trashcanjack

Ok...wanna share w/ you a snippet from Anthony Bourdain's book Kitchen Confidential.

My dad recommended this book to me years ago, and I've read it, like, five times. Amazing, this guy. Whod've thought food writiing would be this badass? Check it out:

"At six in the morning, we boarded Monsieur Saint-Jours small wooden vessel with our picnic baskets and our sensible footwear. He was a crusty old bastard, dressed like my uncle in ancient denim coveralls, espadrilles and beret. He had a leathery, tanned and windblown face, hollow cheeks, and the tiny broken blood vessels on nose and cheeks that everyone seemed to have from drinking so much of the local Bordeaux. He hadnt fully briefed his guests on what was involved in these daily travails. We put-putted out to a buoy marking his underwater oyster parc, a fenced-off section of bay bottom, and we sat ... and sat ... and sat, in the roaring August sun, waiting for the tide to go out. The idea was to float the boat over the stockaded fence walls, then sit there until the boat slowly sank with the water level, until it rested on the bassin floor. At this point, Monsieur Saint-Jour, and his guests presumably, would rake the oysters, collect a few good specimens for sale in port, and remove any parasites that might be endangering his crop.

There was, I recall, still about two feet of water left to go before the hull of the boat settled on dry ground and we could walk about the parc. Wed 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.

My parents hesitated. I doubt theyd realized they might have actually to eat one of the raw, slimy things we were currently floating over. My little brother recoiled in horror.

But I, in the proudest moment of my young life, stood up smartly, grinning with defiance, and volunteered to be the first

And in that unforgettably sweet moment in my personal history, that one moment still more alive for me than so many of the other firsts which followed first pussy, first joint, first day in high school, first published book, or any other thing I 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.

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.

Everything was different now. Everything."

I wish I could write like this guy....