I suppose we can thank Anthony Bourdain for the stereotype of the wild man chef. In Kitchen Confidential, his descriptions of "whacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees...and psychopaths" haphazardly gobbling substances and screwing on flour sacks between shifts made cooking in a restaurant kitchen seem like both the worst and best job imaginable. He romanticized the depraved hangover-to-hangover existence of a clock-punching turner-and-burner even as he cast his world in a hyper-realistic light, widely disseminating a broad colorful portrait of the journeyman chef, specifically a male one, that quickly congealed in the public mind. He popularized an archetype young chefs may even aspire to emulate -- like fledgling rock singers copping Jagger's pout and other well-traveled performance tropes.

In July 2009, Lev Grossman wrote of Bourdain in Time:

"It was invisible then. Now we recognize it right away: this is Anthony Bourdain's world...He changed our whole cultural idea of what a kitchen is. Pre-Bourdain, it was a warm, cozy, maternal place. Now it's a profane, brutal, masculine crucible, where human frailty is rendered away like so much tasty bacon fat."

Of course, Kitchen Confidential didn't tell chefs anything they didn't already know. I also doubt the book would have been such a sensation had it not arrived at a time when cooking and eating were becoming popular fodder for entertainment on the Food Network, and chefs were more and more in the public eye. Today, celebrity chefs are brands -- swollen, polished amplifications of the managerial personalities they cultivated actually manning kitchens. I'm not trying to write a college paper here, but I have noticed (as have many others) that nearly all of the high-profile celebrity chefs are men. While female Food Network hosts -- like Rachael, Giada, and the newly minted Melissa-- focus on saving time, shopping frugally, and feeding families -- clear extensions of the domestic arena -- male celebrity chefs focus on the craft itself, food for its own sake, cooking as an endless array of skills to acquire and adventures on which to embark in the carrying on of tradition and technique. They can approach food from an intellectual perspective. You learn about salumi. You study pizza. You get your education one cream-laden sauce at a time. You come of age in a French kitchen helmed by a venomous, insult-spewing maniac. You soak up abuse like a crostini, work awful hours, and get paid little to no money, but it's what you expect -- because you're an apprentice. You have to be man enough to take it. Some day, you'll be an executive chef yourself, and you'll have your own cadre of serfs to kick around. Until then, you mince onions and practice cursing. While women obviously pass through similar rites of passage in kitchens all over the world, in the realm of food entertainment, they're relegated to clipping coupons, dumbing down complicated dishes to satisfy some producer's market-tested vision of the American housewife, and attracting no shortage of she-can't-really-cook mockery from their male counterparts. Older female celebrity chefs -- like Lidia Bastianich, for example -- are motherly and comforting. They learned to cook from their mothers, and that's what they're sharing with you.

Everything on television is deliberately orchestrated, of course, but many of the common signifiers of male chefness -- the cursing, the drinking, the fighting, the screaming, the preoccupation with large pieces of meat -- whether expressed on camera, in memoirs, or reputation via third-person anecdotes -- endow a traditionally feminine role with coarse, conventionally masculine trappings. Producers want men to feel safe watching their shows. They don't want the women to appear shrill, unattractive, bossy, or otherwise threatening, or for the men in aprons to come off as effete. Over the course of six seasons of Bravo's Top Chef, some of the show's most reviled male contestants have been wheedling, effeminate men. Likewise, when Padma Lakshmi, host of Top Chef, did a tour of Spain for the Food Network way back in early 2000s, she was not tripping around, Bourdain-like, shit-faced on sherry, taking bullfighting lessons, making subtle references to gastrointestinal distress. Instead, cameras zoomed in again and again as she slowly lowered strips of fine jamon into her mouth, oohing and cooing, her face bathed in a soft, warm lamp-lit glow. In one segment, she rode a horse, in another, a donkey. She did go to a bullfight, which the bull managed to win against all odds. Relieved, Lakshmi repaired to a nearby restaurant, where she ate the balls of one of the victorious bull's less fortunate comrades.

