Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain Page B

beachfront patio deck) and an attitude. Specifically, you need a reputation as an ornery fuck who doesn’t give a shit about anything or anybody. Then, like Robèrt, you can not only fuck the rich, you can fuck each and every one of them personally—one at a time, just bend them over a sawhorse in order, and roger them up the poop chute while they thank you repeatedly.
    At his restaurant, for twenty-five euros (about thirty-five bucks then), one gets a few grams of cold, unseasoned, boiled lentils on a very large plate. Lentils. That’s it. About two tablespoons of them—with not so much as a carrot chunk or limp dice of onion to distinguish them from what some street kid with a skateboard and a Hacky Sack is eating right now in a parking lot in Portland. Probable food cost to Robèrt? Maybe two cents. Feel free to season with oil and vinegar, though. Provided complimentary.
    For the main course, there is the option of chicken or fish. Chicken is one leg, which Robèrt himself (that’s him, the scowling, shirtless, and unshaven fellow over there, wearing an apron, shorts, and flip-flops) will personally burn into unrecognizability for you. Nothing less than carbonized will satisfy his exacting standards. Robèrt will take the extra step to ruin your chicken each and every time. People who’ve had the temerity to step over to the grill preemptively and suggest that, perhaps, this order could be a little less cooked find themselves quickly in the street—next to Madonna.
    The fish option is a small, barely cleaned, whole red snapper, prepared with similar attention to detail—which is to say, burned to shit.
    Price for these delights of land and sea? Fifty euros (about seventy-five bucks) each.
    Add a chilled bottle of the cheapest rosé on the list to stave off the summer’s heat, and ameliorate, perhaps, the taste of campfire in your mouth, and you’re talking five hundred dollars for lunch. Merci—and fuck you very much.
    And yet they line up, they beg, they try and bribe, they conspire, they whisper loudly into their cell phones, to friends in St. Tropez or Punta del Este or Rome, trying to reach someone with influence over the situation—so that they may visibly swan past less favored mortals and sit, triumphant, on the Patio of the Gods.
    If, as the man says, “behind every great fortune there is a crime,” then, surely, many of these customers have sanctioned every variety of cold-blooded behavior in the interests of a few dollars here and there: relocating African villages, flooding valleys, gouging the infirm, dumping toxins down wells, and knocking off the inconvenient when circumstances require. But for Robèrt, they cheerfully grab their ankles.
    And they don’t even ask for a reach-around.
    It kind of begs the question: why?
    It’s a question I’ve been wrestling with since early in my career, when I was charged with the care and refilling of the trays and hotel pans at the Rockefeller Center Luncheon Club, where the Masters of the Financial Universe ate every daytime meal at our sorry-ass buffet of the damned. I wondered what might have compelled these people, who singlehandedly decided the fate of nations, the captains of industry, the fabulously wealthy wives of potentates, scions of old European families who didn’t even remember where their money came from, why would these people cower in the dreary confines of the lunch club—or fight tooth and nail, clawing over the bodies of their friends to eat truly awful, insultingly priced food on a shabby pool deck, abused by a man of no standing or station, whom, under ordinary circumstances, they would have set the hounds on without a second’s thought?
    Why, for that matter, tolerate the absurd pretense and prices of Mr. Chow—or Philippe, or Nello, or Cipriani—when there are a hundred better restaurants within a few moments’ drive? What my horrible week on St. Barths taught me was that this traveling strata of mega-rich people, all of whom