In a sidebar in this week's New York Magazine front-of-book Intelligencer section, Eater noted a preview for the forthcoming "Ruth Bourdain" authored book, Comfort Me With Offal, which was attributed to:

"Ruth Bourdain (aka Voice writer Robert Sietsema)."

The problem? Village Voice dining critic Robert Sietsema already denied being the person behind Ruth Bourdain last October after a Star-Tribune writer came up with a theory that ostensibly outed Sietsema as the mastermind behind the Tweets, which prompted Eater to ask:

 Does someone at New York magazine have insider info, or are they just messing with everyone?

In a phone call with The Observer this afternoon, Mr. Sietsema again denied involvement with Ruth Bourdain. So how did his name end up in the magazine? "The only conclusion that I can come to," he explained,  "is that Ruth Bourdain says he’s me in the text [of the book], which I have not seen. It looks like they’ve seen a copy of the book."

"I can’t imagine they’d be so stupid to say that without having any evidence that it’s me."  As he tells it, nobody at New York called him to verify his identity as the person behind the account, "and they are a fact-checking group," he noted, referring to New York's research department. "So I can’t help but think there must be something in the pages.

"As part of the humorous shtick, I can imagine Ruth Bourdain writing in the book, 'Well, I’m Robert Sietsema, of course.' It's in his or her best interests to have me as the cowcatcher on the front of the locomotive. "

When asked what New York thought of Sietsema's denial, The Observer received a terse email from a magazine spokesperson explaining: "This was an editing error." While they did not respond to further questions about how the error came to be, they did note that the mistake would be corrected in the next issue.

"It’s amazing that she’s been able to keep her anonymity for this long," marveled Sietsema.

Indeed, it is: Not only does Ruth Bourdain operate in a relatively small world (the food journalism subculture), but also, has a book coming out, has done press for it, and was even recently handed a James Beard Award for accomplishments in humor. Sietsema also pointed out that Regina Schrambling of Gastropoda has been suspected of being behind the account.

Before him, Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal (who called Ruth Bourdain's identity "perhaps the best kept secret in all of food") once pointed to both food blogger Josh Friedland and Adam Robb—the creator of a fake Twitter for 'Resturant Girl' (aka former Daily News food critic Danyelle Freeman)—of collectively perpetrating Ruth Bourdain on the world. As for whether or not Sietsema would seek any royalties if falsely identified as the identity behind Ruth Bourdain in the book, he explained: that kind of thing just isn't his style.

"It’d be much easier to just step in front of a car."

For the time being, the identity of "Ruth" remains at-large.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Bourdain.

For example...

On Paula Deen

"The worst, most dangerous person to America is clearly Paula Deen. She revels in unholy connections with evil corporations and she’s proud of the fact that her food is bad for you."

On Guy Fieri

"I look at Guy Fieri and I just think, '...I'm glad that's not me.'"

"If I had to be him for five hours, I'd hang myself in a shower stall."

"Anyone who's on TV, if you can’t have a sense of humor about yourself, it's going to be a very tough road. If you can't make fun of Burrell and Fieri, comedy's dead."

On Bobby Flay

"In service to this new, groin-level dynamic, even poor, loyal, Bobby Flay was banished from cooking anywhere near as well as he actually could—to face off with web-fingered yokels in head to head crab cake contests—to almost inevitably (and dubiously) lose...They're sending this poor guy all over the country, to trailer parks and meth labs."

On Sandra Lee

"Pure evil. This frightening Hell Spawn of Kathie Lee and Betty Crocker seems on a mission to kill her fans, one meal at a time. She Must Be Stopped. Her death-dealing can-opening ways will cut a swath of destruction through the world if not contained...The eye-searing 'Kwanzaa Cake' clip on YouTube, of Sandra Lee doing things with store-bought angel food cake, canned frosting, and corn nuts, instead of being simply the unintentionally hilarious viral video it should be, makes me mad for all humanity. I. Just. Can’t. Help. It."

On Bourdain's Brief Time at the Food Network

"I knew there was no light at the end of the tunnel the day we were joined by a new hire—the lawyer and the (it would soon be revealed) outgoing execs stood up and said, "Say hello to Brook Johnson … who we're all delighted to have join us from … (some other network)." Ms. Johnson was clearly not delighted to meet me or my partners. You could feel the air go out of the room the second she entered. It became instantly a place without hope or humor. There was a limp handshake as cabin pressure changed, a black hole of fun—all light, all possibility of joy was sucked into the vortex of this hunched and scowling apparition. The indifference bordering on naked hostility was palpable."

On The Food Network's Programming

"2007 was also the year that Food Network canceled 'Emeril Live,' and stopped ordering episodes of 'Molto Mario,' a calculated break with the idea of the celebrity chef as a seasoned professional and a move toward an entirely new definition: a personality with a sauté pan."

On Scripps' Purchase of the Travel Channel

"I'm definitely taking a wait-and-see [approach]. I'm not happy about sharing a hot tub with Guy Fieri, is what I'm saying."

"Given recent developments, I would say that anything could happen. I'm giving the whole enterprise some serious thought. I know that my crew and I are really into pushing this season as far as we can go creatively. We are doing an entire show in black and white, dubbed in Italian."

From Bourdain's 2010 memoir, Medium Raw:

""It's Sandra Lee's world. It's Rachael's world. Me? You? We're just living in it. If this wasn't clear to me then, after Aunt Sandy had turned me inside out, left me shaken and husked, a shell of a man—like the remains of a lobster dinner, it became absolutely clear just last week: When Scripps Howard, the parent company of Food Network, outbidding Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, bought my network, the Travel Channel—for nearly a billion dollars.

I remember now, from a distance, my earlier, dumber self, watching Emeril, hawking toothpaste (and later, Rachael, endorsing Dunkin' Donuts and Ritz Crackers) and gaping, uncomprehending at the screen, wondering, 'Why would anybody making the millions and millions of bucks these guys are making endorse some crap for a few million more? I mean … surely there's some embarrassment to putting your face next to Dunkin' Donuts—what with so many kids watching your shows—and Type 2 diabetes exploding like it is … Surely there's a line for these people, right?'"

It is safe to say this may have been in the works from quite some time. Like, since the day Scripps purchased Bourdain's network. He may have found more liberal masters in CNN (the same network that decided to make a disgraced governor a television host and that made an attempt at syndicating VICE video clips two years ago). Here's hoping they show him and his crew that kind of liberal approach to television.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Mr. Bourdain, who recently signed famed Olive Garden reviewer Marilyn Hagerty to his publishing imprint, expressed dismay at not being able to sign Eddie Huang to his own imprint for our piece. While there's only so much wordage room in one profile, given the wealth of quotables we received from Bourdain, some things are just too good for the cutting room floor. The interview, in full:

How did you initially become acquainted with Eddie?
I was reading about him for a while. I started following his amazing blog, became a fan as well of his after-action reports on The Next Iron Chef, which were hilarious. And then it wasn’t long before we realized we had mutual friends. But honestly, it was his writing that—long before I met him, which was actually on my show, when I ate at BaoHaus for the first time—I was really a fan of his writing, and his merciless wit. I’m heartbroken that I didn’t have my imprint up-and-running in time to publish him.