Men who have become famous cooking and eating in the public eye go out of their way to project a masculine image, and their carefully constructed personalities stud every crevice of the machismo spectrum. Ginger-coiffed Bobby Flay, proprietor of what Grub Street deems the 13th largest chef empire, is a wise-talking Jersey dude. He's richer than an oil tycoon but he has real friends. How do you know? They come over to his modest-seeming house for sausage party cook-outs. Sometimes, when he's smirking his way through a Throwdown episode, he looks like guys I've seen at bars late at night, red-faced, a little sweaty, leering at ladies between shots of Patron. 8th on Grub Street's list, Mario Batali, corpulent, jolly, and orange-clogged, is renowned for Falstaffian excesses. With his Tourettic interjecting of idiotic catch phrases, Emeril Lagasse, locked with Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Nobu Matsuhisa for #5 through #7, strikes me as a man who always speaks louder than he has to. With his Stray Cats-meets-Swingers-in-the-back-of-a-Sunglass Hut shtick, Guy Fieri apparently wowed audience members at this year's Great American Food and Music Festival in Mountain View with what Bay Area Bites contributor Stephanie Im called a "highly entertaining blowout performance complete with loud rock n'roll, gratuitous hot chicks on stage, big machinery, power tools, and pyrotechnics." The owner of 27 restaurants around the world, Gordon Ramsey has bounced over some financial ruts lately, but Grub Street still has him in the #1 slot. His shows are crude spectacles of theater Artaud, would find unwatchable. Ramsey berates chefs, spits food on the floor, and picks fights. Off-screen, he's compulsively disrespectful, particularly towards women. Bourdain? Well, he doesn't actually cook much anymore, but he drinks a lot on No Reservations and makes a point of eating anything put in front of him, regardless of how strange or off-putting it may be. When he's not going shooting with Ted Nugent, he's a culturally sensitive daredevil -- an Evel Knievel of antacid-defying degustation. I can eat this gigantic sandwich, these bulbous eyeballs, and this disgusting warthog anus, he seems to say -- could you? When he and Eric Ripert venture back into the Les Halles kitchen to char beef and sauce sole for Season Four's "Into the Fire" episode, they're in the war zone, brothers sloshing through the trenches, dunking freedom fries in spitting oil and hustling out steak au poivre as the foes -- the diners -- descend in overwhelming numbers. Interestingly, Jamie Oliver, who on several occasions has been the target of Bourdain's bullying, was the subject of a 2003 academic article published in the International Journal of Cultural Studies: "Oliver's Twist: Leisure, Labor, and Domestic Masculinity in The Naked Chef". The writer, Joanne Hollows of Nottingham Trent University in England, frames Oliver as a construction of the masculine domestic cook. According to Hollows, in his professional capacity, Oliver avoids associating cooking with labor; instead, it's a fun, leisurely, and "recognizably manly" activity.

You'll never see a man on a cooking show gasping and groaning over the way something tastes -- over-sensualizing their pleasure from food. "Oh that's serious," Bourdain will say, wiping some beastly innards off his face, taking a swig of Heineken. Emeril and Fieri will bark as if they're at a ball game. Batali will explain why something is good, rather than simply express how happy he is to eat it. Some kinds of cooking -- grilling, artisanal curing, brawny offal-centric preparations -- tend to have hyper-masculine devotees. Molecular gastronomy -- food science, art, and fantasy in a delicious jumble -- is safe too -- because it's so dramatically removed from the drudgery of home-cooking. Every now and then, you see a gentle man cooking on television, and the effect is jarring. In March, celebrated Manresa chef David Kinch schooled Bobby Flay on Iron Chef. Even though his restaurant is a destination, the soft-spoken and terroir-enthused Kinch will never have product tie-ins -- commercial mayonnaise, kitchen gear, spice rubs, etc -- on Flay's level -- even in the unlikely event he wanted to in the first place. He'd rather build "tide-pools" of fresh shellfish and sea beans languishing in dashi-laced green tomato broth and go surfing in his spare time. One of my favorite cooking shows was Charlie Trotter's original Kitchen Sessions on PBS in the late 1990s. Amid a loose jazz soundtrack, Trotter very softly presented his thesis: cooking is a cycle of improvisations where time-tested techniques meet endlessly changing circumstances and opportunities for adjustment. The food was high-concept, challenging but within reach. As a host, he was a soothing presence -- murmuring vaguely poetic asides, often looking away from the camera, frequently indulging in tangential digressions appropriate to his show's statement of purpose. Trotter has been very successful, but his show, at least in that incarnation, didn't last more than a year or two. Ironically, Trotter actually made a cameo in the 1997 movie My Best Friend's Wedding, in which he convincingly played the stereotype of a blustery chef, bellowing at an assistant: "I will kill your whole family if you don't get this right!" It's a better joke now, twelve years later.

