Echoes of Anthony Bourdain: Provincetown Kitchens

The late celebrity chef and TV star Anthony Bourdain seems to be having a moment – another one – now that a biopic –  “Tony” – has just come out and people are writing about him yet again. Not long ago, former New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells wrote in the Times about looking for echoes of the young Bourdain in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he allegedly decided he wanted to be a chef.

I’ve always kind of liked Bourdain – in 2000, when his memoir “Kitchen Confidential” came out, I was cooking part-time in a restaurant and somebody gave me the book, so I read it early on and enjoyed it – but Wells’ piece got me thinking less about the late chef than about my own memories of Provincetown restaurant experiences and stories.

It also evoked early childhood memories of seafood there: I recalled a view –- or was it a hallucination? -– of tuna piled like cordwood on a Provincetown dock.  And an all-too-real memory of a fishmonger delivering seafood to a summer house near Provincetown where we were staying when I was about four, and brandishing live lobsters — which looked almost as big as I was and scared the daylights out of me.

Then there were the lobsters crawling slowly around a tank when my wife and I took our 9- and 10-year-old kids to a Provincetown restaurant when we were on an East Coast trip.  My wife and son and I knew we would order lobster.  My daughter took one look at the captive crustaceans and knew she wouldn’t.  She said she wanted a hamburger.  How could we leave her sitting there with a burger while we were eating lobster?  We ordered her a steak.  She didn’t eat it.  She had said hamburger and that had been exactly what she meant.  Yet another embarrassing parental lesson. 

Years later, I was sitting at the bar of a West Seattle restaurant, marking time until I could catch a late ferry to Vashon Island, when -– the kitchen having closed for the night –- two cooks came out and sat a few stools away from me.  They discovered they had both had early restaurant jobs in Provincetown.  Neither had forgotten the sound of chitin scraping frantically against the sides of metal pots as lobsters tried vainly to escape the boiling water into which they’d been plunged.  (But hey, they’re not suffering.) One remembered that he had started each shift by walking around the dining room and scooping up the lobsters that had climbed out of their tanks overnight.

And of course, there was my own brief experience in a Provincetown kitchen.  It was the end of the summer after high school.  I had been working, and I decided that before I left for college, I’d spend a few days there at the tip of Cape Cod.  I took a bus to Hyannis, which was the end of the line, and hitch-hiked the rest of the way.  I found a room in a guest house run by the women of a Portuguese fishing family.  I spent a day on the family boat with the grown sons who manned it while they mended net. 

Then I spent a night on the boat when someone with a reservation occupied my room.  I went out on the boat when it left the pier at first light to trawl along the coast.  One member of the crew, a cousin, was about to open a restaurant right on the main drag, Commercial Street.  He had taken over the space vacated  by a restaurant that had folded.  Now, he was ready to go.  But he was short-staffed.  How would I like to work opening night?  Sure.  Why not?

I don’t remember whom I worked with or what we cooked.  I just remember the setting.  The dining room looked great, but beyond the swinging doors, the kitchen was horrific.  It didn’t look like anyone had entered that space since the previous restaurant closed, weeks or months before. All the dishes were dirty.  Remember, we were on the verge of opening our doors.  Maybe hot water, lots of soap suds and a mad scramble could have enabled us to stay ahead of demand.  But there was no soap.  And no hot water.  A scrub with cold water and a brsik rubbing with clean towels?  There were no clean towels. 

We quickly learned that if you put a block of cheese down on a counter, it came up gray and furred by the accumulated dust.  The slicer was caked with desiccated shreds of meat left over from its last rodeo.  Did we use the slicer that night?  I don’t remember.  I hope not.  But we must have figured something out.  Food was being served on plates that at least looked clean.  I wandered out into the dining room to see.  It was packed.  People were chowing down.  They couldn’t have imagined what lay on the other side of those swinging kitchen doors.

The night seemed to be a financial success.  The owner was happy.  He asked if I’d work the next night, too.  That wasn’t gonna happen.  But I didn’t want to be rude.  I told him I couldn’t.   I was leaving Provincetown the next day.  I hadn’t planned to go that early.  But it seemed like the easy way out.  Provincetown may have inspired Bourdain to spend his life in the kitchen; it inspired me to get out of town.