And what was it you found so compelling about his writing?
Some of the stuff he’s written about Asian identity, and his mom, and growing up Asian-American, I thought was really powerful. Here’s a guy with a voice saying things that to a great extent haven’t been said before. That made a powerful impression on me early. And then, I just love that: Here’s a guy on his way to getting a show on Cooking Channel, and [laughs] he’s out there just mercilessly beating up on their stable of stars. He had a shamefully rough time [at the South Beach Food & Wine Festival] in Miami....

We actually heard something like that as we—...
...If you’re walking around with bleached hair, dressed up like a rodeo clown, you should have a fuckin’ sense of humor about yourself. You know, I don’t get it. Anyone who’s on TV, if you can’t have a sense of humor about yourself, it’s going to be a very tough road. If you can’t make fun of Burrell and Fieri, comedy’s dead.

As Eddie told it, when they were in Miami, Anne Burrell elbowed him in the back.
What? Wait, really?

[Ed. From an earlier interview with Eddie: "I went to South Beach Food and Wine [Festival] and I’m there waiting for a hamburger at the 212 House and Anne Burrell comes up behind me, elbows me in the back. I turn around, just looking, and she goes, ‘Oh, excuse me, I’m sorry. Did I just do that?’ and I told her—exact words—I said, ‘Anne, you need to let this go, ‘cause it’s only going to get worse for you.’" When asked for comment on this story, a representative for Burell noted: "Anne is unavailable for comment at this time."]

So the story goes. They were waiting in line for burgers...
I like Anne. That’s just no way to go, though. Eddie’s smart, he’s funny, he’s fast, and that’s not an enemy you want to have.

What do you make of Eddie Huang, chef, or Eddie Huang, restauranteur?
I don’t know Eddie the cook, and I don’t really know Eddie the restaurateur. It seems to me a smart operation with tasty little pork buns. Great. I definitely recognize in his criticism of Next Iron Chef, as hilarious as it was, it was pretty goddamn astute!

Fundamentally sound?
It was fundamentally sound, though scabrously, insultingly, witheringly funny. The guy obviously spends a lot of time immersed in pop culture, but honestly, I think those are deep waters. I see a guy who’s probably had a lot of pain in his life, and there’s a pain and discomfort in what he writes about. I don’t even know how to address it!

Here’s a guy less and less unusual these days in the respect that he’s clearly not done what his parents wanted him to do, who’s broken the pattern of what’s expected of him, and with that there’s come some guilt there, some discomfort there, there’s a lot of anger there, and as so often happens, a very funny guy there. A very very sharp, funny guy there with a lot to say. Important stuff to say. And a guy with a vocabulary like that, who’s that fast, and that funny, that’s a dangerous entity to have. Especially in a target-rich environment like the Cooking Channel [laughs].

So what are his odds of success at a place like that?
My experience, having toiled in the same fields, is that you have to establish up front what you are and are not willing to do. When I was at Food Network, it helped me a lot that I’d written this obnoxious book, and my feelings about the network were already a matter of public record, so I don’t think anyone expected me to morph into another creature, and I made it very clear—very quickly—that...that just wasn’t going to happen. I think he’s in a position to do that same thing, in a sense.

But would they steamroll him creatively before he could do that? Or force him to acquiesce to their brand first and foremost?
Networks have been looking for someone like him forever, they just tend to get scared when they actually find someone. You know: 'We want someone proactive, and who appeals to a younger demographic, and somehow hip, someone edgy!' And when they get someone like that, it scares the shit out of them, and they think: Gee, not that edgy. But if he rates, he’ll be able to do whatever the hell he wants. As long as he’s getting ratings, they’re going to have to eat it.

What do you think Eddie represents to the industrial-food-celebrity complex? Or the food world at large?
I think he’s bigger than food. I’m looking at the guy as a writer, and an interesting guy with a story to tell, and who’s telling it in an interesting voice. I see him as someone with something to say. Whether he’s using food or not to say it, it’s not about his cooking.

He actually said something to that extent: He used food as a way to get into a position where he could speak freely and be taken seriously, as an Asian-American man.
I’m surprised that—I find it really interesting that he’d say that. He clearly has some really interesting and often uncomfortable things that he wants to say, and I’m really interested in hearing them.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Eddie Huang, the gleefully iconoclastic chef-cum-troublemaker, was in a back room at the Ace Hotel, remembering high school. He'd just finished serving as the host of a Jeremy Lin viewing party for a crowd of the chef's friends and "three random girls from Twitter." The wax-paper wrapped bao—the signature Asian bun sandwiches that have been drawing crowds to his restaurant, Baohaus, since December 2009—were long since emptied of their pork-packed glories. The Knicks had fallen to the New Jersey Nets. And Mr. Huang was in a reflective mood. 

Earlier that day, he had published a post on his blog, Fresh Off the Boat. The post examined the spectacle of an Asian-American like Mr. Lin exploding as a pop-culture force. It was a cutting, personal indictment of stereotypes and racism. By that evening, it had racked up over 32,000 unique views.

"It was mainly Asian kids that really hated on me," he remembered. "They thought that there was one face to being Asian, and I was different."

Mr. Huang was wearing a hybrid of high fashion and streetwear. The look was finished with large glasses not unlike the kind made popular by Kim Jong-Il, giving him the appearance of the lost Beastie Boy who'd finally taken Pyongyang.

If Mr. Huang has made a splash with his reinventions of quick-serve, high-end Asian eats, he is perhaps better known for his outspokenness. In a way, he admitted, cooking has always been more of a means than an end for him. "I went into the food world because I realized that no other place in America would let me break through and speak the way I speak. They will listen to us"—he pointed to himself, meaning, Asian-Americans—"because they want Combo Number Five. You know what I mean? We're cute. We're Hello Kitty-like."

Mr. Huang noted that Asian stereotypes were a double-edged sword. "At the end of the day, people would rather put me in a conference room"—sitting in on a business meeting—"than one of the dudes who works for me from LeFrak City, just because of the way I look and the way I smile," he said. "I recognize that it's an advantage. But it's also a disadvantage."

He laughed, adding, "No matter what I do, people will be like, 'He's cute. That dude is like Keroppi.'"

Of course, Sanrio's cross-eyed amphibian is internationally famous, and Mr. Huang is still just a local celebrity. But that might all be about to change. On the horizon for Mr. Huang—who before opening his own restaurant had stints as a streetwear retailer, a journalist, a weed dealer, a stand-up comic and an attorney—is a memoir and a television show.

"There's a lot of good things in place," Mr. Huang told The Observer. "The show, the book—those things are gonna happen. It's just like: Don't fuck it up Eddie. Do not. Fuck. This. Up."

IN MARCH, while negotiations were underway with the Cooking Channel—the Food Network's younger spin-off—over the fate of Mr. Huang's first national TV show, he took to Twitter to verbally fricassee one of the company's top celebrities, Anne Burrell.

