Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Chapter One\ FOOD IS GOOD\ MY FIRST INDICATION THAT food was something other than a substance one stuffed in one's face when hungry — like filling up at a gas station — came after fourth-grade elementary school. It was on a family vacation to Europe, on the Queen Mary, in the cabin-class dining room. There's a picture somewhere: my mother in her Jackie O sunglasses, my younger brother and I in our painfully cute cruisewear, boarding the big Cunard ocean liner, all of us excited about our first transatlantic voyage, our first trip to my father's ancestral homeland, France.\ It was the soup.\ It was cold.\ This was something of a discovery for a curious fourth-grader whose entire experience of soup to this point had consisted of Campbell's cream of tomato and chicken noodle. I'd eaten in restaurants before, sure, but this was the first food I really noticed. It was the first food I enjoyed and, more important, remembered enjoying. I asked our patient British waiter what this delightfully cool, tasty liquid was.\ 'Vichyssoise,' came the reply, a word that to this day — even though it's now a tired old warhorse of a menu selection and one I've prepared thousands of times — still has a magical ring to it. I remember everything about the experience: the way our waiter ladled it from a silver tureen into my bowl, the crunch of tiny chopped chives he spooned on as garnish, the rich, creamy taste of leek and potato, the pleasurable shock, the surprise that it was cold.\ I don't remember much else about the passage across the Atlantic. I saw Boeing Boeing with Jerry Lewis and Tony Curtis in the Queen's movie theater, and a Bardot flick. The old liner shuddered and groaned and vibrated terribly the whole way — barnacles on the hull was the official explanation — and from New York to Cherbourg, it was like riding atop a giant lawnmower. My brother and I quickly became bored, and spent much of our time in the 'Teen Lounge', listening to 'House of the Rising Sun' on the jukebox, or watching the water slosh around like a contained tidal wave in the below-deck salt-water pool.\ But that cold soup stayed with me. It resonated, waking me up, making me aware of my tongue, and in some way, preparing me for future events.\ My second pre-epiphany in my long climb to chefdom also came during that first trip to France. After docking, my mother, brother and I stayed with cousins in the small seaside town of Cherbourg, a bleak, chilly resort area in Normandy, on the English Channel. The sky was almost always cloudy; the water was inhospitably cold. All the neighborhood kids thought I knew Steve McQueen and John Wayne personally — as an American, it was assumed we were all pals, that we hung out together on the range, riding horses and gunning down miscreants — so I enjoyed a certain celebrity right away. The beaches, while no good for swimming, were studded with old Nazi blockhouses and gun emplacements, many still bearing visible bullet scars and the scorch of flamethrowers, and there were tunnels under the dunes — all very cool for a little kid to explore. My little French friends were, I was astonished to find, allowed to have a cigarette on Sunday, were given watered vin ordinaire at the dinner table, and best of all, they owned Velo Solex motorbikes. This was the way to raise kids, I recall thinking, unhappy that my mother did not agree.\ So for my first few weeks in France, I explored underground passageways, looking for dead Nazis, played miniature golf, sneaked cigarettes, read a lot of Tintin and Asterix comics, scooted around on my friends' motorbikes and absorbed little life-lessons from observations that, for instance, the family friend Monsieur Dupont brought his mistress to some meals and his wife to others, his extended brood of children apparently indifferent to the switch.\ I was largely unimpressed by the food.\ The butter tasted strangely 'cheesy' to my undeveloped palate. The milk — a staple, no, a mandatory ritual in '60s American kiddie life — was undrinkable here. Lunch seemed always to consist of sandwich au jambon or croque-monsieur. Centuries of French cuisine had yet to make an impression. What I noticed about food, French style, was what they didn't have.