By Lambert Strether of Corrente<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 201 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page<\/a>, which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, PayPal, Clover, or Wise. Read about why we\u2019re doing this fundraiser<\/a>, what we\u2019ve accomplished in the last year<\/a>, and our current goal, strengthening our IT infrastructure<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.<\/em> \u2013Apocryphal, attributed to Robin Williams<\/a><\/p>\n This week is a very serious week at Naked Capitalism, so I thought I would switch things up and present you, readers, with an amuse-bouche<\/em>, the sort of old school blogging post where I start out not knowing where I will end up. <\/p>\n Not to knock my mother\u2019s cooking, but it was American-style from women\u2019s magazines in the 1950s (meatloaf, creamed peas, jello): well-planned, nutritious, even, but not cuisine<\/em>. I learned to eat late in life, in my mid-30s, in Montreal, where I had come for a Te<\/sub>X conference at McGill \u2014 I was a desktop publisher several careers ago \u2014 and when the program had ended for the day, I walked down the Mountain toward Ste Catherine\u2019s street, and wandered into a random steakhouse, because I thought I would treat myself.<\/p>\n The steakhouse was the Alouette Steak House. The warm room was full of solid provincial bourgeoisie, tucking in. From the menu \u2014 exotically in both French (large type) and English (small type) \u2014 I selected steak au poivre<\/em> with frites<\/em>, escargot<\/em> for an apetizer, and a carafe of red wine (considering the room, \u201cI\u2019ll have what they\u2019re having\u201d). The air outside was crisp; inside, the windows were steamy. The plump chef, in his white toque, seared the steaks on a rotating grill, presumbly for speed. The bread, wine, and the escargot<\/em> arrived; I had never encountered a plate with hemispherical convexities to hold snails, which were garlicky, soaked in oil, and could not quite be said to be tough. I polished them off, soaked up the garlic and oil with the bread, and cut the oil and the garlic with a gulp of wine. The steak arrived, crusted with peppercorns, slathered in cream sauce. I sawed off a hunk\u2026. <\/p>\n My whole mouth was happy. My whole body<\/em> was happy. I don\u2019t know why this never happened before, but it did. As you can see, this was a madeleine<\/a> moment for me. Bourdain is an actual food writer, unlike me and far better, and here is his madeleine moment, which happened to him when he was much younger than I was then. From Kitchen Confidential<\/em> (2000), pp. 18-19:<\/p>\n We\u2019d already polished off the Brie and baguettes and downed the Evian, but I was still hungry, and characteristically said so. Monsieur Saint-Jour, on hearing this-as if challenging his American passengers-inquired in his thick Girondais accent, if any of us would care to try an oyster.<\/p>\n My parents hesitated. I doubt they\u2019d realized they might have actually to eat one of the raw, slimy things we were currently floating over. My little brother recoiled in horror.<\/p>\n But I, in the proudest moment of my young life, stood up smartly, grinning with defiance, and volunteered to be the first.<\/p>\n And in that unforgettably sweet moment in my personal history, that one moment still more alive for me than so many of the other \u2018firsts\u2019 which followed\u2014first joint, first day in high school, first published book, or any other thing\u2014I attained glory. Monsieur Saint-Jour beckoned me over to the gunwale, where he leaned over, reached down until his head nearly disappeared underwater, and emerged holding a single silt-encrusted oyster, huge and irregularly shaped, in his rough, clawlike fist. With a snubby, rust-covered oyster knife, he popped the thing open and handed it to me, everyone watching now, my little brother shrinking away from this glistening, vaguely sexual-looking object, still dripping and nearly alive.<\/p>\n I took it in my hand, tilted the shell back into my mouth as instructed by the by now beaming Monsieur Saint-Jour, and with one bite and a slurp, wolfed it down. It tasted of seawater . . . of brine and flesh . . . and somehow . . . of the future.<\/p>\n Everything was different now. Everything.<\/p>\n I\u2019d not only survived\u2014I\u2019d enjoyed<\/em>.