After the frosty-haired host of Worst Cooks in America, Secrets of a Restaurant Chef and The Next Iron Chef derided him to another chef, Mr. Huang fired back: "you host WORST COOKS IN AMERICA, dress like Guy Fieri, and snitch to networks when you're not happy. i tell it like it is." And yes, Mr. Fieri is also a major Food Network star.

Mr. Huang admitted that network executives were not especially appreciative of his particular preparation of beef.

"They were pissed," he said.

As a negotiating tactic, trashing your would-be colleagues seems counterintuitive, but Mr. Huang can't seem to help himself. "I just love that," laughed his friend and mentor Anthony Bourdain. "Here's a guy on his way to getting a show on the Cooking Channel, and he's out there just mercilessly beating up on their stable of stars," he chuckled. "A guy with a vocabulary like that, who's that fast, and that funny? That's a dangerous entity to have. Especially in a target-rich environment like the Cooking Channel."

Mr. Bourdain, the bad boy former chef, author of Kitchen Confidential and Travel Channel regular, recently started his own literary imprint at Harper Collins. "I'm heartbroken that I didn't have my imprint up and running in time to publish him," he noted of Eddie's forthcoming book with Random House, which (Mr. Huang explained with unrestrained glee) is being edited by Chris Jackson, who also edited Jay-Z's memoir Decoded.

He was effusive in praise for Mr. Huang when explaining his appeal: "Here's someone less and less unusual these days in the respect that he’s clearly not done what his parents wanted him to do, who's broken the pattern of what's expected of him, and with that there’s come some guilt there, some discomfort there."

"There’s a lot of anger there, and as so often happens, a very very sharp, funny guy there with a lot to say." Mr. Bourdain finished: "Important stuff to say."

A few weeks later—just days after his 30th birthday (the party, at Southside, featured a "dream" performance by Prodigy, of the seminal rap group Mobb Deep)—Mr. Huang explained his Cooking Channel dilemma over a late lunch in Fort Greene.

He talked about weighing two alternative routes to video stardom: his planned basic cable show versus a project to be produced and distributed independently online. Despite the recent publication of a press release by the channel's parent company heralding Mr. Huang's arrival, his contract had not actually been signed yet. By him.

Mr. Huang declined to discuss the nuances of the deal, but it seemed clear that joining an established network would mean sheathing his paring knife, learning to be a team player, going along to get along.

"They told me straight up: 'Look, you can't make fun of anyone on this network anymore,'" he recalled. "'They're all family. You're part of the family now.'" At this, he threw his hands up. "I was like, 'I didn't choose to be part of this family.' Like, 'You're buying a show, I'm fulfilling my services on the show.'"

Or as Mr. Bourdain put it, "If you can't make fun of Anne Burrell and Guy Fieri, comedy's dead."

"Networks are always looking for something "edgy," he added, but when they actually get it, "it scares the shit out of them, and they think: Gee, not that edgy."

THE ELDEST of three brothers, Mr. Huang grew up in Orlando, Fla. His mother was just out of high school when she met his father, now a restaurateur whom Mr. Huang said had been affiliated with a Taiwanese street gang. "He ran shit," Mr. Huang said.

Eventually, the elder Mr. Huang settled with his brother in Washington, D.C., where he met Eddie's mother, who became pregnant with Eddie—the first of the three Huang boys—in college. The family then relocated to Orlando, where they ended up launching a steakhouse called Cattleman's, and the Black Olive, a Mediterranean restaurant—where Eddie and his two brothers were exposed to the business at an early age.

Still, the Huangs pushed their sons toward academics. "They wanted us to be straight-laced and overachieving," remembered Mr. Huang's 24-year-old brother, Evan, who in addition to living with Eddie in StuyTown, is a co-owner of Baohaus.

While Mr. Huang was a decent student ("B average-ish") he had a tendency to get into trouble. In high school, someone broke his middle brother Emery's nose, so Eddie earned his first assault charge for fighting. The second came when he was a film and English major at Orlando's Rollins College. He was then making extra money by selling weed, and he got into a fight with some fraternity types. The two offenses earned him felony probation.

Forced to clean up his act, Mr. Huang threw himself into his schoolwork, winning departmental awards in African-American and feminist studies, and trying his hand at sports journalism, penning an article on the Malice at the Palace for the Orlando Sentinal.

After the piece ran, Mr. Huang said, an editor called him in to interview for a job as a basketball beat writer. "The first thing the guy said to me was: 'Oh, no one's gonna talk to you with that face.' Those exact words. Not, 'Hi, hello.' And he caught himself: 'No, not like that—your age.'"

"But I knew what he meant. I knew exactly what he meant."

In early 2005, Mr. Huang enrolled in law school at Cardozo in Manhattan. While there, he maintained a number of side-jobs: He printed his own tees and hawked them online. He became friendly with 50 Cent affiliate and G-Unit member DJ Whoo-Kid, and began promoting parties for him. He took freelance writing jobs with XXL, Rotowire, NBA.com, and Law.com. He also continued selling marijuana, though "not, like, serious weight," he noted.

In September 2008, Mr. Huang was hired as an associate at white-shoe law firm Chadbourne and Park. The economy tanked immediately thereafter. On March 10, 2009, on what Mr. Huang described as "one of the best days of my life," he was laid off. He tried his hand at stand-up comedy, hosting open mic nights, but soon sensed he wasn't gaining traction. What did seem to be winning him fans was the food he often brought along for club owners and fellow comics.

After answering a Craigslist post, he landed a spot on the Guy Fieri-hosted Ultimate Recipe Showdown. He lost the competition, but by the time he went home for the holidays in 2009, plans for Baohaus were well underway.

Mr. Huang's parents, already unhappy with their son's rudderless streak, offered no financial help with the restaurant. The relationship worsened when Eddie managed to get Evan—then a single semester away from graduating college in Orlando—to join him in his new endeavor. "'My parents hated Eddie for a while," Evan laughed. "They thought he was going to ruin my future."

But Baohaus was a hit. So much so that barely half a year later, Mr. Huang decided to open another restaurant on the Lower East Side, Xiao Ye, in July 2010. Whereas Baohaus was a tiny, counter-based quick-serve restaurant, Xiao Ye typified the middle-class family restaurants his parents had run. Without the family part.

Hip-hop blasted from the speakers. A sign painted above the kitchen door screamed: "DERICIOUS." The menu read like any TigerMom's worst nightmare: "Cheeto Fried Chicken," "General Poke-Her-Face Prawns," "Robster Rice" and "Poontang Pot Stickers" were signature dishes. Only three months after opening, the restaurant earned a New York Times review.

In it, Sam Sifton slammed Xiao Ye as an "artful misfire," calling the food "dishonest" and finishing things off with a goose-egg. The review also noted the potential the place had "if Mr. Huang spent even a third of the time cooking that he does writing funny blog posts."

