Learning from the Best

If you’re looking to drink with the best of them, to turn a late Friday afternoon into an epic night of booze-fueled madness, a night that invariably ends in a tailspin of shame, sickness, or both, you could likely do no better than Anthony Bourdain as your guide. 

Which is unfortunate for those of us who aren’t celebrity chefs or employees of the Travel Channel – we’re left with a bit less with which to work.  Thankfully, the December/January issue of Men’s Journal magazine gives us a glimpse of what we’re missing out on: A Drunken Afternoon with Anthony Bourdain, by Mark Binelli.

Bourdain is described by the author not as a TV chef, but as “a television hedonist, luxuriating in the indulgences of an iron-stomached (and –livered) traveler.”  He’s a man with a dream job: travel, eat, drink, repeat – and occasionally write. 

I had the honor of meeting the Kitchen Confidential author a few years back when he did a Q-and-A session and signed autographs at the now-shuttered Penn Quarter Olsson’s bookstore.  His careless attitude, freewheeling lifestyle, and hilarious commentary on his fellow chefs (most notably in my memory, referring to Giada De Laurentiis as a bobblehead) had the small crowd roaring.

But I digress; we were talking about how to drink.  Bourdain’s an old-school drinker and took his cues – just as I did – from one of the greats: “In George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London – one of Bourdain’s favorite books and a model for Kitchen Confidential – Orwell writes about his time doing scullery work in a Parisian restaurant, noting that ‘the power of swallowing quarts of wine, and then sweating it out before it can do much damage.’”  Moreover, it’s simplicity Bourdain seeks.  Although his dining companions are usually the crème de la crème of American dining – domestically at least – he appreciates a simple drink at the end of a long day’s work, even after all these years of cable-television sponsored travel and book promotion tours. 

And afternoon drinking.  Binelli concludes: “Bourdain hoists his fifth – or is it sixth? – Presidente.  It’s still about 20 minutes before happy hour… ‘Getting fed, stealing good shit, drinking for free, getting laid.  In our own little world, each of us was either good on our guitar or we weren’t.  And that was nice.  That would have been enough.’”

George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London

George Orwell’s novelization of living poor and famished is a reflection of the conditions of poverty and the seemingly endless struggles of living hand to mouth and finding work.  Orwell’s story of his vagrancy throughout London and his endless toil as a plongeur (dishwasher) in Paris – inspired by his experiences with the poor but fictionalized and told by first person narration – presents a stark image of the destitution facing many Europeans following the First World War.

But look a little closer and you’ll find a more subtle and even positive note concealed in the midst of poverty: drinking makes a poor man’s life a little more bearable.  The narrator opines of a nearby Parisian bistro popular with his fellow poor and impoverished: “I wish I could find a pub in London a quarter as cheery.”

As evidence of this cheer the narrator describes Charlie, “one of the local curiosities, talking.  ‘Messieurs et dames, I perceive that you are sad.  Ah, mais la vie est balle – you must not be sad.  Be more gay, I beseech you!  Fill high ze bowl vid Samian vine, Ve vill no sink of semes like zese!’”

Or there is “R.,” another pauper and bistro regular, who is described as “a gentle, domesticated creature, never rowdy or quarrelsome, and never sober.  He would lie in bed until midday, and from then till midnight he was in his corner of the bistro, quietly, and methodically soaking.  While he soaked he talked, in a refined, womanish voice, about antique furniture.”

After a time the central character lands steady work in appalling and miserable conditions of a Paris hotel, where drink was a highly valued commodity; he carefully describes this trade in stolen booze.  “The cellerman stole brandy.  By a rule of the hotel the waiters were not allowed to keep stores of spirits, but had to go to the cellerman for each drink as it was ordered.  As the cellerman poured out the drinks he would set aside perhaps a teaspoonful from each glass, and he amassed quantities in this way.  He would sell you the stolen brandy for five sous a swig if he thought he could trust you.”

Despite miserable conditions and long hours, dishwashing was meagerly compensated.  Yet this fails to deter further boozing.  Boris, the narrator’s compatriot in Paris, doesn’t let his lack of money forestall his drinking.  Following a confrontation over an unpaid debt, Boris and his debtor, “having called one another thieves for two hours…went off together on a drinking bout that finished up the last sou of Boris’s money.”

In addition to drinking, another vice dulls the harsh edges of poverty: “It was tobacco that made everything tolerable.  We had plenty of tobacco, for some time before Boris had met a soldier (the soldiers are given their tobacco free) and bought twenty or thirty packets at fifty centimes each.”

After a time the narrator leaves Paris for London, where drinking plays a far less prominent role in daily life, making the poor man’s life all the more bleak and disheartening.  Because as bad as things are in Paris, at least a drink could be bought to temper the hunger pangs and ease the mind; feelings I, God willing, will never experience.

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Please visit The Hip Flask’s Recommended Reading page for other books on drinking culture I’ve enjoyed.