\ After a few weeks of this, we took a night train to Paris, where we met up with my father, and a spanking new Rover Sedan Mark III, our touring car. In Paris, we stayed at the Hôtel Lutétia, then a large, slightly shabby old pile on Boulevard Haussmann. The menu selections for my brother and me expanded somewhat, to include steak-frites and steak haché (hamburger). We did all the predictable touristy things: climbed the Tour Eiffel, picnicked in the Bois de Boulogne, marched past the Great Works at the Louvre, pushed toy sailboats around the fountain in the Jardin de Luxembourg — none of it much fun for a nine-year-old with an already developing criminal bent. My principal interest at this time was adding to my collection of English translations of Tintin adventures. Hergé's crisply drafted tales of drug-smuggling, ancient temples, and strange and faraway places and cultures were real exotica for me. I prevailed on my poor parents to buy hundreds of dollars-worth of these stories at W. H. Smith, the English bookstore, just to keep me from whining about the deprivations of France. With my little short-shorts a permanent affront, I was quickly becoming a sullen, moody, difficult little bastard. I fought constantly with my brother, carped about everything, and was in every possible way a drag on my mother's Glorious Expedition.\ My parents did their best. They took us everywhere, from restaurant to restaurant, cringing, no doubt, every time we insisted on steak haché (with ketchup, no less) and a 'Coca.' They endured silently my gripes about cheesy butter, the seemingly endless amusement I took in advertisements for a popular soft drink of the time, Pschitt. 'I want shit! I want shit!' They managed to ignore the eye-rolling and fidgeting when they spoke French, tried to encourage me to find something, anything, to enjoy.\ And there came a time when, finally, they didn't take the kids along.\ I remember it well, because it was such a slap in the face. It was a wake-up call that food could be important, a challenge to my natural belligerence. By being denied, a door opened.\ The town's name was Vienne. We'd driven miles and miles of road to get there. My brother and I were fresh out of Tintins and cranky as hell. The French countryside, with its graceful, tree-lined roads, hedgerows, tilled fields and picture-book villages provided little distraction. My folks had by now endured weeks of relentless complaining through many tense and increasingly unpleasant meals. They'd dutifully ordered our steak haché, crudités variées, sandwich au jambon and the like long enough. They'd put up with our grousing that the beds were too hard, the pillows too soft, the neck-rolls and toilets and plumbing too weird. They'd even allowed us a little watered wine, as it was clearly the French thing to do — but also, I think, to shut us up. They'd taken my brother and me, the two Ugliest Little Americans, everywhere.\ Vienne was different.\ They pulled the gleaming new Rover into the parking lot of a restaurant called, rather promisingly, La Pyramide, handed us what was apparently a hoarded stash of Tintins ... and then left us in the car!\ It was a hard blow. Little brother and I were left in that car for over three hours, an eternity for two miserable kids already bored out of their minds. I had plenty of time to wonder: What could be so great inside those walls? They were eating in there. I knew that. And it was certainly a Big Deal; even at a witless age nine, I could recognize the nervous anticipation, the excitement, the near-reverence with which my beleaguered parents had approached this hour. And I had the Vichyssoise Incident still fresh in my mind. Food, it appeared, could be important. It could be an event. It had secrets.\ I know now, of course, that La Pyramide, even in 1966, was the center of the culinary universe. Bocuse, Troisgros, everybody had done their time there, making their bones under the legendarily fearsome proprietor, Ferdinand Point. Point was the Grand Master of cuisine at the time, and La Pyramide was Mecca for foodies. This was a pilgrimage for my earnestly francophile parents. In some small way, I got that through my tiny, empty skull in the back of the sweltering parked car, even then.\ Things changed. I changed after that.\ First of all, I was furious. Spite, always a great motivating force in my life, caused me to become suddenly adventurous where food was concerned. I decided then and there to outdo my foodie parents. At the same time, I could gross out my still uninitiated little brother. I'd show them who the gourmet was!\ Brains? Stinky, runny cheeses that smelled like dead man's feet? Horsemeat? Sweetbreads? Bring it on!! Whatever had the most shock value became my meal of choice. For the rest of that summer, and in the summers that followed, I ate everything. I scooped gooey Vacherin, learned to love the cheesy, rich Normandy butter, especially slathered on baguettes and dipped in bitter hot chocolate. I sneaked red wine whenever possible, tried fritures — tiny whole fish, fried and eaten with persillade — loving that I was eating heads, eyes, bones and all. I ate ray in beurre noisette, saucisson à l'ail, tripes, rognons de veau (kidneys), boudin noir that squirted blood down my chin.