The Craft Isn't Cool

What Guy Fieri and Anthony Bourdain Can Teach Us as Witches

When Anthony Bourdain’s Book “Kitchen Confidential” hit bookstores in 2000, what we understand now as the world of the celebrity chef was just starting to manifest. Emeril Lagasse’s career as a popular TV chef was a few years in. Foodies in the know were buzzing about Tom Colicchio’s cooking at Gramercy Tavern, Eric Ripert was tearing it up at Le Bernadin,  and Thomas Keller had turned Napa Valley’s “French Laundry” into destination dining. The book made Bourdain an overnight luminary in this burgeoning scene. His writing was filled with wit and snark, and he drew the curtain back on the mysteries of a restaurant kitchen, which no one had really done. His voice was distinct, a product of a kind of deeply literate punk rock soul that infused a lot of what made something ‘cool’ in the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st Century.

Yes, Tony Bourdain was the Executive Chef at Les Halles in New York. But we should be honest here: Les Halles in the late 1990’s was a  serviceable French bistro located on Park Avenue South that catered primarily to executives eating on expense accounts who wanted a good steak frites. It was not Charlie Trotter’s or Momofuku. Compared to his contemporaries, Bourdain was always a better writer than he was a chef. His great gift wasn’t that he made the best food ever, but that he could go anywhere in the world, eat any kind of food, meet any kind of people, and bring the attitude of the literate and mildly subversive Everyman to whatever situation he found himself in. His gimlet eye and his sharp tongue as he did his voiceovers were what made us all fall in love with him. He was just so cool. We all wanted to be in a little hole in the wall spot on the coast of France throwing back beers and maybe some oysters with this guy.

Right when Tony Bourdain was standing on a balcony filming his now famous show in Beirut while a war unfolded in front of him, a young restauranteur from Marin County, California was winning the second season of The Next Food Network Star. Guy Fieri was everything that  Bourdain had probably sworn he would never become. He had bleached blond hair and talked about taking you to “Flavortown” and he celebrated the kind of food that foodies loved to sneer at, in places that more sophisticated world travelers might have called “flyover country.”

Nashville, Tennessee - January 10, 2022: Window display at Guy Chicken, Guy Fieri's restaurant in downtown Nashville near Broadway. Photo by mkopka.

Bourdain seemed to love taking potshots at Fieri. He called Fieri’s Times Square restaurant a “terror dome” when it opened in 2012. He made clear his disdain for everything Fieri did or stood for. As Bourdain continued to travel the world, using his show not just to highlight the food of a country, but often to shine an uncomfortable spotlight on  the social issues and injustices, Fieri’s focus on diners and dive bars and everything  bacon-laden and fried seemed to personally offend Bourdain. Bourdain’s fans likewise sneered at Guy Fieri. While Bourdain was welcomed to the “cool kids table” of the chef world, Guy Fieri remained an almost clownish figure, as decidedly un-cool as Bourdain was cool.

Fieri only ever punched back at Bourdain once, at a event meant to roast Bourdain in 2012. “Anthony, I gotta ask a question, why do you hate me so much brother? ... Is it because you went to a fancy culinary school and I didn't? I hear you're the only one in class who did most of his cooking with a spoon and a Bic lighter," he said, a reference to Bourdain’s drug addiction which Bourdain was deeply honest about. It was cringey. Fieri couldn’t even be cool telling a joke.

Here’s the thing — while Bourdain was alive, he was considered one of the coolest guys on the planet. He himself liked to say that he had the coolest job. He got to go anywhere he wanted, eat whatever he wanted, and meet all his idols. Before his death in 2018, and even now, If you had to choose between hanging with Guy Fieri and Tony Bourdain, most would probably still choose Bourdain. His suicide was a tragedy, and truly we lost something when he chose to leave us.

But these days, I might choose differently if I was asked who I wanted to hang with. During the pandemic, Guy Fieri became a champion for the struggling restaurant industry, raising over $21 million to give away grants to more than 43,000 restaurant workers, and then an additional $300,000 in grants to restauranteurs through the National Restaurant Association Education Foundation. 

When I heard that, it made me take a second look at Fieri. I started watching episodes of Guy’s Grocery Games and Tournament of Champions. And what I saw was a person who was loud, a little bit mischievous, has a penchant for jokes that make you groan, but at his core, loves seeing how people are going to shine. Sure Guy’s Grocery Games is the poor man’s version of more chef-ey cooking competitions like Top Chef , and the chefs are not James Beard nominees, but the chefs on the show are cooking with solid talent and technique. And they are making really awesome food.

The moment that I think really changed my mind completely, however, came during a recent episode of Tournament of Champions featuring former NFL player Tobias Dorzon cooking against Karen Akunowicz. Moments before he was supposed to enter the kitchen to cook against the James Beard Award winner, Tobias had an anxiety attack. Fieri went to Dorzon's side, walked him outside to get some air, and personally gave him the pep talk he needed to return to the kitchen and beat Akunowicz. Dorzon's win nearly moved Guy to tears, as he recognized exactly what it meant for the Black former football player to make it to the final round of the show.

