Shocking news from the front lines:
He also reveals that the angriest mail he gets is from “beer nerds,” of all people. It happens whenever he drinks a big-brand beer on his CNN show “Parts Unknown.” “The angriest mail I get is from beer nerds — people who are craft beer enthusiasts and see me drinking a cold, available beer from a mass production and they get really cranky with me, and they assume that I’m plugging it or something,” Bourdain told AdWeek’s Lisa Granatstein. “In fact, I just like cold beer, and my standards rise and fall depending on access to cold beer.”
I like cold beer, too, but not with this sort of firm sense of distinction. The header up there is a tiny paraphrase from an Australian ditto tale of the AdWeek interview. But the story actually has a quite detailed explanation of the way Bourdain approaches being Bourdain and, oddly, beer seems to play a role. In another response he states: “I have final approval on all this, so nobody is going to come in and say ‘Oh, by the way, you’ll be drinking a Tsingtao in every scene‘.” In fact, he seems to give beer nerds equally short attention as those who offer the opportunity to be “a spokesperson for every variety of gastrointestinal problem.” Yet not as bad Guy Fieri. Or Kobe meatballs. Which is somewhat comforting. Maybe.
How did good beer people get so… labelled? Such easy targets? I know – well all know thatthey did… but when did it happen? Is there a way to go back and fix it? Implicitly, Bourdain has lumped at least a significant part of beer fandom in a class with those who “bore people to death with something like your month-long program of drinking kale juice.” Or do you take comfort that he has a deep love for “processed or not particularly good, easily meltable cheddar-like stuff that I can make macaroni and cheese with“? Is the point, he is he and you are you and you don’t care?
If so… what’s been the point of all the craft beer PR spin over the last decade? Don’tcha care? I mean sure he can be dismissed as a strong personality but, given his obsession with quality and flavour and disdain for the phony, doesn’t Bourdain serve as at least some sort of barometer of good beer’s broader success? I mean if you can’t prove good beer is any good to such a beer drinking good food fan – what has the point been?
[Original comments…]
Jay Brooks – June 6, 2016 10:45 PM
http://BrookstonBeerBulletin.com
I have generally liked Bourdain’s writing, but this is the sort of shite I hate about certain foodies. They claim to love and want to promote great food with fresh ingredients, and will gush over the minute details of a dish, wanting it to be perfect. Often, but not always, they’ll take great care with choosing the wine, but when it comes to the beer? Then it’s just whatever cold can is nearby, with no thought whatsoever. It’s frankly infuriating, not to mention insulting. Alice Waters is a great example local to me. Her wonderful Chez Panisse restaurant was famous for its locally sourced ingredients and local wine, in fact she helped pioneer the concept of local. But for years she carried just Heineken and other big national and international brands, nothing local in beer whatsoever. It was hypocritical. It wasn’t until a bartender there (maybe 10 years ago) finally convinced her (well, not really even convinced her, but wore her down) so even though they do now carry local beers, I still get the sense that she really doesn’t get it. There was an editor of Saveur a number of years ago who threw beer under the bus, and there was David Chang a more recently, too, among others. There seems to be a pattern of chefs dismissing beer, and partly it’s ignorance, very few culinary schools teach beer, only wine in their curriculums. And while that may be part of it, I fall back on the experience of doctors or lawyers. Even though they went to school during a set frame of time, they’re expected to continue their education throughout their careers, and keep up with changes in the law or medicine or whatever. Doesn’t every profession do that? Yet from my perspective, chefs don’t seem to (I know, there are undoubtedly exceptions) and seem stuck in whatever food tradition they first learned. For years, it honestly seemed like they were utterly ignorant of the better beer being brewed all around them, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for any food person to continue to work with such willful ignorance as this patterns suggest, and yet that seems to be what’s going on, at least that’s how it seems to me.
Alan – June 6, 2016 10:52 PM
I get that entirely – but is it only his/their fault? I mean, I get the weirdness of the mac and cheese stuff, too, but why is the rejection so seemingly consistent? Would good mustards get this treatment? It can’t be just co-ordinated snobbery. Is there something about good beer that is antithetical from a taste perspective with the established western cuisines? Not that I was expecting food pairing to solve this over a decade but shouldn’t have nudged it?