\ And I had my first oyster.\ Now, this was a truly significant event. I remember it like I remember losing my virginity — and in many ways, more fondly.\ August of that first summer was spent in La Teste sur Mer, a tiny oyster village on the Bassin d'Arcachon in the Gironde (Southwest France). We stayed with my aunt, Tante Jeanne, and my uncle, Oncle Gustav, in the same red tile-roofed, white stuccoed house where my father had summered as a boy. My Tante Jeanne was a frumpy, bespectacled, slightly smelly old woman, my Oncle Gustav, a geezer in coveralls and beret who smoked hand-rolled cigarettes until they disappeared onto the tip of his tongue. Little had changed about La Teste in the years since my father had vacationed there. The neighbors were still all oyster fishermen. Their families still raised rabbits and grew tomatoes in their backyards. Houses had two kitchens, an inside one and an outdoor 'fish kitchen'. There was a hand pump for drinking water from a well, and an outhouse by the rear of the garden. Lizards and snails were everywhere. The main tourist attractions were the nearby Dune of Pyla (Europe's Largest Sand Dune!) and the nearby resort town of Arcachon, where the French flocked in unison for Les Grandes Vacances. Television was a Big Event. At seven o'clock, when the two national stations would come on the air, my Oncle Gustav would solemnly emerge from his room with a key chained to his hip and ceremoniously unlock the cabinet doors that covered the screen.\ My brother and I were happier here. There was more to do. The beaches were warm, and closer in climate to what we knew back home, with the added attraction of the ubiquitous Nazi blockhouses. There were lizards to hunt down and exterminate with readily available pétards, firecrackers which one could buy legally (!) over-the-counter. There was a forest within walking distance where an actual hermit lived, and my brother and I spent hours there, spying on him from the underbrush. By now I could read and enjoy comic books in French and of course I was eating — really eating. Murky brown soupe de poisson, tomato salad, moules marinières, poulet basquaise (we were only a few miles from the Basque country). We made day trips to Cap Ferret, a wild, deserted and breathtakingly magnificent Atlantic beach with big rolling waves, taking along baguettes and saucissons and wheels of cheese, wine and Evian (bottled water was at that time unheard of back home). A few miles west was Lac Cazeaux, a fresh-water lake where my brother and I could rent pédalo watercraft and pedal our way around the deep. We ate gaufres, delicious hot waffles, covered in whipped cream and powdered sugar. The two hot songs of that summer on the Cazeaux jukebox were 'Whiter Shade of Pale' by Procol Harum, and 'These Boots Were Made for Walkin' by Nancy Sinatra. The French played those two songs over and over again, the music punctuated by the sonic booms from French air force jets which would swoop over the lake on their way to a nearby bombing range. With all the rock and roll, good stuff to eat and high-explosives at hand, I was reasonably happy.\ So, when our neighbor, Monsieur Saint-Jour, the oyster fisherman, invited my family out on his penas (oyster boat), I was enthusiastic.\ At six in the morning, we boarded Monsieur Saint-Jour's small wooden vessel with our picnic baskets and our sensible footwear. He was a crusty old bastard, dressed like my uncle in ancient denim coveralls, espadrilles and beret. He had a leathery, tanned and windblown face, hollow cheeks, and the tiny broken blood vessels on nose and cheeks that everyone seemed to have from drinking so much of the local Bordeaux. He hadn't fully briefed his guests on what was involved in these daily travails. We put-putted out to a buoy marking his underwater oyster parc, a fenced-off section of bay bottom, and we sat ... and sat ... and sat, in the roaring August sun, waiting for the tide to go out. The idea was to float the boat over the stockaded fence walls, then sit there until the boat slowly sank with the water level, until it rested on the bassin floor. At this point, Monsieur Saint-Jour, and his guests presumably, would rake the oysters, collect a few good specimens for sale in port, and remove any parasites that might be endangering his crop.\ There was, I recall, still about two feet of water left to go before the hull of the boat settled on dry ground and we could walk about the parc. We'd already polished off the Brie and baguettes and downed the Evian, but I was still hungry, and characteristically said so.\ Monsieur Saint-Jour, on hearing this — as if challenging his American passengers — inquired in his thick Girondais accent, if any of us would care to try an oyster.