What stood out to me in that moment was Fieri's compassion and his unabashed joy at seeing Dorzon succeed. He wasn't being cool at all. What he was being was warm and kind and human. That's a man I want to hang out with. It occurred to me that Bourdain had been deeply unfair to Fieri.

Why did Bourdain choose to make Fieri a whipping boy? Fieri was everything Bourdain feared becoming. Neither Bourdain nor Fieri were ever going to win a James Beard Award for their chef skills. Bourdain instead was distinguishing himself as a writer and cultural commentator, who maybe wasn't a wizard in a kitchen but was beloved by the culinary cognoscenti for his smart insights and cutting, clever words. Fieri was making a name for himself as a colorful host who seemed almost cartoonish, but he could hardly be called distinguished.  His demeanor might be rock and roll, but leaned more to hair metal than punk rock. He seemed to shun fine dining as a concept, choosing instead to celebrate diners and dives and the kind of food that most of the culinary cognoscenti disdains as being too much of the common folk. And here Fieri was, succeeding on the Food Network, and seeming to have no respect for the chef culture that Bourdain worshipped and desperately wanted acceptance from. Bourdain saw Fieri as a joke, and deep down feared being seen as a joke himself.  Because that's what every person who cultivates a veneer of being cool secretly fears. It is usually that which we most fear being, that we most want to publicly deny and distance ourselves from.

But here's the thing: the chef culture that Bourdain revered, that he craved acceptance from, was elitist, deeply misogynistic, deeply racist, and in bad need of reform. For all of the ways in which Bourdain challenged authority with his punk rock attitude in places like Haiti or Peru or Lebanon, he didn’t do the same when he was in a fancy chef’s kitchen. It was only in the last years of his life, when he started dating Asia Argento, who had been raped by Harvey Wienstein, that Bourdain even thought to speak out publicly on behalf of women he was working alongside of. And let's be perfectly clear that Bourdain's show format -- a Western European man travels all over the world to various places to get a flavor of what life is like there -- is extractive and treats other cultures as something exotic to be consumed. Bourdain blithely swam in privilege, and while he did his best to be respectful and it might have made him uneasy at times, he did nothing to change it.

Fieri, in contrast, has always had chefs of every background on his shows. He's championed chefs like Tobias Dorzon, Jet Tila, Darnell Williamson, and Crista Leudtke, who might not have seen as much notoriety without Guy lending his platform to help them shine. He's always treated all different types of cuisine as being equally capable of displaying good technique and asks that they be judged on even footing. His populist view of food and technique and being a chef actually meets the moment we're in with the right note of humanity and acceptance that we really need right now, as we seek to find a way to celebrate food and cooking in a more inclusive way. Guy has a ton of privilege, and he uses it to highlight and enrich those who do not have it.

The problem with being cool is that it only stands out if someone else is seen in contrast as uncool. And this is the place where witches need to to take a lesson. The practice of the Craft of the Wise certainly lends itself to creating a cool persona in the modern world. It's anti-authoritarian, requires intelligence and savvy, and lately has been afforded a level of pop culture cachet. With the huge proliferation of witches showing out on Instagram and TikTok, we see how "cool" witches can be.

Don't get me wrong -- the fact that witches are more accepted than ever in our society is a good thing. That there are many who are taking up the Craft who see no reason to hide that part of their identity is progress. Especially considering that in many parts of the country, witches who are "out of the broom closet" face discrimination, and can lose their jobs, or be placed in precarious positions in custody disputes. It warms my heart to see young witches walking in the world openly, proudly and with confidence.

But as the Craft and its practitioners become more and more "cool" we need to be very careful that we aren't seduced by it. "Cool" is a status that is, at bottom, supremely self-conscious, despite its appearance of not caring what others think. The trope of the "effortlessly cool person" like a James Bond or Steve McQueen is attractive because of its promise that someone can move through the world in a perfect state of grace where everything they do is compelling and fashionable and just "it." But make no mistake, that coolness is always a studied and curated facade that takes energy and will to maintain. No one is always cool.

Aspiring to be cool is in fact, a ticket to perpetual disappointment. Because even if you can get other people to think you're cool, you'll know that secretly you're probably not as cool as all that. And that insecurity will eat at you and steal your joy. It's a lot of energy to spend on something that honestly doesn't serve you, doesn't serve your Craft, and doesn't serve humanity at large. The world does not need cool witches.

What the world needs is witches who are kind, and who aren't afraid to be warm and connected to their fellow humans in the world. The world needs witches who are less interested in sucking up to existing institutions and more interested in how they can raise up people who have been held back by those institutions. The world needs witches who are not seduced by their own shine, but who instead turn their spotlight to others who need it more. The Craft certainly appears cool, when you look at it from the outside. But those of us within need to understand that cool is nothing to strive for, and is fact the antithesis of all that our gods and our Craft needs from us. We need to be a little less Tony Bourdain, and a lot more Guy Fieri. Although for the good of us all, maybe not so much hydrogen peroxide in the hair.....