Who is the heiress in medium raw

By the end of the piece I felt I knew Thomas better than I know most of my own friends. You have to hand it to Bourdain; this is really good writing, not just really good food writing. Bourdain says he spent 28 years as a professional cook and chef. By my reckoning he's spent 15 years as a professional writer. Will it surprise you that he doesn't think much of writers? He says, "hanging out with more than one of them at a time is about as much fun as being thrown in a cage full of hungry but toothless civet cats.

Top shopping picks. Things to do in San Francisco this weekend. He met his actress girlfriend Asia Argento when they shot an episode of his show Parts Unknown shortly after breaking things off with his wife Busia. Firenze asiaargento La Primavera. A post shared by anthonybourdain anthonybourdain on May 24, at am PDT. Argento and Bourdain were seen together apparently happy as recently as two weeks ago prior to his shock suicide.

Bourdain was found dead on Friday in his hotel room in Kaysersberg, France after killing himself. His chef friend Eric Ripert, who was the one to find Bourdain in the bathroom, knew something was wrong when he didn't show up for their planned dinner. Bourdain had been in the area filming an episode with his CNN crew for a segment on Alsatian food. The disgruntled cook pulled back the Wizard of Oz's curtain, exposing the industry's tricks of the trade and forever ruining any pleasure a "civilian" could take in discount sushi or a Sunday eggs Benny.

Along the way, he dished out stories of sex, drugs and the kind of antics that might even make Keith Richards blush. His new-found celebrity won him a second career as a popular television host A Cook's Tour , No Reservations. Suddenly, Bourdain was loose on the streets, searching out the craziest, wackiest, tastiest foods around the globe. The cook had left the kitchen.

And we all wanted what he was having. Medium Raw , Bourdain's sequel, takes stock of both the changes in his life and in the culinary world he inhabits. Which are quite a few.

Bourdain kicked his heroin habit, got divorced, remarried spending time in between with a coked-up heiress, some plastic surgery victims and the Gadhafis on an island in the Caribbean. He is now a doting father - and blissfully uncool. The essence of cool is "not giving a fuck," he writes. Around the same time, fine dining started to feel less relevant. Seemingly overnight, New York chef David Chang became the standard-bearer for a new zeitgeist in dining: small, casual places that served seriously adventurous food - the kind of stuff chefs like to eat, like tripe.

Here at home, the trend has been promulgated by the Black Hoof and Montreal's Au Pied de Cochon, where the cooks look more like skateboarders than the country's most talented kitchen staff. She was damaged, I knew. Like me, I thought—flattering myself. I identified with her distrust of the world. This was an idea that held little attraction for me.

Even then, in my state of relatively blissful ignorance, I knew that St. Barths, which lay about ten miles offshore from my comfortably dowdy island, was not somewhere I could ever be happy.

I knew from previous day trips that a hamburger and a beer cost fifty bucks—that there was no indigenous culture to speak of, that it was the very height of the holiday season and the island, not my scene in the best of circumstances, would be choked with every high-profile douche, Euro-douche, wannabe, and oligarch with a mega-yacht.

I knew enough of the place to know that St. Barths was not for me. I made obliging, generically willing-sounding noises, fairly secure in the assumption that every rental car and hotel room on the island had been booked solid. She would in no way, she insisted, be deterred by insignificant details like no place to stay and no way to get there. There was a house. Russian friends. Everything would work out. I did know better. But I walked straight into the grinder anyway.

We took a small propeller plane the ten minutes or so across the water, landing at the airport with no ride, no plans, no friends I was aware of, and no place to stay. A famous guy said hello to my friend by the luggage carousel. They exchanged witty banter. He did not, however, offer to let us crash at his place. There were no taxis in sight. From a comfortable rented villa on a nice island, where—despite my nightly flirtations with vehicular homicide and suicide—I was at least able to swim, eat and drink fairly cheaply, and eventually sleep securely in my own bed, I now found myself suddenly homeless.

Worse, my partner, as I quickly discovered, was a spoiled, drunk, and frequently raving paranoid-schizophrenic. Any pretense that mysterious Russian friends with a villa would be there for us had somehow dematerialized somewhere on the flight over.

