Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook Paperback – 6 Jun 2011

I have been an admirer of Anthony Bourdain since the release of 'Kitchen Confidential' ten years ago. His writing is always good, whether in his fiction, his travel writing or in memoir. It is, however, when writing about cooks and cooking that his prose comes truly alive. His passion for food and those involved in its preparation, from the imagination required to produce a tasting menu at the French Laundry to the mental stamina and physical skill involved in `cutting' 700lbs of fish in 5 hours, has not diminished over the years. If anything, the personal and professional changes in his life, and they have been startling, have fired his enthusiasm and, in some memorable instances, his anger. The `Heroes & Villains' chapter is a delight to read not least because he can turn a phrase, but because he is unafraid when choosing his targets and the language used to skewer them.
The chapter on `Virtue' is a stand out because it acts as neat summation of the sensibility of an intelligent sensualist. Writing about food and the pleasure associated with eating and cooking is, as Anthony Bourdain points out, extremely difficult without resorting to the banalities of `food porn' so ubiquitous in the culture. In 'Medium Raw' he avoids cliché or cheap observations to produce a fresh, honest and thoughtful take on subjects that ought to be of interest to everyone. Buy copies for yourself and people you like.

Medium Raw is subtitled 'A Bloody Valentine To The World Of Food And The People Who Cook' an unwieldy sentence which doesn't actually mean very much, and means even less when you read the book: Medium Raw is a collection of leftovers, chopped up and shaped into book form, and deep fried in marketing hype. I had gotten the impression this was going to be an autobiography of Mr. Bourdain's post 'Kitchen Confidential' years, but there's no cohesive thread to the book at all: It ranges from a diatribe against tasting menus to a piece about taking his four-year old daughter to dance class. There are some meaty bits amongst all the starchy filler - Bourdain is wonderful at writing about food and the food industry - but a lot of it is inexcusably self-indulgent: an entire chapter is devoted to dishing the dirt on an obscure (to non-New Yorkers, anyway)food critic who's insulted Bourdain in a restaurant review: Another piece 'Heroes and Villains' reads like it was knocked up in a few hours purely to fill up a few more pages. In short, there's just not enough meat on the plate here to justify charging for a full meal.

"Medium Raw" by Anthony Bourdain is a new book written by this notorious chef who previously wrote an excellent book "Kitchen Confidential" and led very popular show "No Reservations".

"Medium Raw" somehow can be seen as sequel to "Kitchen Confidential" although ten years had passed and lot of things had changed in the food industry.
And due to that it should be honest and say that this book is of a bit lower quality compared to his previous work, although it has lots of qualities for which it should be read.

Its best parts are those when Anthony is telling the stories from the cook line, when he's describing fantastic dishes and when he is telling stories about his private life, how he feels being father for the first time, and being husband the second.
What was totally unnecessary and actually spoiled the experience of the whole book is a part where he talks about Food Network and other cooks that are probably completely unknown to wider audience and therefore uninteresting.

Although I didn't previously heard about the guy, the particularly touching part of the book is when Anthony is telling story about Justo Thomas, a man who works at the New York restaurant Le Bernardin.
Thomas became famous due to his skills of quick fish filleting, allegedly he can shift 1000 pounds of fish a day, a job that takes three men when Thomas is away.
I hope that Thomas would be still there when I'll come to that restaurant, just to try his fish fillets.

Overall, this whole book was like speaking to Anthony Bourdain or listening to him while in same time eating some good meal.
And if there weren't those unnecessary parts, and the previous book which showed that the author can do even better, such conversation would deserve the highest grade.

This is the follow-up to 'Kitchen Confidential', a book that contained rage not just at circumstances, but at life itself - that was a book full of dark joy, and the energy needed to write it - let alone to live that way - was the sort of level that could never be sustained by anyone who wasn't a complete maniac.

Which, I have to say, I thought Anthony was. I now realise he's just as 'normal' as the rest of us - pretty much nuts then, but coping with it from day to day. He's written the book about his past, and this is the book about his present. He's not doing the Class A drugs any more, and there's a more calm and collected sense of perspective about things - he's in a place that he himself admits he could ever have imagined possible a few years ago.

AB has a really great way of writing about things - I *hated* his attempts at writing fiction; they were in the style of Raymond Chandler, but they came across more like 'soft boiled' rather than 'hard boiled' - he's far more comfortable telling things the way they are. So, in this book you get stories about insane girlfriends with too much cash, his opinion of 'Food Network', all these sort of things. There's a great section called 'Food Porn' which just describes (in quite fantastic detail) his favourite meals. I've been lucky enough to have had one of them, and believe me - he's right on the money when he's writing about food.Read more ›