Quotes from Anthony Bourdain

Starbucks's truly beautiful idea was the simple realization that Americans wanted to spend more money for a cup of coffee, that they'd feel much better about themselves if they spent five dollars for a cup of joe rather than buy that cheap drip stuff that shows such as Friends suggested only fat white trash in housecoats (or people who actually worked for a living) drank anymore—in their trailer parks or meth labs or wherever such people huddled for comfort.

how about hollandaise sauce? Not for me. Bacteria love hollandaise. And hollandaise, that delicate emulsion of egg yolks and clarified butter, must be held at a temperature not too hot nor too cold, lest it break when spooned over your poached eggs. Unfortunately, this lukewarm holding temperature is also the favorite environment for bacteria to copulate and reproduce in. Nobody I know has ever made hollandaise to order.

After level of skills, it's how sensitive you are to criticism and perceived insult — and how well you can give it right back — that determines your place in the food chain.

It's like demanding of a date that she have unprotected sex with four or five other guys immediately before sleeping with you—just so she can't point the finger directly at you should she later test positive for clap.

history, as they say, will always be written by the victors.

Most jobs, you don't work, you don't get paid. You wake up with a sniffle and a runny nose, a sore throat? You soldier on. You put in your hours. You wrap a towel around your neck and you do your best to get through. It's a point of pride, working through pain and illness.

I want to tell you about the dark recesses of the restaurant underbelly — a subculture whose centuries-old militaristic hierarchy and ethos of 'rum, buggery and the lash' make for a mix of unwavering order and nerve-shattering chaos — because I find it all quite comfortable

With my little short-shorts a permanent affront, I was quickly becoming a sullen, moody, difficult little bastard.

When outside forces corrupt the desire to do a job well and take pleasure in the doing. It's an awful thing to watch. It's awful when it happens to you.

Refugees, usually émigrés and immigrants

Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

with skull-and-crossbones painted in chicken blood.

Linh has informed me of something called 'fox' coffee, ca-phe-chon, a brew made from the tenderest beans, fed to a fox (though I have since seen it referred to as a weasel), and the beans later recovered from the animal's stool, washed (presumably), roasted, and ground. Sounds good to me.

The food was what you might expect to find on Air Uganda tourist class:

If I lived across the street from this place, I'd quit my job and just hang out here all day, until all the money was gone. Quimet & Quimet is a four-generations-old tapas bar in the El Poble-Sec neighborhood of Barcelona, which relies heavily on that Catalonian tapas bar staple of canned food.

At the time of their deaths, three out of five Russian men, I am told, are found to have a blood-alcohol level exceeding what one needs to qualify for a DWI.

All of us, when we travel, look at the places we go, the things we see, through different eyes. And how we see them is shaped by our previous lives, the books we've read, the films we've seen, the baggage we carry.

when the chef starts thinking he's an artist rather than a craftsman.

His hands flew, twirled, an entire ballet with ten digits. It had taken him, he told me, three years, during his training and apprenticeship, just to be considered as having mastered rice alone. For three years in his first kitchen, it had been all he'd been allowed to touch.

Sally farted in his sleep, they could hear.

What is love? Love is eating twenty-four ounces of raw fish at four o'clock in the morning.

casual comments I may or may not have made, in which I may have suggested she was the "hellspawn of Betty Crocker and Charles Manson.

a monstrous, despotic, iron-fisted Frenchman who ruled his kitchen like President for Life Idi Amin, it was Chef Bernard.

I Can't Believe It's Not Butter? I can.