When it came to food, my grandfather prized quantity. Maybe it was something about being a kid during the Depression and then an adult during World War II rationing, but he relished, like little else, walking into the dining room of a second-rate hotel restaurant, and seeing brunch laid out: a legion of steaming metal tubs on tables in rows, like shining shields, their handles swathed in white cloth napkins. There'd be a d.i.y waffle station to the left, a man shaking omelets to the right. Cascades of silly, under-ripe fruit would pile on circular tables here and there. There'd be a roast beef carving counter, little sausage links, pancakes, scrambled eggs, and lunch-like dishes -- baked chicken-y things, bad salads, mysterious gratins -- no one ever seemed to actually eat. He loved brunch, specifically buffets, because he could eat anything he wanted, in whatever sequence and amounts he desired. Brunch was freedom in the form of phony opulence. It reminded him of the cruises he adored, I think, an earthly manifestation of those magical floating worlds where dedicated gluttons could dine four times a day and hop freely from one bastardized culinary tradition to another.

In San Francisco, buffets are more luxurious than those I knew in Kentucky as a kid. On Sunday mornings, from 10:30 a.m. until 1:30 p.m., you can enjoy $68 worth of omelets made to order, sushi and sashimi, pasta, dim sum, crepes, breads, pastries, and desserts -- along with posh digs and about 800 tourists -- at the Court Garden of the Palace Hotel on the corner of Market and New Mongomery. The most trumpeted neighborhood brunch spots, typically buffet-less, are usually no less packed with locals. Brunch isn't breakfast. Breakfast happens on a walk from BART to work, right after a stop at Specialty's, or at a diner in the middle of Wyoming at 5 a.m. You eat breakfast because you're hungry. More than sustenance, brunch is a time to linger, a special occasion you get used to, even if you're having it around the corner from your apartment.

The ultimate slow feed originated in Britain, close to the end of the 1800s. Since the dawn of civilization, the privileged and wealthy had enjoyed leisurely, pleasurable meals at an expense of money and time unsustainable for poorer people. Brunch was a trendy expression of this long-running culinary tradition. While the meal itself would gain great popularity in the United States well after the turn-of-the-century, the name was coined in 1895 by Hunter's Weekly contributor Guy Beringer. In an article entitled "Brunch: A Plea", Beringer advocated the adoption of a new meal, offered around noon, to replace early Sunday dinner, that daunting afternoon ritual of gravy-sauced roasts and meat pastries Beringer found unduly rough on a booze-imbued stomach. "Brunch is cheerful, sociable and inciting," Beringer wrote, thinking of good toast, fine jams, and languorous mugs of coffee to precede heartier indulgences. "It is talk-compelling. It puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week."

Over a hundred years later, in his career-making 2001 book "Kitchen Confidential", celebrity face-stuffer Anthony Bourdain (I'd like to leave him be but he keeps popping up like a Whac-A-Mole at the county fair) notoriously took brunch's modern, evolved form to task:

"Brunch menus are an open invitation to the cost-conscious chef, a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday nights. How about hollandaise sauce? Not for me. Bacteria love hollandaise. And nobody I know has ever made hollandaise to order. And how long has that Canadian bacon been festering in the walk-in? Remember, brunch is only served once a week -- on the weekends. Cooks hate brunch. Brunch is punishment block for the B-Team cooks, or where the farm team of recent dishwashers learn their chops."