\ My parents hesitated. I doubt they'd realized they might have actually to eat one of the raw, slimy things we were currently floating over. My little brother recoiled in horror.\ But I, in the proudest moment of my young life, stood up smartly, grinning with defiance, and volunteered to be the first.\ And in that unforgettably sweet moment in my personal history, that one moment still more alive for me than so many of the other 'firsts' which followed — first pussy, first joint, first day in high school, first published book, or any other thing — I attained glory. Monsieur Saint-Jour beckoned me over to the gunwale, where he leaned over, reached down until his head nearly disappeared underwater, and emerged holding a single silt-encrusted oyster, huge and irregularly shaped, in his rough, clawlike fist. With a snubby, rust-covered oyster knife, he popped the thing open and handed it to me, everyone watching now, my little brother shrinking away from this glistening, vaguely sexual-looking object, still dripping and nearly alive.\ I took it in my hand, tilted the shell back into my mouth as instructed by the by now beaming Monsieur Saint-Jour, and with one bite and a slurp, wolfed it down. It tasted of seawater ... of brine and flesh ... and somehow ... of the future.\ Everything was different now. Everything.\ I'd not only survived — I'd enjoyed.\ This, I knew, was the magic I had until now been only dimly and spitefully aware of. I was hooked. My parents' shudders, my little brother's expression of unrestrained revulsion and amazement only reinforced the sense that I had, somehow, become a man. I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life — the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation — would all stem from this moment.\ I'd learned something. Viscerally, instinctively, spiritually — even in some small, precursive way, sexually — and there was no turning back. The genie was out of the bottle. My life as a cook, and as a chef, had begun.\ Food had power.\ It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me ... and others. This was valuable information.\ For the rest of that summer, and in later summers, I'd often slip off by myself to the little stands by the port, where one could buy brown paper bags of unwashed, black-covered oysters by the dozen. After a few lessons from my new soul-mate, blood brother and bestest buddy, Monsieur Saint-Jour — who was now sharing his after-work bowls of sugared vin ordinaire with me too — I could easily open the oysters by myself, coming in from behind with the knife and popping the hinge like it was Aladdin's cave.\ I'd sit in the garden among the tomatoes and the lizards and eat my oysters and drink Kronenbourgs (France was a wonderland for under-age drinkers), happily reading Modesty Blaise and the Katzenjammer Kids and the lovely hard-bound bandes dessinées in French, until the pictures swam in front of my eyes, smoking the occasional pilfered Gitane. And I still associate the taste of oysters with those heady, wonderful days of illicit late-afternoon buzzes. The smell of French cigarettes, the taste of beer, that unforgettable feeling of doing something I shouldn't be doing.\ I had, as yet, no plans to cook professionally. But I frequently look back at my life, searching for that fork in the road, trying to figure out where, exactly, I went bad and became a thrill-seeking, pleasure-hungry sensualist, always looking to shock, amuse, terrify and manipulate, seeking to fill that empty spot in my soul with something new.\ I like to think it was Monsieur Saint-Jour's fault. But of course, it was me all along.\

AppetizerA Note from the Chef3First CourseFood Is Good9Food Is Sex19Food Is Pain25Inside the CIA36The Return of Mal Carne45Second CourseWho Cooks?55From Our Kitchen to Your Table64How to Cook Like the Pros75Owner's Syndrome and Other Medical Anomalies84Bigfoot91Third CourseI Make My Bones105The Happy Time120Chef of the Future!128Apocalypse Now134The Wilderness Years144What I Know About Meat153Pino Noir: Tuscan Interlude163DessertA Day in the Life183Sous-Chef206The Level of Discourse221Other Bodies229Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown235Department of Human Resources246Coffee and a CigaretteThe Life of Bryan255Mission to Tokyo272So You Want to Be a Chef? A Commencement Address293Kitchen's Closed300