Oftentimes, restaurant owners respond to a bad review by taking up arms in the press against the critic in question. Mr. Huang took a different tack: wholeheartedly agreeing with Mr. Sifton, and posting a hysterically withering email from his mother, encouraging him to keep his law license active so he could potentially go back to being a lawyer.

"YOU MUST GET BURNT BEFORE YOU WILL HEAR YOUR MOM," she wrote. "You have a lot of potential, but you must make good choice and stick to it with the best choice. With all the staff, and your korean friend, no one was able to point out or warn you the mistakes, or problems you have???????????????????"

"I didn't want to do shitty food on purpose," he explained. "I wanted to just wild out, and do really dumb shit in an artful way."

He added that part of the original vision was that "customers could come in every night and know that it was going to be fun." That part, he definitely managed. That summer, a caffeinated malt liquor drink called Four Loko began to gain popularity. Senator Charles Schumer launched a war on the beverage, and Mr. Huang saw an opening. He changed his Twitter handle to "General Loko" and instituted an all-you-can-drink Four Loko dinner. After the plan was deemed illicit, he tacked on $3 per can charge. According to his tweets the morning after, the dinner was a great success.

But that night, the State Liquor Authority raided Xiao Ye and destroyed all the Four Loko. Over the next few weeks, the restaurant was raided by the SLA on three separate occasions after citations for serving underage drinkers (in the form of undercover SLA agents). Under threat of losing his liquor license—which would have made selling the space more difficult—Mr. Huang and his partners shut Xiao Ye down.

Reflecting on the failure, Evan is philosophical. "Xiao Ye was definitely Eddie trying to prove something," he said. "And he didn't fully prove it, but he learned a lot."

IN JULY, a second Baohaus was opened on 14th Street. On a recent Friday night, a line snaked around the door as Ol' Dirty Bastard's "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" pumped through the restaurant.

Mr. Huang has collaborated on a few one-off Chinese New Year's dinners, one of which received a glowing review from Mr. Sifton. Plans to open other Baohaus locations are in the works. And the book deal—which Eddie considers the best thing he's ever done with his life—has been signed.

Though he eventually wants to open another sit-down restaurant, he noted, "I don't have a plan. I hope people don't get upset that cooking is just one thing that I'm into."

Just a few weeks after our lunch, Mr. Huang was sitting in the lobby of the Museum of Chinese in America, having delivered a speech on the topic of whether Asians are black or not. Later, sitting with The Observer in the lobby, he was still mulling over the contract from the Cooking Channel.

He wanted success, but at what price? After all, it was the unfiltered Eddie Huang—self-destructive fuck-up, unlikely feminist, reluctant chef, crack-up, class clown and social equality advocate—who got him so far in the first place. Would those ingredients work any other preparation but his own?

A few days later, he made it clear where he stood, while DJing music on an Internet radio station. "My next song is for Anne Burrell and Guy Fieri," he wrote, tweeting out the link to a YouTube page. Those who clicked through found a G-Unit video: "I Smell Pussy."

The contract has yet to be signed, and negotiations are still ongoing.

During our interview, Mr. Huang recalled the posters he put up in his room as a child: Basketball players like Allen Iverson and Charles Barkley.

"There were no posters I could buy of Asian people besides Bruce Lee. And—I mean, no one's ever going to put up a poster of me, but I hope that, to some kid"—he paused, looking up. "I get emails from Asian kids, and it means the world to me, that they're like: Yo man, you're doing your thing, you're saying what I want to say, and you make me feel like I can walk around with my head up.

"People have sent me emails like that," he grinned. "I won."

[Illustration by Drew Friedman. Photo by Steven Lau.]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

*Editor's Note: In October 2012, Eddie Huang's show—Fresh Off The Boat—was announced by VICE Media. The planned show with the Cooking Channel and Scripps never materialized.

(Illustration by Drew Friedman)

Anthony Bourdain knows how he can come off. The chef-turned-TV personality has written that it would be “entirely fair and appropriate” were he described as “a loud, egotistical, one-note asshole who’s been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious, over-testosteroned book for way too long and who should just shut the fuck up.” But it takes only one meeting with Mr. Bourdain—the man who likes to pepper his prose with words like “fucktard” and who made “bad boy chef” a resplendent cliché—to reveal that he is a perfect gentleman.

Get his friends to start talking about him and it becomes very clear that if Mr. Bourdain wants to preserve his louche reputation, he should probably engineer another appearance on TMZ, “running buck-naked down some Milwaukee street with a helmet made from the stretched skin of a butchered terrier pulled down over my ears” (as he once envisioned it).

Instead, Mr. Bourdain—who has long suppressed his inner nerd—has recently been tapped to start an eponymous line of books at the HarperCollins imprint Ecco.

“He loves literature and he’s a huge reader,” said his publisher, Dan Halpern.

“He spends so much of his time shining light on other people,” said food writer Peter Meehan.

“He’s a sweet, sweet, loyal wonderful man,” said Karen Rinaldi, who edited Mr. Bourdain’s breakout book, Kitchen Confidential. “It’s all the 60- and 70-year-old women who love him the best. They all want to adopt him.”

A little more than a decade ago, Anthony Bourdain was a 44-year-old chef at the middle-of-the-road French bistro Les Halles. He worked 12 to 14 hours a day. He had never had health insurance or owned a car, and rarely paid his rent on time. He owed a decade’s worth of back taxes and credit card bills. Sometimes he wrote things, like two mystery novels in the mid-1990s that had promptly bombed. He didn’t quit his day job. Instead, he wrote an article for Sam Sifton, now the national editor of The New York Times but at the time an editor at the shambolic alt-weekly The New York Press. The article was about working in a kitchen.

“Because they were free, I figured their standards were low enough to print it,” Mr. Bourdain recently recalled over a midday pint of Dogfish Head ale at Cafe D’Alsace on the Upper East Side. It turned out otherwise. “Sifton was my editor and couldn’t get the piece in. He kept getting bumped, week after week. I was getting bitter and frustrated with it and of course working full time, so it wasn’t like I was working on the great American novel. I’d pretty much given up any notion of being a writer.”

Or so he says. But before giving up entirely he sent the article to The New Yorker. “Amazingly enough they called me back a few weeks later, said they were going to run it and then they ran it.”

When the article appeared, under the headline “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” Mr. Bourdain was in Japan helping organize the Tokyo outpost of Les Halles. He emailed dispatches about his experiences there to his friend, the novelist Joel Rose. After reading the colorful missives and The New Yorker article, Mr. Rose thought that there might be something there for his wife, Karen Rinaldi, then editorial director at Bloomsbury USA, to make a book out of.

“Karen had just had our first son, Rocco, and she was totally overwhelmed and in heaven,” recalled Mr. Rose. “She was sitting on the floor of our apartment nursing the baby and I said you have to read this email.” Ms. Rinaldi was not exactly eager, but she consented.

“It was 6 a.m. and I was up with my very, very young son,” said Ms. Rinaldi. “I remember sitting on the floor and reading it and I was like, ‘Whoa.’” Then she called Mr. Bourdain’s agent, Kim Witherspoon, with a proposal. “I said, ‘I will give Tony an advance of X amount of dollars to write a nonfiction book. I don’t even care what it is. We can talk about it when he gets back from Japan.’”

