![]() ![]() Bourdain stalked the screen, like a gaunt Joe Strummer, swearing like a longshoreman, occasionally actually drunk ![]() ![]() For all the rock’n’roll, the easy, sleazy charm, the guy wrote like a poet and, as he got older, he just got better. Not pretentious, not the purple passages of food writers before him, the high prose of the refined connoisseur but the terse, full-auto linguistic firepower of a New Yorker – imagery like crime-scene photos, the flayed raw humour of a morgue attendant, the sort of one-liners a hitman drops as he pulls the trigger, and similes that would make Raymond Chandler eat his own pencils. And when he was on form, Christ, could Bourdain weave words. Alone in the kitchen, a hangover and a double espresso from the still-warm La Marzocco machine, knocking up a scallion and chorizo omelette as you set up your station. For me it was a single passage that resonated most: the description of being the first guy on the line in the morning. It is said to have been rushed into print on the strength of the New Yorker piece, and some of it, in hindsight, feels like filler, but parts are inspired. It is more a collection of essays than a solid narrative. ![]()
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