Free THENASTYBITS by Anthony Bourdain

of highest-quality food: the extensive glassware, the tablecloths, the expensive silver and floral arrangements, even the table itself. In this bold new vision of the way it could—and perhaps should—be, the finest ingredients, prepared by the very best chefs and cooks, are served over a counter, diner style.
    It's a revolutionary shift, or more accurately, a reactionary one. Not so much about what chefs want to do as much as about all the things they don't want to do anymore. And the change from black-and-white-penguin-suited tableside service to counter service looks to be an almost entirely chef-led trend, reflective of what chefs themselves like to eat in their few hours away from their own kitchens and, as significantly, where they are eating.
    I spend a lot of time in my nearly never-ending bounce around the world eating and drinking with chefs. It seems that in every city I visit, everywhere in the world, whether on a book-flogging tour, while making television shows, or just traveling for fun, I end up too late at night with the local hotshots and their crew, talking shop, talking food, talking about what we all really like to eat—and what we secretly consider to be bullshit. And I listen to what people tell me. I notice what they eat. When we play the "Death Row Game," naming those single dishes or ingredients that we'd choose if given only a few hours to live, as the last taste to ever cross our palates, I take note. Most chefs' choices for last meal are invariably simple. No one ever expresses a desire to experience a fourteen course degustation menu (or even any part of one) in an as-yet-unvisited three-star Michelin. Instead, the word Mom usually comes up. Bread and butter, steak frites, duck confit, and a bowl of pasta are popular answers. As frequently, the words Spain and sushi will be heard. More often than not, we're eating sushi or Spanish-style tapas while having this discussion.
    It is no coincidence that so many chefs have been visiting Spain lately, only to return with an altered worldview. While most chefs first head off to Spain so that they can experience Ferran
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    Adria's El Bulli, on the Costa Brava, they do have to pass through the rest of Spain to get there. Many return dazzled by the casual Spanish approach to eating: dinner at midnight, the standup snacks at crowded tapas bars, the whole concept of the poteo —the multistop bar and food crawl from casual eatery to casual eatery, grazing for what's good, cherry-picking the best at each place ("a little bit, often") before moving on to the next place, and the next. The tiny-bite pinchos and unself-conscious approach to the very best ingredients come as both relief and revelation to the jaded chef on vacation. All those nonsensical, show-business aspects of "our thing" seem ever more burdensome, and extraneous, upon return.
    And then there's sushi, and the sushi bar. To say that chefs have always been well disposed toward sushi and sashimi would be an understatement. No single development in Western gastronomy has changed our lives as drastically or as well as that first moment when Americans and English-speaking restaurantgoers decided they could let go of their instinctive wariness of raw fish—that sashimi and sushi were cool and desirable and worth paying for. From a marketing standpoint, the spread of sushi lifted all boats for all chefs. Now that there was always a Japanese chef willing to pay twice the going rate for quality seafood, standards shot through the roof. And more importantly, the choices of ingredients we could reliably expect to sell our customers expanded. Customers willing to eat eel, sea urchin, belly tuna, and monkfish liver meant that French and Italian and American chefs could now offer the neglected, nearly forgotten traditional items once almost impossible to sneak onto our menus; we were now free to serve the oily, bony, squiggly, and delicious delights like octopus, mackerel, rouget, and fresh sardines that