He accepted. When he came back to New York, Ms. Rinaldi and Mr. Bourdain met at a bar.

“So what do you want to write?” she asked him.

Since Kitchen Confidential debuted on the best-seller list in 2000, Mr. Bourdain has had a remarkable trajectory. “I figured, how many years have I got cooking? If the thing doesn’t lose money maybe I have a crack at doing another book someday when my knees go,” Mr. Bourdain remembered. Today, of course, there are the television shows—No Reservations on the Travel Channel, appearances as a judge on Top Chef on Bravo and a new show coming out this month, also on the Travel Channel, called The Layover, where Mr. Bourdain goes to cities with massive international airports and grazes the local cuisine.

There are the many subsequent books, including the best-selling Medium Raw, a third crime novel and an unexpected history of Typhoid Mary. There’s the graphic novel, Get Jiro, co-written with Mr. Rose with art by Langdon Foss, that will be coming out next year on DC Comics imprint Vertigo.

Mr. Bourdain also writes for David Simon’s HBO show Treme, embellishing the story line of the show’s chef character, Janette Desautel, who moves to New York to hang out with Mr. Bourdain’s friends after her restaurant in New Orleans is forced to close. He estimates he gives 30 or 40 lectures a year, sometimes tag-teaming with Eric Ripert, the Gallic dreamboat at the helm of seafood temple Le Bernardin.

He has married and has a young daughter. He’s working on another crime novel, and writes a film column for the David Chang/Peter Meehan/McSweeney’s new food magazine Lucky Peach. He’s having, in sum, what he calls his “second childhood in his 50s.”

It’s funny, then, that a lot of what’s motivated him is guilt.

“I bounced around my whole life,” he said. “I did nothing. At 44 I suddenly started getting opportunities and year after year I’m presented with, I mean, not necessarily spectacularly lucrative things, but who wouldn’t do a really cool comic book if they could? Who wouldn’t write for David Simon, like go play with David Simon?”

While he is the first to admit that he has been far more successful as a writer than he was as a chef, and that he quit cooking as soon as Kitchen Confidential took off, Mr. Bourdain still expresses discomfort with his status as a man of letters.

Bourdain.

“In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations as if I were writing although I wasn’t actually doing any writing,” he said. “I think I was intoxicated with Burroughs and Hunter Thompson and figured that if I did enough drugs it would lead directly to great works. I never got around to writing those.” And then he fell into the restaurant business. A common refrain from Mr. Bourdain, one that almost feels like an insistence, is that most of his friends are chefs and he does not socialize with writers. It’s the legacy, perhaps, of years in a career where, as Mr. Bourdain put it, “it’s a liability to talk too smart.” But his writer friends disagree.

“He was always a writer,” said Joel Rose, who published something Mr. Bourdain wrote about methadone in the early 1980s in a literary magazine he ran called Between C and D. (Mr. Bourdain described the magazine as an “alternative independent publication that came in a plastic bag like heroin.”) And after reading a New York magazine profile of the editor Gordon Lish at some point in the 1980s, Mr. Bourdain even signed up for a writing workshop, going up to Columbia one day in his dirty kitchen whites after working lunch to apply through the School of General Studies.

“It was very cultlike. You didn’t even go for a piss. You sat there and listened to the great man,” Mr. Bourdain remembered about the class. “You had to read aloud and only as far as he could bear it, which was usually about a sentence and half before he’d go, ‘Oh, it’s horrible, I can’t stand it, stop, stop,’ at which point everyone in the class would tell you what sucked about it.”

His first novel, Bone in the Throat, which was acquired by editor David Rosenthal, then at Villard, he describes as the result of a lucky break. “I was working at a Mexican restaurant I think and my old college roommate had apparently had some kind of licensing deal with David and bragged to him at a party that ‘I know better writers than the shit you’re doing,” he said. “David said something like, ‘Prove it, smart guy,’ and my old roommate of course didn’t know any writers, had no clue what he was talking about and, desperate to not look like a jerk, thought of me because I’d written some of his papers in college. He essentially bribed me into writing a 100-page teaser for Rosenthal, who immediately commissioned one and then two books.”

“He told me he had this friend, Tony, who he had gone to college with, and Tony had this book and would I took a look at it,” was Mr. Rosenthal’s recollection of Mr. Bourdain’s college roommate. The books did not sell very well at first printing, but they have had a second wave post-Kitchen Confidential. “They were very charming, they were humorous mysteries and they were witty as well,” said Mr. Rosenthal.

“What happens in books and writing is that it’s so rare that you find someone with a vocation that’s as good at their vocation as they are at writing,” said Ms. Rinaldi. “I’m dying to find the firefighter who can do that,” she added.

If Mr. Bourdain’s bread and butter is, well, bread and butter, that does not mean he is limited to it. Asked what he has read lately, he rattles off an unpredictable catalog: Robert Fisk’s The Great Struggle for Civilization, Daniel Woodrell’s forthcoming novel Tomato Red, Daniel Alarcón’s Lost City Radio and the Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes’s novel about the war for Angolan independence, The Land at the End of the World. In preparation for a trip to the Balkans he said he reread Rebecca West’s 1,200-page Balkan history cum travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

“To me he’d just been a guy who had been a chef who can write the hell out of a kitchen, but he’s a lot more than that,” said Mr. Simon.

He recalled a recent dinner out with Mr. Bourdain at August, in New Orleans. “I’m being amuse-bouched to death,” he said, describing a common hazard of eating out with a well-known chef. “The food we ordered hasn’t even come to the table and I’m already dying.”

Mr. Bourdain asked Mr. Simon what else he was working on and the two started discussing a project about the history of the C.I.A. that Mr. Simon is developing.

“I think it’s just table conversation,” said Mr. Simon. “He said, ‘So, you’re doing the Gehlen group.’ I said, ‘Yeah, we’re doing all of that. How do you know about that?’”

“So we started going deeper,” Mr. Simon continued. “It turned out he’s read everything and knows it like the back of his hand.”

After dinner Mr. Simon called his writing partner, Ed Burns, and told him he had a new writer for the show. “He said, ‘Who?’” said Mr. Simon. “‘The food guy?’” He laughed. “The guy’s an autodidact. He’s read everything and he can write,” he said. “But on paper it’s like, yeah, food guy. And part-time C.I.A. expert.”

The new imprint will reflect Mr. Bourdain’s eclectic tastes. While there will be a heavy focus on food, he said that he is also interested in crime writing, poetry, essayists, rock ’n’ roll memoirs and other kinds of books.

The idea of recruiting a celebrity editor to help consult for an imprint is nothing new: Random House has former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham and former Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl; Faber and Faber has the musician Jarvis Cocker; Crown has Deepak Chopra. (And of course, Jackie O. spent years as an editor at Doubleday.) Unlike in most of the recent cases, however, Mr. Bourdain has already been serving in the role informally, having had direct responsibility for the American publication of British chef Fergus Henderson’s The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating and a $350 Ferran Adria cookbook.