Similar departures from reality would become a regular feature of the next few days. After a long time, we found a taxi to a hotel—where, once the staff laid eyes on my mysterious but increasingly mad companion, a room was hastily made available for a night. A very expensive room. Better you pay. And pay I did. Days and nights bingeing on overpriced drinks, bribing bartenders to scoop us up in their private vehicles at end of shift and drive us off into the dark to wherever she thought we might stay that night.

One crappy motel-style room after another that cost what a suite at the St. Regis would. More drinks. By now, I was a prisoner of her escalating and downright scary mood swings and generally bad craziness. Fact was, she constantly misplaced her cell phone, her purse, anything of value she had. I am not a fan of people who abuse service staff. In fact, I find it intolerable. From the first time I saw that, our relationship was essentially over. From that point on, I was babysitting a madwoman—feeling obliged only to get her crazy ass on a plane and back to England as quickly as possible and with as little damage done as could be managed.

This was easier said than done. Now, all I wanted to do was get her on a plane back to London, but it was like reasoning with a wild animal. Strangely, neither neighbors nor management ever dared complain. She crashed parties, jumped lines, scarfed grams at will, a magnet for indulgent enablers, reptilian party-throwers. Apparently familiar with her rapier wit, her way with a lasting cruel remark, those who knew her from St.

Tropez, from Monaco, from Sardinia—wherever fuckwits and fameballs went that year—they cowered at her approach. No one stood up to her.

Maybe it was because they all hated each other. It seemed the point of the whole exercise. All seemed to have come to St. With a smile, of course. That should tell you something. Enrique Iglesias provided the entertainment. Who had the bigger boat, wore the better outfit, got the best table seemed all that mattered. There were decade-old feuds over casual cracks long forgotten by everyone but the principals. They circled each other still—waiting to identify a weakness—looking for somewhere and some way to strike.

This from the people who, it gradually began to dawn on me, actually ran the world. I was lingering over the buffet on a Dr. No—size yacht with the appropriately Bond-esque name Octopus: huge interior docking inside the hull, a six-man submarine, landing space for two helicopters, Francis Bacon originals in the crapper. I looked up from the sushi and got the impression that anybody there—any of the guests dancing, schmoozing, chatting politely at the party—would have watched my throat getting cut without the slightest change in expression.

By the time she lost her wallet for the third and last time, I was ready to dig a hole in the sand and drop her in it—had I thought for a second I could get away with it. I also had a very real concern that even were I to do something as measured and sensible as simply walk out on her, what remained of my Caribbean sojourn might end with the arrival of two thick-necked fellows from Chechnya holding a tarpaulin and hacksaws.

I was a bad person in a bad place, with another bad person, surrounded by other, possibly even worse people. The French, who administered this playground of evil, who serviced its visitors, knew their customers well and catered to them, accommodated them, gouged them, and fucked them over in all the traditional ways—and a few new ones. Sit down for a burger at a beach bar and suddenly the music starts thump-thumping and here come the models with swimwear for sale—or jewelry.

Fiftyish men with potbellies hanging out over their Speedos danced with pneumatic-breasted Ukrainian whores—during brunch. Waiters looked at everyone with practiced expressions of bemused contempt. One man on the island understood better than anyone the world my companion moved in.

An artist, a genius—a man who stood alone in his ability, the sheer relish with which he fucked the rich. And a man whose example gave me, in some ways, the strength to endure. The Ciprianis, along with a few other operators and imitators, made, a long while back, a remarkable discovery: that rich international fucktards like to hang out with each other and eat marginally decent Italian food—and are willing to pay outrageous amounts of money for the privilege.

Better yet, all the people who want to look like they, too, are rich international fucktards will want to get in on the action as well.

They just cost a fuck of a lot. That maybe twenty-nine bucks for a bowl of spaghetti with red sauce is perfectly reasonable. In New York, it is a cruel irony of Italian food that the more ingredients in your spaghetti with red sauce, and the more time and steps spent preparing it—the more it costs to prepare—the less likely it is to be good.

It will also usually be cheaper on the menu. This will cost you twenty-nine bucks. And the drink that precedes it will cost at least seventeen. Many who gazed admiringly at the Ciprianis took things a little further, realizing that decent food was in no way necessary.

Chow and Philippe. Add to the mix some curiously available Eastern European women who find low-riding ball-sacks distinctly fascinating? He had it all figured out. On the contrary, you can explicitly and with great care and determination, he discovered, serve shit. You need only a nice location in this case, a wood-planked beachfront patio deck and an attitude.

