The Renegade Gourmet

Ant

hony Bourdain doesn't get to eat anything fun at home. "My wife is the most unimaginative eater ever. She doesn't even like tomatoes," he says. So Bourdain, 45, the chef who wrote 2000's restaurant tell-all, Kitchen Confidential, got himself a TV deal and book contract to travel around the world eating lamb testicles, duck embryo and a still-beating cobra heart ("like an aggressive oyster," he says). For this interview, he escapes from his Upper West Side apartment to a signless Japanese restaurant in the basement of a midtown Manhattan office building. He orders sea urchin roe and clam abductor muscle, smokes nine Lark cigarettes, and points out what he says is a geisha house behind a door without a handle. Chefs know all kinds of cool stuff.

Bourdain's mission is to show the cool, un-Martha side of the culinary world. And after nearly two years of ranting about the Food Network's glossy simplification of cooking through such celebrity chefs as Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay, Bourdain will join them. Starting Jan. 8, at 10:30 p.m., he will appear on the network's 22-episode run of his half-hour travel show, A Cook's Tour, a companion to his book of the same name (Bloomsbury; $25.95; 274 pages). In Kitchen Confidential, which became a surprise best seller, Bourdain drew a super-testosteroned picture of the guys who make French fries--and served up insider's secrets, including why people should not order fish on Mondays. In A Cook's Tour he takes even less advisable gastroenterological risks as he searches the globe for exotic foods. In one episode of the show, Bourdain toasts the Bam!-meister with a glass of cobra blood: "Hey, Emeril, why don't you kick this up a notch?" But Eileen Opatut, senior V.P. of programming for the Food Network, doesn't worry about Bourdain's slagging her channel. "That has to do with a certain machismo that many people in the world of food have," she says. "I see Tony as being more akin to the Emerils and Bobbys of the world than just about anyone else. They speak plainly, and they are intellectually hungry when it comes to food."

Playing the role of the renegade rock-'n'-roll chef is going to get harder for Bourdain as his celebrity rises. David Fincher, the director of Fight Club, has optioned Kitchen Confidential for a film to be called Seared, and Brad Pitt may play the main character. Bourdain still maintains a position at the Manhattan brasserie Les Halles, where he is now executive chef, which means he shows up with a six-pack of Corona a few times a month and hangs out with the staff. He says he will never cook again; his knees are too shot and his bank account too fat. "I was always more in love with the lifestyle and my cooks than the customer. I didn't have the drive to perfection or the natural ability," he says as he finishes off a second glass of cold sake.

The voice Bourdain uses in conversation and in writing--an odd mixture of macho vulgarity and effete vocabulary, a DMX-Jane Austin duet in one person--has made him both a success and a target for most serious food writers. It's a learned toughness: he's by nature a softie, a prep-school kid who went to Vassar to follow a girl he had crush on (whom he later married). But after two years he dropped out of college to work in a series of kitchens--including fish shacks where he chopped onions alongside ex-con fry cooks--before earning a degree at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America. Now Bourdain is worried about how he's going to keep his edge while appearing on the Emeril channel. "Cooking is quantifiable. At the end of the day, you sleep well," he says. "I just like to hang out in the kitchen and suck up the ambience."