“I’m evangelical on the subject of some chefs and writers,” Mr. Bourdain admitted. “I don’t know if I’d call it a mission but I get off doing it.”

“He basically said ‘Publish these fucking books,’” said Mr. Halpern of Ecco, which published the paperback of Kitchen Confidential and many of Mr. Bourdain’s subsequent books. “It took me a while with Ferran and Fergus but eventually I saw the light.” He also scored nigh-impossible-to-get dinner reservations at El Bulli.

Mr. Halpern said that currently under consideration for the imprint are some pamphletlike books on Michel Montaigne’s essays and possibly a barbecue book, and that Mr. Bourdain “has got martial artists.”

As for the testosterone-infused prose with which he made his name back in Kitchen Confidential, Mr. Bourdain suggests he might have changed. I’d like to think that the other stuff I write is a lot more reflective,” he said. “And a lot more neurotic.”

ewitt@observer

We look forward to publishing an unusual mix of new authors, existing works, neglected or under-appreciated masterworks, and translations of people from elsewhere who we think are just too damned brilliant not to be available in English.  We're presently looking at an initial list composed of chefs, enthusiasts, fighters, musicians and dead essayists.

Fighters! Musicians! Dead essayists! Mr. Bourdain is not the only culinary consultant in New York publishing. Ruth Reichl, cookbook author, composer of sensuous food poems on Twitter and the former editor of Gourmet, has a consulting editor position with Random House.

"Ironically, my first memory of food is a pretty painful one," Ms. Ray responded. "I was trying to mimic my mother. … I wasn't even high enough to see the top of a huge restaurant griddle, and I grilled my thumb. My whole thumb is pretty much dead to the touch," she said, wiggling it for effect. Yikes—an inauspicious start for a kitchen careerist! "You would think that would scare me away from the stove, but I got over it," she said with a laugh.

Queer Eye dining guy–turned–Food Detective Ted Allen had a much less scarring story to relate: He said he realized he was a foodie in the dining room of the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago, back when it was under the stewardship of Chef Sara Stegner. "It was the first time I ever had a Sauterne dessert wine with chocolate cake. And the idea that a golden-colored white wine could complement something as rich and intense as chocolate, it was like lightbulbs and bells and stars and whistles," Mr. Allen said.

Stanley Tucci and Anthony Bourdain wandered by, but we were deep in conversation with Mr. Allen, who also recommended an underrated restaurant near his home in Clinton Hill: Locanda Vini E Olii. "It's in an old 1800s drugstore and they kept all the fixtures from the drugstore," he explained. "They've been there for like 12 years, long before the neighborhood gentrified. So if you want an experience … Their house wine comes in carafes, and the way they decide how much to charge you is they put a stick in it after you're done, to see how much you've drunk." Just like Mom used to do.

Emeril Lagasse, who was honored at the event for his support of the Food Bank, was in a rather serious mood. Asked whether he thought New Yorkers need to worry about this tomato shortage we've been hearing about, Mr. Lagasse launched into a technical analysis of oxygen and rainfall levels that lost us about halfway through. (Apparently, the tomatoes are going to be okay … we think.) We also asked whether he had any good kitchen-disaster stories—a dish that didn't go off quite as planned, perhaps? "We suffered a pretty major disaster with Hurricane Katrina, so I think that was enough of a disaster for a while," Mr. Lagasse replied. We felt appropriately guilty for the rest of the night.

Ms. Streep looked years younger than her character in a chic blazer over a white blouse, with her hair tied back in a simple ponytail. Ms. Adams was glam in a floor-length gray and white halter dress.

Director Nora Ephron said, “Unlike most romantic comedies, which are about people falling in love, this is about people who are already in love.” When asked who she thought should take over Frank Bruni’s spot as food critic at The Times, Ms. Ephron replied, “Maybe Meryl should do it!”

“If anyone can look like they know how to cook, it’s Meryl Streep,” said chef Anthony Bourdain.

“I am so excited about Meryl Streep, I can’t even think!” said guidebook mogul Tim Zagat. “I was once working for a company that owned Paramount, and Meryl was in a movie, and they said, ‘You’ve got to come down.’ I didn’t know she was there, and I sat down and I realized I was sitting next to her. I couldn’t remember anything after.”

Patrick Martin, executive chef of the Cordon Bleu, mused about how Ms. Child would fare in today’s competitive kitchens: “At the Cordon Bleu, Julia learned a lot of things in terms of techniques—if she was here today, she would have the same talent! Things change, food changes, but not Julia!”

The Transom also caught up with Top Chef Masters host Kelli Choi, who said the celebrity she’d most like to see in a kitchen is “President Obama! If he was cooking up a burger or something—I think he’s really into food.”

“You’re on the wrong side!” someone shouted at Martha Stewart, who stood behind the press to get a picture of her friends strolling down the carpet. “I know! I’m blogging!” she shouted back, snapping pictures of Atlantic Monthly food writer Corby Kummer.

Actor and comic genius Bob Balaban, meanwhile, discussed the perils of eating on film. “In a movie, they show you taking one bite, but you ended up taking 150 bites!” he said. “You have rehearsal, there are 15 angles, you have to eat a lot!” Mr. Balaban, who has a few dietary restrictions (“I don’t eat meat, I don’t eat dessert, particularly—I don’t eat butter, cream or cheese. It’s impossible to feed me!”), said cooking at home can be difficult.

Luckily, he added, “My wife is a really, really good cook!”

The three Americans who were freed recently from a leftist guerilla organization in the jungles of Colombia traveled home to Florida for the first time in more than five years on Saturday after undergoing 10 days of treatment in an Army medical center in Houston. Their highly publicized rescue by the Colombian military on July 2 served as a reminder that the large South American nation still has lots of problems, like political strife, a slowing economy, poverty, crime and drugs. (Did you see that VBS.tv documentary on Colombian scopolamine? Scary!) But tonight, Anthony Bourdain focuses on the brighter side of Colombian culture in the latest installment of No Reservations. In fact, Mr. Bourdain was apparently so taken with the country that he described it as a “Vacation Wonderland.” He wrote on his blog:

So are things really looking up for Colombia? Tune in to the Travel Channel tonight at 10 p.m. and see for yourself. Otherwise, the History Channel will make you feel a little better about that one really bad tattoo you wish you’d never gotten with its two hour special Ancient Ink, which looks at tattooing through the centuries from the aborigines of Maori to Thai monks to New York’s vampire clubs. (9 p.m.)

TUESDAY

It looks like the educational networks are your best bet again. At 10 p.m., National Geographic Channel’s five-part mini-series, Earth: The Biography, concludes with the episode “Rare Planet,” which pretty much seems to be about how humans have ruined the environment. And at 9 on Discovery Channel, the seafaring crabbers of Deadliest Catch battle Arctic ice and “Bering Sea dementia.”