<\/p>\n This, I knew, was the magic I had until now been only dimly and spitefully aware of. I was hooked. My parents\u2019 shudders, my little brother\u2019s expression of unrestrained revulsion and amazement only reinforced the sense that I had, somehow, become a man. I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life-the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation-would all stem from this moment.<\/p>\n I\u2019d learned something. Viscerally, instinctively, spiritually\u2014even in some small, precursive way, sexually\u2014and there was no turning back. The genie was out of the bottle. My life as a cook, and as a chef, had begun.<\/p>\n Food had power<\/em>.<\/p>\n It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me . . . and others. This was valuable information.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I was dining in solitary splendor, and so experienced the aesthetics only; not power<\/em>, as did Bourdain (for good or ill). Sadly, the Alouette Steak House is gone now:<\/p>\n Gone like so much else downtown. I moved on to much more upscale eateries, though I do not think at that time celebrity chefs were a thing; everything was still innocent, still about the food. I discovered tasting menus, seven courses of tiny delicious morsels, and menus that specified ingredients like \u201cMonsieur Fortier\u2019s greens,\u201d which was great, because local! I was supporting a farm! (In fact, one of the best meals I ever ate was in my home town in Maine, where the cook created a Slow Food<\/a> dinner, all from local ingredients (so any town can do it)). I also learned to deprecate the American practice of surrounding a great slab of meat with sides; at that time, in Montreal at least, meat and vegetables were equally important on the plate, and designed to complement and reinforce each other.<\/p>\n On reflection, rereading my own experience in Montreal, I see that with \u201cthe bread\u2026 arrived,\u201d I have fetishized the bread and made it into an active agent; in fact, a serveur<\/em> brought me my food. Bringing us to one of many Bourdain reflections on staff. Again from Kitchen Confidential<\/em>, pp 208-209:<\/p>\n I guess it was a historic moment.<\/p>\n [Steven] showed up looking for a saut\u00e9 position, his even more degenerate friend Adam Real-Last- Name-Unknown in tow\u2026.<\/p>\n When Steven and Adam were in the kitchen together, I couldn\u2019t turn my back for a second. They were hyperactive and destructive, two evil Energizer bunnies who, when they weren\u2019t squabbling and throwing food at each other, seemed always to be dodging out of the kitchen on various criminal errands. They were loud, larcenous, relentlessly curious\u2014Steven can\u2019t look at a desk without rifling its contents; they played practical jokes, and set up whole networks of like-minded co-workers. A few weeks after he arrived, Steven already had the whole club wired from top to bottom: the office help would tell him what everyone else was getting paid, security would give him a cut of whatever drugs they impounded at the door, and the techies let him play with the computers\u2026. Maintenance gave him a share of the lost-and-found and split the leftover booty from the promotional events-goody bags filled with cosmetics, CDs, T-shirts, bomber jackets, wrist- watches, etc.; the chief of maintenance even gave Steven the key to a disused office on the Supper Club\u2019s neglected third floor, an old janitor\u2019s storage room that, unbeknownst to management, had been converted to a carpeted, furnished and fully decorated pleasure pit, complete with working phone. It was a space suitable for small gatherings, drug deals and empire-building. [The room] had been done up with pilfered carpet remnants and furniture from the adjoining Edison Hotel. As the space was located up a long flight of garbage-strewn back stairs, behind the reeking locker-rooms, down a dark, unlit hall where spare china was stored, management never visited\u2014and a young man could be secure in the knowledge that whatever dark business he was conducting, no matter how loud, unruly or felonious, he was unlikely to be disturbed.<\/p>\n The boy could cook<\/em>, though.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The sort of delicious office politics I learned at my father\u2019s knee\u2026 <\/p>\n Kitchen Confidential<\/em> made Bourdain into a celebrity and then a TV star, but I\u2019m going to skip over all that and present three short video clips that show how much he loved food (and delicious food that locals could eat, for not much money, unlike my excessive and precious tasting menus). From San Francisco, the Swan Oyster House:<\/p>\n\n
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