From outside the kitchen, the view is still a little bleak, or significantly brighter -- depending on where you stand. Stale bread breakfast casseroles, hash, and whatever-with-eggs may be unabashed second chances for unpopular dinner specials, leftovers slopped together by the bored, hung-over chefs inhabiting Bourdain's tableau. Yet the brunching masses greet them with enthusiasm all the same, dropping dinner-sized wads on scrambles, stacks, and the odd strata. For some urban professionals, a Sunday morning wouldn't be quite right without lingering al fresco at some cafe over granola, crumbly biscuits, vegan gravy, and a bottomless mimosa. For others, weekend mornings and early afternoons are times for errands and exercise. On their paths to such less idle pursuits, they worm their ways through throngs of shades-wearing folks holding out for coveted tables, seemingly with nothing better to do save wait. Brunch isn't just a meal, an enduring dining convention white people like -- along with modern furniture, Apple products, and other stuff. Today, it's a state of mind, and a polarizing one at that. Brunch-positive people work hard and play hard. They see brunch as a soothing extension of the partying they did the night before, a necessary putting back together of things that were dislodged -- a ritual well worth the inflated price of pancakes and a lengthy wait. Brunch-negative people think waiting for food they could make at home for a fraction of the cost is a waste of a day's best hours. There are two sides, and San Francisco's boutique-lined streets -- Haight, Church, Valencia -- are divided between them.

The blogger (Andrew on right) captured in a rare moment of brunch-positivity. Photo by Rich Good.

Last Tuesday, S.F. Chronicle writer Trey Bundy tackled brunch-positivity in his People Meter column, opening with the following salvo:

"San Franciscans are a vocal lot when it comes to waiting on Muni, but apparently don't mind waiting half the morning to order breakfast."

He'd sidled up to crowds of hopeful patrons at Boogaloos and Dottie's True Blue Cafe two days prior, and peppered them with the sorts of questions brunch-negative people often contemplate posing: How long are you willing to wait for this brunch? What makes waiting for so long worthwhile? What would you do with more free time, assuming you spent less of it waiting for brunch?

Reading the responses, I was surprised to find that the waits were even longer than I'd imagined, and the reasons for doing so seriously non-compelling. The great Millie Jackson once sang that "anything worth having is worth waiting on." She wasn't talking about the green gravy with carrot chunks at Boogaloos. This substance is not one of Sam-I-Am's less successful forays into the culinary world; to a few of the quoted, it's a real treat deserving of an hour-long dally on the sidewalk. I've had it, and though it is reasonably palatable, it is, unlike a pig roast, a trip to Hog Island, or a mammoth fish fry, not a food around which to plan a day.

Thankfully, brunch-positives are not waiting for food at all. The soft, crunchy, creamy, salty, and sweet kinds of food enjoyed at brunch are signifiers of the desired experience, not the whole of it. At such a time, when Beringer's cobwebs droop low, whether from a hangover as wicked as the cook's or the queasy dregs of a tough week at work, the waiting to eat is probably as valued as the eating itself, not to mention the obvious habit-shaped act of sitting down, ordering, getting coffee, passing the paper, observing other tables, and conversing with your companions. You're supposed to wait. Brunch is satisfying because you know what you're waiting for and what to expect. There are no surprises. The cafe is loud, swollen with chatter and the clatter of a hundred plates. Water is slow to arrive, and when it does, you finish it quickly and want more. Your head throbs, but help is on the way. Godot is a criminally-overpriced mess of eggs, nothing more, but if you order him, he really will come, and everything else will fall into place -- while the rest of the world whizzes by.

For five years now, Manivanh, a smallish place on 24th Street near Hampshire, has been one of my very favorite neighborhood restaurants in town. It's a completely unremarkable-looking Thai joint unceremoniously dumped at the grimiest edge of the Mission District, out of step with the strip's bevy of taquerias, hair salons, and, more recently, art galleries and hipster donut stands. For three years, I lived two blocks away, not far from 24th and Utah, where Jack's Club cheerfully presides over the corner. Manivanh holds just over a dozen tables, half of them empty most nights. The servers frequently look as fried as Krispy Kremes, their eyes distant and glazed. Between orders, they crane their necks to stare up at the television hovering above the counter. One afternoon, when all the area liquor stores were closed for a holiday, the host sold me a few beers to-go without so much as a blink. Manivanh is not a hole-in-the-wall, some Bourdanian treasure where fears of gastrointestinal trauma accompany each tasty bite. The interior is clean and warm, even pleasant. The neighborhood is fine, even though the 24th Street drunks' hacking coughs rattle through the window panes and swaying grocery cart barges skitter along the sidewalk outside. Satay and pad thai don't spark the excitement food-obsessed city residents work up over tacos. Everyone has a favorite Thai lunch place socked away somewhere -- the stuff of cheap lunch specials and coconut-creamed ice teas in tall plastic cups. Manivanh is a true find, unusual precisely because it's so good yet so relentlessly unexceptional in its design and scope, a regular, everyday restaurant without a whiff of marketing mojo and no rugged street food cred. Few would think to sniff it out and even fewer would bother writing about it, but I beseech you all the same to discover it, to walk down 24th Street until you can clearly hear the hum and screech of 101. Look to your left, see the sign, sit down, and order the larb-ped.

