MEDIA REPORT:
BOOKS!
No, really, books. It's all I've got time for these days.
Anthony Bourdain's The Nasty Bits, and Michael Ruhlman's The Stretch of a Chef.
Yep, more food stuff.
Here's the fun part. Bourdain and Ruhlman are real-life buds, even though Bourdain is this six-four booze-swilling hooligan from New Yawk with a leather jacket and tats, and Ruhlman is a six-four family man from Cleveland Heights with a button-down collar, total opposites.
Nasty Bits is a compilation of articles that Bourdain has written for various others, plus some new stuff. Dipping into it, I found him raving rapturously about a meal he had at Masa, a mucho expensive sushi restaurant at the Time Warner building in NYC. One of his pals for the dinner happened to be Ruhlman.
Wait a sec. Chapter index, in Reach of a Chef, yep, there it is, a chapter on Masa. And what meal does Ruhlman just happen to be writing about? The one he shared with Bourdain, of course. (Bourdain, in his account, admits to cribbing from Ruhlman's notes as to exactly what they ate.)
Ruhlman is a journalist, cool, examining. Bourdain is a sensualist, raging, a living exclamation point. All the same, these two books, just released, are begging me to read them at the same time, flipping from one to the other.
I'm going to have fun!
