Nightline: Daily E-mail (12/22)
W A S H I N G T O N, Dec. 22, 2000 -- Looking for a good time? Tune into tonight’s “Friday Night Special.” You’ll encounter more bleeped-out curse words and more laugh-out-loud moments than have ever appeared in a single Nightline half hour (we’re pretty sure that’s true).
Kitchen ConfidentialThe source of all this merriment? Tony Bourdain and his motley band of knife-wielding cooks, who populate the cramped kitchen quarters of Brasserie Les Halles, a popular New York restaurant. Executive Chef Bourdain is author of the best-selling Kitchen Confidential, Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. With nearly 30 years in the business, Tony has seen it all, and he tells all in his funny and sometimes horrifying book. He reveals why it’s best to avoid Hollandaise sauce and mussels in most restaurants, why you should never order fish on a Monday, and what a restaurant’s bathroom can reveal about the food that’s placed in front of you. And if you’re the type of person who orders your filet mignon or tuna steak well done, well, perhaps you should avoid the book and tonight’s broadcast altogether.
In fact, the gross-out factor is not the primary focus of our program. What was fascinating about Tony’s book, and what we will lay out tonight, is just what it takes to make a good restaurant successful and what it takes to keep it that way. Obsessive attention to detail and a passion for excellence is the short answer, but it goes way beyond that. It is tedious, it is tense and it is physically exhausting. And that’s all before they begin actually serving meals during a dinner rush. That situation can only described as controlled chaos. Tony, the maestro, directs the action, alternating between barking orders, swearing a blue streak, and jumping in to bail out a cook who is “in the weeds,” restaurant jargon for hopelessly confused and behind schedule. The orders rush in and pile up from the hungry diners at their tables, with many more forming a line out the door. The scene in the kitchen, roughly the size of a submarine galley, is one of open flames, flailing knives, and flaring tempers. Nonetheless, the sumptuous meals continue to emerge, consistently cooked to the precise specifications of each individual diner. It is appears to our untrained eyes nothing short of miraculous.
That is very much the way we feel after getting Nightline on the air on a night when news has broken very close to air time and we have to scramble to make it all come together. There’s nothing like the satisfaction of producing good television under trying circumstances. Tonight, if we may be so immodest, we manage to serve up both good television and good food in a delectable package that relies almost entirely on Tony Bourdain, utilizing both his culinary genius and his well-honed instinct for show biz.
Bon appetit.