\ From Barnes & NobleIf you've ever been curious about just what goes on in the kitchen of your favorite eatery, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly is just the book you've been waiting for. Anthony Bourdain, acclaimed executive chef of Les Halles restaurants in New York, Washington, D.C., Miami, and Tokyo, spills the beans, so to speak, on "what it feels like, looks like, and smells like in the clutter and hiss of a big-city restaurant kitchen."\ \ \ \ \ New York magazineBourdain’s prose is utterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and a precise ear for kitchen patois.\ \ \ USA TodayBourdain captures the world of restaurants and professionally cooked food in all its theatrical, demented glory.\ \ \ \ \ NewsweekA gonzo memoir of whats really going on behind those swinging doors.... Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain is unique.\ \ \ \ \ Denver Post"You’ll laugh, you’ll cry...you’re gonna love it."\ \ \ \ \ New York Times Book ReviewHysterical.... Bourdain gleefully rips through the scenery to reveal private backstage horrors.\ \ \ \ \ New York MagazineBourdain’s prose is utterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and a precise ear for kitchen patois.\ \ \ \ \ USA Today...the kind of book you read in one sitting, then rush about annoying your coworkers by declaiming whole passages.\ \ \ \ \ New York MagazineUtterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and precise ear for kitchen patois.\ \ \ \ \ Denver PostYou'll laugh, you'll cry...you're gonna love it.\ \ \ \ \ Joseph KleinAnthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential has already turned a few stomachs with its frank discussions of what goes on in the kitchens of America's favorite restaurants. He revels in anecdotes that would make an Ozzy Osbourne roadie question the catered stuff on his plate. Sex, drugs, sex near food while on drugs: Bourdain gleefully dishes the dirt on some of his former haunts, from the fish houses of New England to the elegant-on-the-outside eateries of New York. Yet the tone he takes with his joyously muckraking expose/memoir follows a distinctive rhythm, a blunt, boastful swagger that recalls some accounts of organized crime. Bourdain is just as likely to tantalize with his descriptions of food as disgust with his descriptions of the people and actions swirling around it, the activities disgusting yet somehow funny at the same time. It's an exhilarating combination often invoked in mobster tell-alls, but while there's more than a little goodfella in Bourdain -- he dices, dresses, and dishes with trash-talking braggadocio -- he clearly loves what he does. While he admits early on that the call of the kitchen often comes only after every other option has failed, he clearly enjoys working in such terrible conditions. It's like he has the key to the ultimate backroom club, a place of privilege where everyone operates with a different set of rules and gets off on a different set of thrills. Eat to live, don't live to eat, the saying goes, and for Bourdain, life is never better than when he's the one doing the cooking. \ —Onion A.V. Club\ \ \ \ \ Restaurant BusinessWith equal parts wit and wickedness, Bourdain [does] the unthinkable by revealing trade secrest that chefs and restauranteers cringe to read.\ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyChef at New York's Les Halles and author of Bone in the Throat, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business. His fast-lane personality and glee in recounting sophomoric kitchen pranks might be unbearable were it not for two things: Bourdain is as unsparingly acerbic with himself as he is with others, and he exhibits a sincere and profound love of good food. The latter was born on a family trip to France when young Bourdain tasted his first oyster, and his love has only grown since. He has attended culinary school, fallen prey to a drug habit and even established a restaurant in Tokyo, discovering along the way that the crazy, dirty, sometimes frightening world of the restaurant kitchen sustains him. Bourdain is no presentable TV version of a chef; he talks tough and dirty. His advice to aspiring chefs: "Show up at work on time six months in a row and we'll talk about red curry paste and lemon grass. Until then, I have four words for you: `Shut the fuck up.' " He disdains vegetarians, warns against ordering food well done and cautions that restaurant brunches are a crapshoot. Gossipy chapters discuss the many restaurants where Bourdain has worked, while a single chapter on how to cook like a professional at home exhorts readers to buy a few simple gadgets, such as a metal ring for tall food. Most of the book, however, deals with Bourdain's own maturation as a chef, and the culmination, a litany describing the many scars and oddities that he has developed on his hands, is surprisingly beautiful. He'd probably hate to hear it, but Bourdain has a tender side, and when it peeks through his rough exterior and the wall of four-letter words he constructs, it elevates this book to something more than blustery memoir.\ \ \ \ \ New York MagazineUtterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and a precise ear for kitchen patois.