WEDNESDAY

Tonight is a sad night for Bravo. It’s the last time a new season of the Emmy-nominated reality series Project Runway will debut on the channel before moving to its new home, the considerably less hip women’s network, Lifetime. As Gawker and other publications noted last week, Bravo’s been a bit elusive in terms of promoting the new cast. Unlike with past seasons, publicity has been minimal—Bravo just started airing commercials in recent days, and even those have only featured previous cast members—which is odd considering Project Runway is its most popular show. So is the network bitter about losing it to Lifetime? Or are the new designers total duds? In either case, it seems like a pretty anti-climactic auf wiedersehen for the show, which has moved to the 9 p.m. time slot. Sigh.

THURSDAY

As far as low-end beers go, you can’t go wrong with Budweiser. And we don’t mean Budweiser Select, or Bud Lime or—shudder!—Bud Ice. We’re talking about a good, old-fashioned bottle of the King of Beers. But how has Budweiser remained at the top of the brewing industry after losing market share yet gaining competition from the snobby craft/microbrew scene? CNBC has the answer tonight at 9 p.m. with American Originals: Budweiser. U-S-A! But if you want to make it a sober night, the original summer blockbuster, Jaws, is on AMC at 8. Also at 8, G4 has a preview of the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight.

FRIDAY

Sometimes after a long, hard week of work, there’s nothing better than coming home, plopping yourself down on the couch, and lazing out with a few back to back episodes of Law & Order: SVU that you’ve probably already seen 27 times (USA, 6-9 p.m.).

Paint Chips

Inside a building of high-end duplexes and spacious lofts, a 16-month tenant war has raged. But these are not the cruel and usual machinations of an Upper East Side co-op. This is Williamsburg.

“It really is,” said a resident, Iris Dauber-Elbaz, “a conflict of too many creative people.”

“It’s like the Bloods and the Crips—except it’s the Teals and the Dark Charcoals,” said her neighbor, Nancy Rielle.

“I don’t like these New York stories,” said another resident, Monroe Denton. “But they’re very New York.”

The battle, over the color of the common side of each apartment’s door and its frame, is pitched between the owners of the 11 condos on the third floor of the former Esquire Shoe Polish factory, on Wythe Avenue between South First and South Second streets.

In March 2005, the Esquire building’s board decreed that each floor would be allowed to choose the exterior colors of their doors, as well as each door’s jambs, lintel and sill.

So far, of the seven condo floors, only the sixth floor has come to a consensus. But no other floor has battled like the third.

“They get the prize,” said Stephanie Eisenberg, the building’s developer, of the third floor. “One lady called me and said, ‘You have to stop this. I can’t get home every night to a note under my door.”

“This is part of the problem,” Ms. Rielle said. “Most people on this floor are somehow involved in the visual arts, so everyone has a feeling about color, you know, one way or the other. You know, there’s a filmmaker, an art historian and a collector, an artist—well, she’s a dancer, but you know—Gillian does design, the other two were journalists, and an architect, and then other people are photographers.”

On March 30 of last year, just after the board’s green light, Ms. Rielle slipped a memo under the door of each third-floor resident: “RE: Door/Trim Color Scheme For Our Floor.”

Her note suggested a two-part plan. First, she thought that people interested in proposing a new color scheme should paint a “large area” of their “door and/or door trim” with a color that they enjoyed so that their neighbors might evaluate it.

Second, after the door and trim choices had been proposed, she suggested that each unit should vote for a color scheme; the majority would decide.

That April, the floor voted. On the ballot, the tenants had to choose from eight different colors. Some of the door color choices were: natural metal, turquoise and celery. There were eight trim choices, including teal, olive and dark charcoal.

Ms. Rielle is an artist and a student of feng shui, so she also distributed a flyer to her neighbors detailing the moods and feelings that different colors carry with them. For instance, “Yellow—enriches the emotions.”

On May 1, 2005, the votes were tallied. The floor had reached a consensus on the door color: They were to be painted natural metal, by a 7 to 4 majority.

On the issue of trim, however, fewer votes were cast, and the third floor had split down the middle: four votes for teal and four for dark charcoal.

Ms. Rielle, who before settling on art worked in public relations, now sent around a ballot to address the standstill. This May 20, 2005, ballot, called “Door/Trim We’re Half Way There,” gave floor members three options to rank: Individuality, which would allow each unit to select its own trim color; Uniformity, which would enforce majority rule on a single color; or Middle Ground Compromise, allowing each tenant to choose between teal and dark charcoal.

But these proposed options didn’t sit well with Ms. Rielle’s neighbor, Ms. Dauber-Elbaz. Ms. Elbaz, a real-estate agent by trade, was concerned that a hodgepodge of door-trim colors along the hall would lower property values. She slipped a memo of her own under each door. Dated May 25, it said that a unified color scheme for door trim would be the only acceptable option. Also, she included a personal note:

“Rafi Elbaz is an architect of international acclaim …. In his professional opinion we will all benefit from the second option of Dark Charcoal.”

Later that summer, a floor meeting was held to address the color divide. They met in Ms. Rielle’s apartment. Her walls are painted in many hues and shades. Although wine and beer were served, it was not a relaxed get-together. “It was like the Civil War—brother against brother,” said resident Jim O’Grady, 46, a freelance journalist and an adjunct processor at New York University. “I was in the charcoal camp, the side of righteousness.”

In fact, Mr. Denton, 59, an art historian and collector, found his neighbors downright rude. “Someone who shall remain nameless looked at me and said that I had to go along with whatever the majority votes, because it’s a democracy,” Mr. Denton recalled. “I said, ‘No, I don’t think so. That’s tyranny of the majority.’”

Mr. Denton said that he became fed up with the lack of manners at the meeting. Ms. Dauber-Elbaz announced that the turquoise color Ms. Rielle had selected for her trim made her nauseated. “That’s not nice,” Mr. Denton said. “Say ‘It’s not to my taste,’ not ‘It makes me sick.’ That’s intolerance, which is the basis of oppression and bigotry.”

Neither the teal nor the dark charcoal factions gave up ground. Ms. Dauber-Elbaz left abruptly. The meeting was a bust. The third floor was nowhere near a door-trim consensus.

“I realized a lot of people just don’t embrace color,” said Ms. Rielle. “That’s what it came right down to: those who embrace color and those who like it neutral.”

“We sort of gave up for nine months,” she said.

In March of this year, Ms. Rielle and Stefania Borghi, her neighbor across the hall and a fellow consensus-fighter, started up their color lab again. “People were asking about the doors. And it just felt like time,” said Ms. Rielle.

Ms. Borghi hung out a number of color swatches on her door. In time, neighbors started dropping by to give their two cents.

On June 6, they put up a ballot for a “warm earth” reddish color. The color was almost chosen—but it was hamstrung by two dissenters.

“Several people mentioned that they would be happy with a color similar to the red that was there to begin with,” Ms. Rielle said. “It will mean someone going to get more paint.”

Ms. Rielle is trying to locate a shade that would match the original factory building’s red as closely as possible—a return to an authenticity of sorts.