Isn't it larb-ly?

Larb is not a sludge-metal band from Florida or a faintly embarrassing medical condition. Larb may actually be those things as well, but the larbs I know first-hand are meat salads: fish sauce-y melanges in innumerable lovely variations, popular throughout Laos as well as Thailand. Refreshing and bold, Manivanh's larb-ped -- minced duck, lettuce, mint, and red onion laced with a chili-flecked lemon dressing -- is heady, almost druggy in its deliciousness, unsettlingly, crazily flavorful -- a sweet, benevolent Klaus Kinski on the palette. In the past four months, I've taken three different groups of people to Manivanh, and every single neophyte has gone batty for this minor miracle of taste and texture. I wandered down with a friend on the eve of his flight back to Philadelphia and he, upon spooning up the last bit, wondered out-loud if he could pack a few orders to bring back to the city of brotherly love. "The duck -- it's like bacon, except somehow better," another friend remarked on the night of his conversion, reaching for a third helping, unsubtly trying to snag more than his fair share of the chewy, crispy bits. Manivanh's menu beckons with many very good things, like grilled pork, chicken with chiles, onion, and fresh basil, and fried bean cake with cashews and roasted curry paste. Yet this one dish -- the transcendent larb-ped -- sends the restaurant over the top, searing it into heart and memory. Again and again, I recommend Manivanh to anyone interested -- because I want others to know it and cherish it as well.

Still, a few weeks ago, in bed, watching the long-awaited "No Reservations: San Francisco" on my laptop, I was happy not to see forkfuls of that fine ducky goodness disappearing into Anthony Bourdain's gaping maw.

Over the course of that episode, he painted a broad strokes portrait of the San Francisco he wanted to hate, a city where the good stuff has to be pried out from beneath sheet-rock layers of weak Chez Panisse-y silliness. It's a pretty cool town, he seemed to say, so long as you keep it real among the hordes of smug, self-righteous yoga mat people telling you how to eat -- in his mind, villains more onerous than greedy landlords, creeps, loud-talking Muni lunatics, and fickle fault-lines.

His pal Zamir's meltdown in Romania, however bizarre and mortifying, was, as Bourdain might intone on a clips show voice-over, good television. Making fun of vegetarians in San Francisco is not. The tall, gray host is usually much more insightful than he was here, using food as a trusty lens through which to respectfully experience the ways people live around the world. He likes delving into the preposterous, the campy, and the down-and-dirty. When it comes to eating on camera, fried squeazel, pig's eyes, chicken asses, and seven-pound tortas are his ripe texts, ideal, semi-shocking stuff he can stretch into funny, alcohol-soaked, highly watchable lessons of cultural interest.

A pedestrian pleasure such as Manivanh wouldn't interest Bourdain, at least for the sake of his show. For that, I am thankful. I like my larb line-less, my beloved local gems broadcasted via whispers, not ear-splitting bellows from some perch on Foodie Mountain where he sits every Monday, leather-jacketed, hung-over, racked with indigestion, clutching his megaphone. That's It, the deli with the seven-pound torta, sits a block away from where I currently live. One day, it was my corner store, and, the next, I had to squeeze through a mob just to get a tall can from the cooler in the back.

