Why Nigella’s got America eating out of her hand

US chef Anthony Bourdain tells Lina Das viewers are lapping up his co-star’s unforgiving approach on new American cookery show The Taste

She’s the Domestic Goddess, known as much for her curves as for her lascivious ways with linguine; he’s the Lou Reed lookalike and culinary world’s resident punk whose book Kitchen Confidential infamously lifted the lid on what really happens behind restaurant doors. An unlikely pairing they may be, but Nigella Lawson and New York chef Anthony Bourdain have teamed up for a new competitive cookery show, The Taste, which launched in the States last month.

It’s a concerted attempt by Nigella to crack America, and judging by the favourable reception to the first episode on the ABC channel, that dream may not be too far away. The Taste pulled in 6.1 million viewers and had one critic rhapsodising about Nigella’s ‘passionate, telegenic star power’ while the switchboard was swamped with calls from people wanting to know where she got the scarlet dress she was wearing.

All of which makes one wonder why Nigella hasn’t tried this sooner. ‘Well, I’m really not sure why not,’ admits Anthony. ‘Her British shows used to be on the Food Network channel in the US, which wasn’t a good fit for her. They don’t like people with accents. They made us subtitle people who were speaking perfectly good English on my show A Cook’s Tour. But Nigella, she’s just herself. Most people will do anything to stay in TV but she’s resolute about not playing the game.’

There’s no doubt that, at 53, Nigella’s looking as good as ever – lush but toned, her new figure the result of a regime of yoga and pilates, apparently. With Hollywood as body-conscious as it is, did she feel pressure to slim down? ‘Well, I’m a guy, so I’d have no idea,’ laughs Anthony, ‘but she’s not vain. For somebody as gorgeous as she is, you’d think she’d have a lot of vanity, but I never see her agonising about her looks and if she talks about her appearance it’s always in a self-deprecating way. She’s happy to walk around in curlers in front of the crew and she doesn’t strike me as someone who stares in the mirror all day.’

The show, which has been dubbed The Voice for Foodies (‘Except we don’t have the cool chairs,’ says Anthony), features a panel of judges including Nigella, Anthony and US TV chefs Ludo Lefebvre and Brian Malarkey, who judge the contestants – both amateur and professional cooks – by sampling just one spoonful of their food without knowing who cooked it or what ingredients they used, and then voting them on or off accordingly. The judges then mentor their team of four contestants, but the blind tasting continues, meaning a judge may unwittingly vote off their own team member.

Since Anthony is known for his sharptongued comments, he’s already been called the Simon Cowell of the piece. ‘But although I think that was clearly everybody’s expectation, that wasn’t always how it turned out,’ he says. ‘Nigella’s kind but she can be brutal too, and a couple of times she was pretty unforgiving. Once she said one of the contestants had committed a crime against food. Everyone on the show takes food very seriously and I don’t know who the designated b****** will be,’ he grins, ‘but so far it isn’t me.’

Certainly they make an interesting pairing on screen and Nigella, who admittedly could flirt with a food mixer, is in her element. But if the producers were worried that Nigella, the daughter of former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, and Anthony, the New Yorkborn reformed heroin addict, would have little in common, they needn’t have been. The two have been friends for a decade, having been introduced at a dinner party by British restaurant critic AA Gill.

‘My first impression of Nigella was that she was just like she is on TV, only smarter and funnier and I liked her,’ says Anthony. ‘She was there with her husband Charles Saatchi, and he was fiercely protective of her,’ he laughs. ‘I was this guy who had a reputation for being cynical and foul-mouthed, so he was examining me very carefully. I respected him a lot after that.’

Anthony gained his reputation when, in 2000, his book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures In The Culinary Underbelly became a worldwide bestseller, revealing as it did the occasional unsanitary practices that went on in certain restaurant kitchens ( hollandaise sauce was a ‘veritable Petri dish of biohazards’) and imparting the now famous advice to restaurant-goers to never order the fish on a Monday (as it’s likely it wouldn’t be fresh). The book was sold to Hollywood (‘It started out as a David Fincher film starring Brad Pitt and ended up as a sitcom star-

ring Bradley Cooper,’ says Anthony a touch woefully) and earned him the reputation of being the culinary world’s gun-slinging spokesman. And yet it was that same machismo that inadvertently got Nigella into trouble recently with animal rights campaigners Peta.

In two separate articles, Anthony recounted how, at a dinner he attended where Nigella was present, he and ‘a bunch of guys... were all trying to outmacho each other’ with tales of eating ‘live cobra heart’, when Nigella suddenly piped up with her own story of being in Europe where the locals aborted a pig and then roasted the foetus for her to taste. Peta accused Nigella of using animals as ‘props for her selfindulgence’, and prompted her spokesman to issue a denial, saying Nigella had only been informed of the practice and hadn’t actually partaken of it.

Rather tactfully Anthony now says, ‘Well, apparently she was innocent of the practice itself, so I don’t want to get her into any trouble and I stand corrected. But what made her television series so original was that she really enjoyed her food and was so fearlessly omnivorous, going to her fridge late at night in her bathrobe and grabbing great big hunks of pork – that was great.’

While Bourdain may be effusive about Nigella, other British cooks haven’t always fared so well. Of Jamie Oliver, Bourdain once said he would like to travel back in time ‘just for the pleasure of bullying him at school’, while Ainsley Harriott was the ‘eye-rolling, cooing, squealing, flattering and mugging’ TV chef. Still, having been the culinary world’s enfant terrible for some time, Bourdain now finds himself, at 56, less of the enfant and not so much of the terrible either. Oliver is now warmly received and Anthony admits, ‘He could have played the cockney boy role for years and that would probably have played a lot better in the States, but instead he tried to do some good in the world with Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. We don’t want to be told we’re doing anything wrong or eating enormous amounts of c***, which we are, and the fact that he tried to do it makes him a bet- ter man than I am.’ Even Harriott was ‘very forgiving’ of Bourdain’s description when they happened to bump into one another in a bar in Australia.

Only Gordon Ramsay, whose similarly brusque turn of phrase Bourdain once greatly admired (‘He once called Antony Wor ra ll Thompson “a squashed Bee Gee” – is that not jazz?’) comes in for anything resembling criticism these days. ‘I haven’t seen Gordon in years. He makes a lot of TV these days and I wish him the best, but I prefer his English shows to the American ones. Boiling Point was ground-breaking and The F Word was brilliant. They’re closer to the Gordon I used to know.’

With The Taste set to air in the UK later this year, it seems the hunger for cookery competitions has yet to abate. So how does Anthony feel about The Great British Bake Off making its way to the States later this year? He blanches. ‘Baking? Cakes? I hate sweet stuff,’ he says. ‘Seriously, if I was in Guantanamo Bay and they made me watch a show where they were icing cakes, I’d confess everything immediately.’ The Taste will air in the UK this year.

Nigella with Anthony Bourdain