the world weary veteran in recovery. He writes like that because he's been there and no longer needs or wants to live the life.

The dozens of confessional chef memoirs that have followed have become increasingly formulaic.