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you pursue excellence for yourself —not for dreams of TV stardom or endorsement deals, not for the customer, not for your chef, but for yourself—then you are well on your way to becoming the kind of lifetime adrenaline junkie professional culinarian recognizable in any country or culture.
    I can't tell you how many times I've talked about this with chefs and cooks around the world. Whether it's Singapore, Sydney, Saint Louis, Paris, Barcelona, or Duluth, you are not alone. When you finally arrive, when you take your place behind a professional range, start slinging serious food, know what the hell you're doing, you are joining an international subculture in "this thing of ours." You will recognize and be recognized by others of your kind. You will be proud and happy to be part of something old and honorable and difficult to do. You will be different, a thing apart—and you will cherish your apartness.
FOOD AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS

    "MAYBE YOU SHOULD DRIVE," I Said.
    I yanked the blood-red Cadillac Eldorado onto the shoulder and stomped on the brakes. Ruhlman, sunning himself in the passenger seat, was thrown forward, mashing his folding sun-reflector into the dash and spilling beer all over his lap.
    "You filthy pig, Bourdain," he screeched, "that was the last beer!"
    Ruhlman is a big man, six-foot-four like me, but wider, with big corn-fed Midwestern shoulders—and when he gets those thick forearms and meat-hook paws around your neck, it's already too late.
    I had good reason to be afraid. He was in an ugly mood. I'd dragged him away from his wife and children, from the relative calm and civility of his beloved Cleveland, all the way across the country to this godforsaken desert, to Las Vegas no less—the Ugly Shorts Heart of Darkness—to assist me in the production of a television show (and the writing of this article) on the burgeoning celebrity chef scene. As coauthor of the Bouchon and French Laundry cookbooks, and as a respected writer on the subject of chefs, he was uniquely placed to help me. He'd been to Vegas before. He knew the histories of the personalities and operations I was interested in—and his reputation and deceptively innocent aw-shucks manner and preppy good looks might, I hoped, make me (a vicious interloper if ever there was one) more welcome in town. My plan had been to get him liquored up, then piggyback on the research he'd spent many months if not years assembling. If nothing else, I knew he could get me a good table at Bouchon.
But he'd turned on me. And not without reason.
    In the past few days, in the interests of television entertainment, I'd induced him to wear the same loud, electric-blue Hawaiian shirt every day. I'd repeatedly shot (and badly bruised) him during a ferocious game of indoor paintball; fed him beer and liquor from sunup to late night; then, when he was vulnerable, remorselessly interrogated him about Vegas culinary history. I'd watched him lose terrible sums at blackjack—all this while being regularly force-fed gargantuan, two-time-a-day tasting menus as the cameras rolled and I jotted down his every comment.
    Now, we'd been driving back and forth for hours in the scorching desert sun—so the television crew could get that perfect Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas "homage" shot—and it wasn't going well.
    He had to drive. I was in much worse shape than he, my head pounding from the previous night's mile-high frozen margaritas, my heart racing with terror in my chest. What had I been thinking? Six days to research, cover, write, rewrite, edit, and deliver an article for a respectable major publication—while simultaneously making an hour-long episode of a show that would (and did) require every variety of bestial, excessive behavior. Even now, there was a Sammy Davis Jr. impersonator waiting for me in the Neon Boneyard, an accordion convention to attend, and more food—always more food, more meals to eat—before I was due, on the last day, to jump out of an