At his restaurant, for twenty-five euros about thirty-five bucks then , one gets a few grams of cold, unseasoned, boiled lentils on a very large plate. About two tablespoons of them—with not so much as a carrot chunk or limp dice of onion to distinguish them from what some street kid with a skateboard and a Hacky Sack is eating right now in a parking lot in Portland. Maybe two cents.

Feel free to season with oil and vinegar, though. Provided complimentary. For the main course, there is the option of chicken or fish. Nothing less than carbonized will satisfy his exacting standards. The fish option is a small, barely cleaned, whole red snapper, prepared with similar attention to detail—which is to say, burned to shit. Price for these delights of land and sea? Fifty euros about seventy-five bucks each.

Merci—and fuck you very much. And yet they line up, they beg, they try and bribe, they conspire, they whisper loudly into their cell phones, to friends in St. Tropez or Punta del Este or Rome, trying to reach someone with influence over the situation—so that they may visibly swan past less favored mortals and sit, triumphant, on the Patio of the Gods. Why, for that matter, tolerate the absurd pretense and prices of Mr. What my horrible week on St. Perhaps this explains why they all go to the same lousy beaches—usually narrow, pebbly, and unimpressive stretches of oft-reeking sand that would be unacceptable to any half-seasoned backpacker—and to restaurants that any food nerd with a Web site and a few bucks would walk sneeringly by.

Try arguing the virtues of Nello on chowhound. A clue came to me on St. Barths as I lay on a chaise lounge, half drunk in the moonlight, various Gaddafis and their guests frolicking in the background. As I looked around the beach, I saw, in the jaundiced light of my unhappiness, the full extent of the horror of this Island of Dr. The full spectrum of plastic surgeries gone wrong—right there in the open, curiosities of the flesh, which at a lesser income level would have been confined to the carnival sideshow: mouths that pulled to the side, lips plumped beyond credibility, cheeks filled with golf ball—like lumps, and foreheads frozen so tight you could play snare drum on them.

Identical noses … eyes that refused to blink and could barely even close …. And there was my date for the night, in her thousand-dollar plain white T-shirt.

Searching—once again—for her cell phone. They should. What they want on St. Secure that, if nothing else, everyone else in attendance will have bought into the shared illusion. After she lost her cell phone for the fourth time, I saw her drunkenly survey the room, eyeballing other partygoers for suspects.

Specifically on two very large women, thick-necked and unfriendly-looking to begin with, both wearing midnight sunglasses—either of whom could easily have taken me in a fair fight. In the kind of slow-motion approach that so often precedes disaster, I watched as my companion confronted the two women, accusingly demanding to know where her cell phone was.

Utterly disgusted, I now no longer cared if, in the weeks to follow, I was found in a culvert, with my feet sawed off. It was all just too awful to bear—much less look at—anymore. I needed to get out now. Let her dig her own crazy ass out of this ever-building shit storm. I pulled her over and said as much—then lurched out of the restaurant and down the road. I packed my bag, arranged with the front desk for her to have two more nights at the hotel, should she need to, and then walked the mile or so to the airport, where I spent the night on a bench.

I took the first flight out and landed on my old, familiar—and decidedly more friendly—island ten minutes later. I retrieved my rental car from the long-term parking and drove gratefully home, where I quickly curled up in the fetal position and slept like the dead for twenty-four hours. I stayed home, avoiding bars, brothels, and even beaches for the rest of my time on the island. Barths—or in the mirror during the worst year of my life—but something had to change.

I knew that now. Nine years now since I last took up a pan in anger and I still whip around automatically to that title. I am not a chef. Still, it usually makes me happy when I hear that. A not-too-cold pint, absolutely alone at the bar—even in this fake-ass Irish pub. The generic Irish bric-a-brac they deliver by the truckload. Empty moving vans roaming the Irish countryside right now, I imagine, waiting for old Missus Meagher to drop dead into her black pudding so they can buy up the contents of her curio shelves.

We all have. Even the stink of Lysol from the too-clean floor, the fruit flies hovering over the garnish tray do not distract me from a general feeling of well-being. The bartender is Irish. Jumped a student visa about ten years ago but nothing for him to worry about. The cook, though, is Mexican. Some poor bastard at ten dollars an hour—and probably has to wash the dishes, too.