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Anthony Bourdain goes loco for San Loco. Photo by Ronna Gradus

Anthony Bourdain

By Lydia Martin

It's probably a good thing that bad-boy food star Anthony Bourdain isn't hungry. You'd be hard-pressed to find him any gross-out stunt meals at South Beach's Raleigh Hotel.

This is a guy famous for eating a still-beating cobra heart, an eyeball pried from a just-slaughtered seal, cooked warthog rectum served without anyone standing on enough ceremony to, you know, clean the thing out first.

"The warthog rectum was f - - - - - - awful, " says Bourdain, star of the Travel Channel's Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and author of fiction and nonfiction books, including 2000's bestselling memoir/restaurant exposé Kitchen Confidential. "I was desperately ill. I don't mean I was throwing up because it was gross. I mean I had a system-wide shutdown and a long course of antibiotics."

By way of lunch, Bourdain downs two Heinekens. He's still giddy about his last gorgefest for Travel Channel cameras.

"I was just in Uruguay. It was one of those great discoveries. Montevideo is outrageously cool. I ate meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I don't think I saw a single vegetable for 10 days. Everything is cooked over roaring heaps of wood. They are burning down the whole world to feed themselves. I had armadillo. Hadn't had that yet. And some emu/ostrich varietal. But the big surprise was how good the blood sausage was. Maybe the best morcilla I ever had."

But how good was the steak?

"It was better than I had in Argentina. People say the beef in Argentina is great. I prefer American beef to Argentine beef. But everything I had in Uruguay was unexpectedly great."

Bourdain never minces words. He is brash, tattooed, foul-mouthed. He's like an aging rocker, pounding back so much of the national booze in whatever corner of the world he visits that his morning-after taping sessions inevitably involve a discussion on the local hangover remedy.

And he's fun, in a Beavis and Butt-head sort of way. You have to snicker when he goes off. Harshing on restaurants and food personalities he doesn't love is clearly his favorite sport, second only to the daredevil eating.

You know better than to think he'll gush about Miami's culinary scene.

"I have heard Miami called one of the premier food destinations in the country. And, hell no, it's just not. There are some good mom-and-pop places by people who came from somewhere else. And that's going to make it more interesting to me. But you have to really travel for it."

Best meal he ever had in Miami?

"I like Norman [Van Aken]. I like what Michelle Bernstein does. But there isn't a chef-driven culture here."

Worst meal he ever had in Miami?

"What was that restaurant called that had a beauty-themed menu? Afterglo. It was some kind of weird Nazi geneticist's idea of food that would make you young and beautiful. My heart bled for the cooks. It was insipid, stupid, offensive. I hated it from the get-go."

You can't help but prod him to cut some personalities down to size while he's at it. Easy enough to do. Just mention Rachael Ray.

"Rachael can't cook. I've never seen her cook anything edible. People like her are not trying to be cooks anyway. They're really in the Tony Robbins business. They're about making you feel better about yourself. But you should see some of their riders about how you can't even get close to them."

Giada De Laurentiis?

"Giada can actually cook. I'd eat her food."

Paula Deen?

"I get the impression I'd like her if we sat down and had a couple of shots of bourbon. She's like me; she kind of scored late in life. I'm rooting for her."

OUT OF THE KITCHEN

Bourdain had been a chef for almost three decades (he is now chef-at-large at New York's Brasserie Les Halles, where he ran the show for years) before he hit it big with Kitchen Confidential. The book led to a TV show on the Food Network. He has been doing the Travel Channel show since 2005.

Traipsing around the globe with a TV crew can be grueling, but Bourdain isn't complaining.

"I'm no fool. I'm 51 years old. Why would any sane person who has worked in kitchens for 28 years complain about doing a TV show? Working a lunch counter is not so far away in my memory. I'm very aware that this TV s - - - and the books were a well-timed break for me. I was living paycheck to paycheck. I never had health insurance. I never owned anything. I was desperately in debt. Every morning I'd wake up thinking the IRS was going to catch me."

Which is why he laughs at all those culinary students who, in recent years and thanks to the proliferation of cooking shows and cooking personalities, have gotten into the game thinking they're going to become famous chefs.

"The restaurant business organically shakes off that kind of delusional character as a matter of course. It just squishes them very quickly."

But he won't outright clobber the new celebrity-chef culture.

"I think it's empowering chefs, making what they do a prestigious thing. They have more self-respect now. It didn't used to be. The kitchen has become a much more serious place than it was back in my day. People aren't doing cocaine back there now. It's unacceptable now to spit in people's food or have sex on the cutting boards during service."

Was he having sex on the cutting boards?

"Any horizontal surface in a restaurant. Years ago I went to a new restaurant that Mario Batali was opening. I had worked in that same space years earlier. I said, 'It's great to be back here. My DNA is like on every surface of this restaurant.' And he was like, 'Thanks for that visual.' "

HAVE A HEART

But for all his bluster, Bourdain seems more mellow and mature than you expected. He's not trashing the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, for which he was in town.

"Even at it's worst, it makes the world a marginally better place. A weekend of celebrating wine and food -- that's marginally a win for the good guys."

He's also not smoking. Quit about a year ago, when his daughter was born. And he's not calling the waiter over for a third Heineken. He has to run, he says, because he promised to inflate a pool toy for the baby. His new wife and first child are waiting upstairs in their room.

"Everything they say about having a baby is true. It changes everything. I have never been happier. And yeah, it has certainly made me more forgiving of stuff that I would have just mocked without hesitation."

Like the Hawaiian luau he covered for the Travel Channel.

"It was one of those traditional, awful Don Ho luaus with a bunch of old people piling off the bus to get their slopped-off Hawaiian platters. I realized looking at the raw footage that the voiceover expected of me was supposed to be really vicious and snarky.

"And I just looked at the old people dancing around in their coconut bras, and I didn't have the heart. They worked their whole lives to be able to do this. A year ago, I would have just unloaded on them. It drove everybody crazy. They were like, 'What the f - - - is happening to you?' "