Marry me, Bourdain

Now…does ANYONE actually believe that Bobby Flay can’t make a better chili than a supermarket ground beef bearing amateur? I don’t. It’s a cruel exercise in humiliation.

So wrote Chef Anthony Bourdain in a scathing  February 8 blog post some are still chattering about. Bourdain, the outspoken author of several books, was the guest on fellow chef Michael Rulhman’s blog and took the opportunity to eviscerate The Food Network, which gave him his first program. (He’s moved on to the Travel Channel.) He laments the Network’s shift toward “bobblehead personalities” and away from chefs such as Flay, who’s been subjected to a cook-off show called Throwdown.

Not surprisingly, he’s not impressed by Rachael Ray (”We KNOW she can’t cook. She shrewdly tells us so. So…what is she selling us? Really? She’s selling us satisfaction, the smug reassurance that mediocrity is quite enough.”) or by Paula Deen, whose food,  he said, is beginning to look like a buffet of horrors. But the brunt of Bourdain’s wrath is aimed at Sandra Lee, whose Semi-Homemade Cooking is awash in recipes using processed foods.

Bourdain is so disdainful of what TFN has become that his long-standing nemesis, Emeril Lagasse, gets a pass, although he’s still deemed unwatchable.

A few weeks after the post, Bourdain spoke at a Food and Wine Festival sponsored by TFN. Some of those he blasted in print were there. To quote Ruhlman, that took balls.

I love the guy.

Tagged as: Anthony Bourdain, commentary, Rachael Ray