It may not make for good television, but you can learn a lot about the way we live from something so mundane as a neighborhood restaurant and its way with one dish -- maybe not from Manivanh specifically, but from establishments like it. In my reality, of which I am, of course, captain, Manivanh serves the best Thai food in the city. The rest of the world doesn't have to agree. Manivanh's Yelp reviews are high, four stars, on average, with some disgruntled customers, as usual, chirping up to soil the spread. Interestingly, the gripes people air about Manivanh are often very specific and personal, super-subjective criticisms unbound by universally persuasive criteria. One reviewer complains about too many onions. Another bemoans the absence of white-meat chicken. A vegetarian whines about fish sauce in the silver noodles she'd thought were meatless, claiming that the waitress rolled her eyes when she shared her grievance, which Bourdain, had he been there, hovering in the corner like a spectral watchdog, would have done too. People are inclined to be inflexible about what they eat at cheap neighborhood restaurants, particular to the point of weird, preschool-y pickiness. We want what we want, when we want it, how we think it should be made -- usually the way we've learned to like it somewhere else. Eggplant is not my favorite vegetable, but I wouldn't tell Thomas Keller that if he prepared it for me. Yet if I ordered larb-ped at another Thai restaurant, and for some stupid reason, it arrived topped with a heaping portion of soggy eggplant, I might not go back to try anything else. In such restaurants, perhaps we're really seeking personal chefs challenged to solve the mysteries of our individual tastes without clues, or an unwavering Applebee's from the block, consistently supplying whatever specific eating experience it is we desire, wherever we go. For those who've learned to love it somewhere else, it takes a lot to go out of your way to try larb like this, to begin a new relationship with a familiar food rendered foreign all over again. But, if you do, as Rick said at the end of "Casablanca," as he strode off into the mist with Captain Louis, it might be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Manivanh
map
2732 24th Street
(between Hampshire and Potrero)
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 552-3534

Photo by geminder

Post by Brian Underwood

Anthony Bourdain does not come off as a man easily rendered speechless -- but he may have met his match.

His talk on Thursday night at Flint Center brought out an eclectic crowd of spirited and often rowdy foodies, many of whom seemed quite capable of getting into a bar fight over the relative merits of Anderson Valley Pinots versus Amador zin. Fortunately no fists flew, just steady waves of enthusiasm at Bourdain's dynamic dissertation of Food Network gossip, friendly bashing of Alice Waters and Rachel Ray, and tales of his culinary philosophy and many testicle-eating adventures.

"No Reservations" often details some of the bizarre foods he ingests when traveling abroad, which he explains in terms of social propriety: often he is the guest of local families, who often have very little material wealth, but who generously put forth some of their most cherished cuisine. If they were to offer their honored guest the platter of poached puppy dog heads that would normally feed the family for the whole month, then it would be unconscionably rude to refuse the gift on the grounds of pickiness, squeamishness, or heaven forbid, vegetarianism. He professes a more rabidly inclusive form of gastronomic diplomacy.

While taking audience questions, he called on one fellow who had been interjecting various yells throughout the talk -- "F--- EMERIL!", for example -- addressing him as "you, the angry, belligerent dude in the hat." The Mr. Belligerent said something about a tattoo, and Bourdain invited him onto stage to provide proof.

The madly grinning Mr. B took the stage and lifted his pant leg for all to see. His entire right thigh was tattooed with Bourdain's face, looking brusquely cherubic as a softly lit Stevie Nicks in a biker bar.

Clearly Bourdain sees many unusual things in his travels, but his own face on the body of someone he didn't know left him looking some combination of flattered and mortified. It may have at least been reassuring to note that the other limbs bore similar portraits in ink, a walking Pantheon of Food Network personalities: Mario on the forearm, Alton on the shin, Fieri not visible in polite company...

Mr. B, having leveraged his unique opportunity to win over the roaring crowd, handed his idol a Sharpie and asked him to autograph the leg. Bourdain could have easily signed at the knee or even refused and called security, but instead, reaffirming his unflappability, urged Mr. B to hike the cuff up a little further, to get the scribble right onto the bikini line.

I can only assume he will remember the incident as Cupertino's gift of poached puppy dog heads.

Related Links:
Anthony Bourdain's blog
No Reservations on Twitter
No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain on Facebook
Anthony Bourdain books and DVDs on Amazon.com