“Yeah, there’s been tension,” said resident Gillian Schwartz, who is the design director for Bumble and Bumble. “But if more than four eyes roll at once, a community is forming. I think the root of the problem is resistance to change. As an earnest attempt at micro-democracy, the process was educational and entertaining. But at a point, I was ready for a benign dictatorship. If the board had just sent paint crews to do the job, people would have been thrilled with or gawked at the new coat of paint. I bet that’s how it works in the Gretsch building.”

“I remember thinking, ‘This process is so left-conscious, it’s veering right,’” she said.

“If I don’t get my color,” Mr. O’Grady said, “I’m going to chain myself to the lobby.” He understood the root of the problem at hand. “We live in a hyper design age, where we are all raging aesthetes.”

—Spencer Morgan

Screech Grown Up; In Trouble; Well Hung

“We’re a pattern-recognition-based species,” said Dustin Diamond, 29, known best for his work as Screech on the television show Saved by the Bell, of growing up before his public. “We don’t like change; it usually has to be forced upon us. And being a recognition-based species, I’m classified as a squeaky-clean, loveable-nerd, Saturday-morning guy. I’m not allowed to be a 29-year-old man expressing my emotions and feelings in less than a child-friendly manner.”

And so, last week, Mr. Diamond found himself at Porky’s NYC, a cavernous and fairly new bar at 55 West 21st Street. It may be the worst watering hole in New York City. It’s not that the bar—where a woman goes about selling orange Jell-O shots topped with whipped cream, and where the walls and ceilings are drowned in “flair” and black light and raunchy signage and music apparently piped directly from the worst end of the Jersey Shore—is the sort of bar a 15-year-old getting drunk in the woods dreams of; it’s that it’s the bar that a 15-year-old getting drunk in the woods would create, if he were given the power to create a bar, because he doesn’t really know how anything works or how to translate what he thinks he wants into reality.

Mr. Diamond was there to sell T-shirts. The shirts read “Save Screeech’s House,” and the misspelling, Mr. Diamond’s agent said, is because NBC owns the right to that character’s name.

For the last month or so, Mr. Diamond has urgently peddled these $15 shirts anywhere that will have him. “I have 30 days to cough up $250,000 for my house in Wisconsin,” Mr. Diamond said. “They”—they?—“know my credit isn’t great, and I can’t get a loan. I’ve lived there for three years. I have $200,000 in it already, and they could keep my equity.”

This was confusing. “I had a mortgage, but it was through a land contract, and he”—he?—“has decided to call in the remainder of the amount all at once,” Mr. Diamond said later. “I make better money than a lot of people. But I don’t have $250,000 lying around.”

Mr. Diamond’s home is in Port Washington, Wis., population 10,892.

“Everyone knows,” said Port Washington’s Re/Max United real-estate agent, Tom Didier, speaking of Mr. Diamond’s troubles. Reached by phone on June 26, he had just returned from a closing seven doors down from Mr. Diamond’s house. “It’s the talk of the town.”

Mr. Didier had also previously shown Mr. Diamond’s house to a few of his clients, and described it as “a neat-looking one-and-a-half-story Cape Cod, with an exposed basement.” He said that the house had been listed at between $300,000 and $380,000; he believed, from checking sales records, that the price of the house had been $350,000.

How could Mr. Diamond be in for $200,000, and urgently owe $250,000? The land contract, Mr. Didier said, would have to be at an absurd interest rate. “Assuming he hasn’t trashed the inside of the home, if he has any sort of income, he should be able to refinance.”

Instead, Mr. Diamond apparently remains a slave to whatever cruel soul holds his paper.

Mr. Didier said that people get a kick out of Mr. Diamond’s presence in town. “The town has a nice fishing heritage—people ask: ‘Hey, does Screech really live in Port Washington?’”

Mr. Diamond said that he is on the road, doing standup, 47 weeks of the year. After his appearance at Porky’s, he would go to Los Angeles to tape a TV Guide Channel interview, and then have a photo shoot for Hustler magazine.

Would those photographs be clothing-optional? Last month, Mr. Diamond told Howard Stern that his penis measured 10 inches. “It’s totally true,” said Mr. Diamond’s girlfriend by phone. “Dustin Diamond—and also David Cassidy. True.”

—Max Abelson

Dear Tracy

Anthony Bourdain, the chef, author, and Travel Channel sensation, had come to Siberia from a wrap party for an episode of his show, No Reservations. Siberia, just a bit west of The New York Times, is where hacks go to get drunk, and so most people did. That night, June 26, people had gotten together to celebrate the coronation of Steven Garbarino as BlackBook magazine’s new editor-in-chief.

“You gotta respect a man who spends that much time with a blow dryer,” Mr. Bourdain said. “Steven’s exactly the right mixture of evil impulses, literary skills and personal grooming. I will write for him.

“And I have a scoop! Apparently, Tracy Westmoreland will be doing a ‘Dear Abby’ advice column for BlackBook,” Mr. Bourdain said. Mr. Westmoreland is the owner and hands-on proprietor of Siberia.

Is the burly barkeep qualified to be giving advice?

“Who’s better conditioned to understand human nature than a longtime operator of nightclubs in New York, especially this fuckin’ sleazehole bar?” said Mr. Bourdain. “Whether you’re building your dream woman out of nail clippings and recovered human flesh in your cellar, or you’re an Oscar-winning screenwriter, a tabloid reporter, an organized crime figure or my mom, we all bask in Tracy’s reflected glory.”

Mr. Garbarino, clad in a mint seersucker blazer, said unleashing Mr. Westmoreland on readers was only one of many new ideas he’s considering. “It’s about turning things upside down, but not in some pretentious, weird way,” he said. “BlackBook is waiting for a personality, and I know a lot of good personalities, in this city as well as in L.A. There are so many people waiting to tell the right story but have not been given the right assignment.”

As an example, Mr. Garbarino said he planned to have Mr. Bourdain interview Christopher Walken about cooking. “It’s like: Walken. He gave me one of his cats, he gave me one of his Abyssinians, and he’s like, ‘Do you like macaroni?’”

“The idea is, BlackBook will break new people—but the thing is, there’s all these people like Jack Nicholson who can be rebroken,” Mr. Garbarino said. “I mean, when Nicholson’s wearing a dildo in The Departed, that might make him the subject, that might make him the cover of BlackBook.

“Fashion is key in this situation,” he said. “Mixing pop culture and literature into fashion and not giving a shit what Vogue and everyone else is saying is in at the time is so much more fun.”

Mr. Westmoreland, for one, is always ready to be rebroken. He saved 72 lives while lifeguarding on Rockaway Beach, worked at both Studio 54 and the Palladium and has been to the Philippines, he said. He works sometimes as an actor.

“Whatever forum that Steven wants to give me,” he said, “I want to ask people—and I don’t mean this disrespectfully or anything—but you know, like hot women, they’re always asked about their boyfriends and their girlfriends. That’s just boring. I’m not interested in any of that. I want to ask, like, Eva Longoria how she feels about, say, cheese.”

—S.M.