\ \ \ \ \ The New York Times[A] literary chef, as appreciated for quips as for steak frites.\ \ \ \ \ NewsweekUnique…mesmerizing.\ \ \ \ \ New York Daily NewsFunny, irreverent, scandalous.\ \ \ \ \ The Denver PostYou'll laugh, you'll cry…you're gonna love it.\ \ \ \ \ USA TodayBourdain clearly operates with all six burners on scorch, and the result keeps the reader excited.\ \ \ \ \ The New York Times Book ReviewThe guy is hysterical…in a style partaking of Hunter S. Thompson, Iggy Pop and a little Jonathan Swift, Bourdain gleefully rips through the scenery to reveal private backstage horrors.\ \ \ \ \ Joseph Epstein...the best book I have ever read about the nuts and bolts mechanics of running serious restaurant kitchens...brilliant on the tumult of running a kitchen that might turn out anywhere from two hundred to four hundred serious meals a night...Bourdain is a wild old boy and a bit of a lost soul, and, being strongly anti-malarkey, utterly believable.\ —The Weekly Standard\ \ \ \ \ Morse PartnersFrom that magical boyhood visit, when he became a "foodie" in France, to today, when he is executive chef of the chic New York bistro, Les Halles, Tony Bourdain has experienced it all. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, he learned his trade, as he puts it, "knocking around" Europe and toiling in some famous multi-starred restaurants in New York and cities north, west, east, and south. He has served as dishwasher, prep-drone, fry-cook, grillardin, saucier, and sous-chef along the way, and the strange and exotic and horrendous subculture of the professional kitchen is as familiar to him as the meals he and his fellow "lifers" turn out, noon and night, in the great -- and sometimes not so great -- restaurants of our world. \ Now, in this astonishingly frank, often outrageous, more-often hilarious romp of a book, Bourdain opens up the swinging, clattering kitchen doors to show vividly, pungently, "what it feels like, looks like, and smells like in the clutter and hiss of a big-city restaurant kitchen."\ Woven in are the stories of some of the great and less than great characters he has known--Howard, the "revered elder statesman of Cape Cod cookery," with wild, unruly white hair and a gin-blossomed face, who had a lifelong love affair with seafood and wrote two books about it; Tyrone, the broilerman, "big, black, hugely muscled, with a prominent silver-capped front tooth, a fist-sized gold-hooped earring, and a size 56 chef's coat stretched across his back like a drumhead;" "Bigfoot," the giant Jewish restaurateur of Greenwich Village who remains beloved and/or despised by generations of waiters, bartenders, cooks and chefs but who taught Bourdain how to wring the last penny from this hugely difficult business; Nando, the famous pastry chef of the Rainbow Room, who found time to hurl profiteroles at the skaters in the Rockefeller Center rink, sixty-four floors down; Pino Luongo, the "Prince of Restaurant Darkness," who ran a string of Tuscan restaurants in high-priced New York venues; and all the zany, beleaguered, unpredictable talents, many of them immigrants and the self-styled marginals, who have worked for and with Bourdain in his 25 years in the business.\ Woven in too are the secrets of the trade and their consequences, sometimes nefarious, for diners: Why Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the only truly good nights to eat in a restaurant, why chefs rub their hands over customers who want their beef well-done; why seafood frittata is a definite no-no at a weekend brunch.\ And with no nonsense clarity, Bourdain spells out in a few pages what it takes to bring your kitchen up to par with the pros. It is not as difficult as you might think. It may take as little as a new Global chef's knife and the right kind of bottle to spritz your serving plates like a pro…\ Tony Bourdain may be a master chef by profession, but he is also a born raconteur. A portion of his book, in a somewhat different form, ran in The New Yorker and his portrayal of the "underbelly" of the contemporary big-city restaurant can only be compared to George Orwell's in DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. The great difference between Orwell's hellish vision and Bourdain's is that Bourdain is enormously proud of his profession, and trumpets its "grandeurs" as well as he bemoans its "miseries." As he puts it, "For me, the cooking life has been a long love affair, with moments both sublime and ridiculous. But like a love affair, looking back you remember the happy times best, the things that drew you in in the first place, the things that kept you coming back for more."\ KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL is that kind of meal.\ \ \