Ten years after publishing his memoir Kitchen Confidential, revealing the sometimes dark and gritty culinary world , Anthony Bourdain is a changed man. No longer the chef who wields sharp knives and works dinner service, he has hosted the Emmy Award winning Travel Channel show, No Reservations for the past decade, running around the globe in search of bizarre and unusual cultures, foods, and peoples in countries like Columbia, Ghana, and Vietnam. His new book, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, explains his departure from the kitchen, how it feels to sell out, and what parenthood can do to a rock and roll chef.

On Thursday, June 24, the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State Street, hosted Bourdain for a book reading and signing. The sarcastic author read an excerpt from the book discussing his opinions on Food Network celebrity hosts, cracked more than a few jokes about everyone from cooking celebrity Sandra Lee to himself and answered questions from a crowd of roughly 250. Selected audience questions and Bourdain’s responses have been condensed below.

Katherine Sacks

If you had to eat one style of food for the rest of your life, what would it be?
If I was going to a desert island and had to eat one genre of food everyday for the rest of my life, then I would travel with a really high-end sushi chef. If I could eat good sushi everyday for the rest of my life, I would not be unhappy about that.

Of all of the places you’ve been to, if you could only go to one of them again, where would it be?
It would depend where I’m at in my head. If everything in my life went horribly wrong, and I wanted to end up someplace as the tragic hero- the fantastic, poetic end to my life, I would go to Vietnam. If I ended up a broken man, alone, at least I would be eating delicious pho and watching life in Vietnam around me. That would be the consolation prize to an otherwise misspent life. I would be very happy there. The plan is, I want to go like Marlon Brando in the Godfather, but in Italy. I re-married an Italian woman, my daughter is a dual citizen. If everything goes perfect, I’m going to retire to Italy or Sardinia. I want to grow tomatoes in my backyard; I want to make really crappy wine. Someday chasing my granddaughter and grandson around the tomato vine I’m gonna keel over from a fucking heart attack. Right now, ask this question of ten really great chefs, a whole hell of a lot of them would say San Sebastian, they would say a restaurant called Etxebarri up in the mountains outside of San Sebastian with this dude, he just grills stuff, little eels, homemade chorizos, beautiful ham, two or three ingredients, cooked up in a little pub outside Basque country. You know keeling over stone dead with a half eaten piece of Iberico ham in your mouth, there’s worse ways to be.

What is a good cookbook to learn to cook from?
Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, it’s the Bible. When all else fails, go to Julia. I mean I love it. That’s it. You can barely do better than that. It’s just a terrific, terrific, terrific book. If you don’t trust a recipe or another recipe doesn’t work, those will always, always work.

Can you talk about your writing process?
Everything I learned as a dishwasher, no joke. I learned to show up on time and do the best you can. Given the opportunity to write a book I will deliver it on time and wake up early everyday and do the best I can to write it. What is my writing process? I don’t give myself anytime to think about the million and one reasons why I can’t or shouldn’t write the book. If I was sitting around staring at the ceiling thinking about, ‘Gee, what do they expect?,’ ‘What is the market like right now?,’ I’d never be able to write a word. I wake up, immediately start writing, write as long, as fast as I can, shove it in a drawer, don’t read it for weeks, because if I read it right away I’ll become miserable and critical and edit myself out of existence. I just go and I go and I go. I come from an oral tradition of storytelling. I’m not agonizing, I’m not Marcel Proust agonizing over sentences. You know, I write the way I talk.

Why this book, why now?
I wrote this book because it had been ten years since I wrote Kitchen Confidential, which is still selling like crazy, which I’m happy about but on the other hand I felt it was important to state publicly that I am no longer a working chef. In fact, it’s been ten years, I’m no longer in that tribe. It would be a mistake to assume that I am. I don’t work everyday, I wouldn’t be good at it anymore.

Where haven’t you been that you want to go in your travels?
I haven’t been to Cuba. I try every year and something always goes wrong. I really want to go before, you know. I assume that as soon as Castro hits the floor, they’ll be opening a W Hotel there. So I kinda want to see history, I want to go to Cuba and I want to see the greatest baseball players of the world play for $29 a month. So that’s a place I really want to shoot that we haven’t been able to. They’ll let us in, we’ll let us out, but it’s always getting the permits to move as freely as we want to that’s the problem.

In your opinion, what will it take to see a shift away from the Rachel Ray food culture?
An alternate universe. It won’t happen. It’s a spectacular success, people love that stuff, Food Network is putting up bigger and better numbers. Look at all the great newspapers that have been closing down in this country, all the great magazines that are evaporating.  All those Food Network magazines are a huge success story, so people like it, it’s the way it is. It’s Rachel’s world, I just live in it now.

If you were starting again, would you go into again?
Would I do it all over again? Yes. I wouldn’t change anything, I would do everything exactly the same again. I wouldn’t miss any of it, the good and the bad. I’m quite sure that if I could go back in time and confront myself at age 17 and say, listen the following really, really bad things are gonna happen. You know, heroin is gonna cause you a problem a little bit down the line, this is a bad career move, this and that, I’d do the same things. I’d ignore my own advice, from me.

What was the last thing you cooked?
Hmm, that was a long time ago. I think I made spaghetti alla bottarga, you know at home.

Favorite places to eat in Chicago?
I have a very narrow view. Anything Paul Kahn is associated with is worth paying attention to. I’m a big fan of the hot dog place I’m not going to mention because the line is already too long. And I really hate your fucking pizza.