don't order fish on mondays

While I do profess an admiration for various chefs, the one person I would love to sit down and have a meal with is Anthony Bourdain.

I admire his tenacity and the way he unabashedly hurls himself into things - be it gulping down a snake's still beating heart, taking bicycle rides down the streets of Tokyo, trying various unrecognisable delicacies from all around the world.

I like that while he owns a restaurant - Les Halles in NYC - his TV show isn't all about that, but rather, his travels around the world.

I vaguely remember the ep in Singapore where Seetoh brought him to Geylang for the crab noodles.... but last year when I went to Singapura restaurant at Selegie (love the cold crab and their foo chow cuisine!) there was a picture of Mr Bourdain smiling for the camera.

I'm sure he must have enjoyed the cold crab. Sometimes I think that's the best way to enjoy a fresh crab, rather than slathered underneath the sweet chili sauce or worse still, black pepper!

Anyway, I've taken to reading Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential again. The first time I read it was during the fking long plane ride to Toronto so I think it deserves a reread.

And on the bus to work, I read this lovely passage about his first experience eating an oyster.

"This, I knew, was the magic I had until now been only dimly and spitefully aware of. I was hooked. My parents' shudders, my little brother's expression of unrestrained revulsion and amazement only reinforced the sense that I had, somehow, become a man. I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life - the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing , whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation - would all stem from this moment."

Eating is an adventure. He definitely knows it.

Plus how could you not like a guy who says this:

"I'm not afraid to look like a big, hairy, smelly, foreign devil in Tokyo," Anthony Bourdain explains, "though I do my best not to, I really do."