In October 2017, amid the restaurant industry’s reckoning with the #MeToo movement, Anthony Bourdain sat for an interview with Slate’s Isaac Chotiner and offered a sharp self-indictment.
“I’ve had to ask myself, and I have been for some time, ‘To what extent in that book did I provide validation to meatheads?’”
Bourdain was speaking about Kitchen Confidential, which 17 years earlier had been published as an autobiographical account of the realities of professional kitchens. Later, in the same interview, he went on to acknowledge that, although he’d tried to distance himself from his jagged bad-boy identity, “the fact is that’s what my persona was.”
I’m not a Bourdain devotee. His brand of masculinity — swaggering, profane, and transgressive — has always kept me at a distance. But his willingness to look back at himself critically and honestly I find genuinely admirable. I think that’s part of what draws people to him, even still. It’s that, and the fact that anyone who cares about American food culture must reckon with Bourdain’s place in the canon, is how I found myself at the movies a couple weeks ago to see Tony, which documents the first summer a young Bourdain found himself working in a professional kitchen.
The movie itself I mostly liked, but also found hard to watch.
As expected, Bourdain (played by Dominic Sessa) was completely dislikable. What made the movie for me was Ciro (played spectacularly by Antonio Banderas), the man who gave Bourdain a place to crash and his first kitchen job. For all of Bourdain’s aggressiveness, brashness, and loudness, Ciro offered viewers the sanctuary of immigrant optimism, patience, hospitality, generosity, entrepreneurship-as-vehicle-for-creativity, and second chances.
Looking back, Bourdain in 2017 was worried he’d fed the meatheads. What seems clear now is that the meatheads won.
We’re living through a renewed cultural fascination with hardness. Donald Trump’s return to the presidency is a political backdrop to that perception, but the president isn’t responsible for the phenomenon. Men’s fashion has careened into manual labor-core. Proteinmaxxing is all the rage. The rise of Hyrox, rucking, and ultra-endurance events permeates social feeds, tech CEOs openly call for more “masculine energy” at work, and popular tradwife content presents the fantasy of hard men and quieter women in its view of an orderly world.
I think this is why I felt Banderas’ character, totally out-of-sync with the cultural temperature, as especially alluring. He was the one thing that kept me in my seat. Upon realizing this, I sensed that Obama-era-millennial self-recognition bubbling to the surface. Part of me watched Tony and thought to myself: ‘Oh God. Of course this is the character I love.’
But why was that my reaction?
I look back at food touchstones: Julia Child brought cheery domestic instruction to home cooks. The early days of the Food Network beamed a friendly Emeril into our living rooms. And then came Bourdain, Ramsay, cooking competitions, chef-as-rock-star (see: Guy Fieri and Mario Batali), chef-as-antihero (see: Marco Pierre White and David Chang), and chef-as-tortured-genius (see: Bernard Loiseau) until much of it crashed into the cliffs of cultural reckoning. Maybe screaming at employees, destroying yourself, and being an asshole aren’t actually evidence of genius.
But did we ever move on to something better? The Great British Bake Off — that paragon of perfectly boring, perfectly easy, perfectly friendly food culture — comes close, but still lacks depth. Ina Garten? Maybe.
At the risk of meandering down a tangent,The Bear absolutely understands that brash kitchen culture destroys people, and yet Carmy’s explosive kitchen meltdowns — oh my god the screaming in that show! — haven’t stopped him from becoming a desirable cultural object. It’s impossible to keep track of the torrent of Instagram ads serving up the shirts and tanks worn by the show’s male actors. To be clear, these are clothes designed to reproduce a muscular, hypermasculine silhouette.
That’s where we are. We’ve become sophisticated enough to make television about the damage caused by the macho-chef archetype, and then the algorithm manages to extract a macho-chef aesthetic and sell it back to us. The meathead survives his own deconstruction.
I know The Bear is a thoughtful show. And I may be Pollyanna about Banderas. His character doesn’t provide the same mythology. He’s not dangerous. In the ways he may be tortured he goes out of his way to suppress. And he’s definitely not a walking contradiction to pick at psychologically.
He started a restaurant. He likes to feed people. And he takes care of someone. His version of masculinity — so far afield of Bourdain — can feel naive and simple. Still, he offers something more interesting than the tortured soul narrative. He absorbs pain and still manages to take care of people. That can look uncomplicated by comparison.
Maybe that’s old hat, or maybe we’ve gotten bad at recognizing care as something interesting instead of merely nice. We value generosity, but we mythologize aggression. Where does that leave us?