Jay Brooks – June 7, 2016 12:03 AM
http://BrookstonBeerBulletin.com
That’s a great question. The beer denunciation from the food side of the aisle does seem eerily consistent. I have always thought it was institutional, but that should have changed as the beer market has matured, and that does not seem to have really happened, although to be fair there are certainly more chefs who appreciate and use beer in cooking and pairing than there were two decades ago.
Kat – June 7, 2016 1:33 AM
http://beerblog.katalbert.eu
Thanks for the read. This is an interesting article with his mentions of beer. To me, he just doesn’t seem to have an interest in beer (for some reason). Exactly, of all people how is Bourdain not more on board for it?
Craig – June 7, 2016 11:03 AM
http://www.drinkdrank1.com
Jay, I think there’s an element of education that chefs don’t want to get into as well. Wine pairing at its very most basic has a fairly simple mantra—white with chicken or seafood and red with beef. Sure there are variations and exceptions, and rabbit holes to go down. But it’s a fairly basic guideline—a sound bite. Hell, even my dad knows that, and he couldn’t give two shits about what he drinks with what he eats. Beer doesn’t have that simplicity when it comes to food. I think that their are still enough people out there who say “I don’t like beer” or “I like regular beer” that it’s simply to much of a learning curve for chefs to care about or attempt to correct, from their perspective. Beer and food gets dismissed because it’s kind of a pain in the ass—or at least it seems that way.
Alan – June 7, 2016 9:52 PM
I wonder. There are plenty of great natural partners – mushrooms and dubbels, oysters and gueuze, pilsner and curry – but you are right on: there isn’t a basic snappy mantra yet despite all the “pairings” efforts of the last decade.
Ryan – June 8, 2016 4:19 PM
My guess would be that for an older generation of chefs (which would include Bourdain) wine was always paired w/ food because the quality of wine available far outpaced the quality of beer available. And I’m not sure if this is still the case, but wine has typically had a far higher profit margin than any other alcoholic beverage, so that might play into it.
If you go off the stereotype that chefs work hard and play hard, then to me it makes sense that they would gravitate towards a beer that was cheap, cold, and “easy drinking” so they could drink as many as they could. And while you would like to think that they could see how beer has changed over the years, sometimes those old biases are hard to break.
Greg – June 12, 2016 1:10 PM
It’s worth noting that in Japan, in some the most exalted places to eat in the world like Jiro Ono’s sushi restaurant, what they serve is basic lager.
I love great beer, but it’s worth thinking why this might be the case, and I’m not about to even hint that my palate might be wiser in such things than Jiro Ono. I think beer nuts probably ought to just relax.
DaveS – June 13, 2016 10:00 AM
Sometimes there’s straight up snobbery and cultural inertia involved in this sort of thing, but I think that with someone like Bourdain or David Chang it’s more of a reverse-snobbery thing. Having your whole life tied up with expensive food and high end restaurants makes it hard to maintain a straight-talking man-of-the-people persona, but one easy way to do it is to occasionally take a break from the foie gras and truffles to sing the praises of something trashy, or have a pop at something supposedly highbrow.
And to be fair, craft beer geeks have kind of set themselves up as an easy target for this sort of thing…
rhudder – June 14, 2016 9:25 AM
http://itslunchtimeca.blogspot.ca/
Or maybe it is more simple than that. Cold lager goes well with most things. I’m guessing that simple beer works well with most food. I know more than one beer bartender that kick back with a mass lager at the end of a night because it is simple and unchallenging.
I’m guessing that sommeliers don’t break open some big wine when they go to unwind… Also, if you are traveling, it is easier to go with the flow. The number of people who love good food outnumber the number of people for good beer. It is not as if most lagers are that much worse than most local craft. I would dare say that I would prefer to drink a known inoffensive beer than have my meal sidetracked by a poor tasting beverage. And, he is a food guy who likes ‘trash’ food as well.