Anthony Bourdain: Holy Chow!

"I'm not exactly prime-time material," he shrugs. "I can only guess that some sinister cabal of criminally deranged anarchists within the Food Network let this in under the radar."

"Poor Tony," says Eileen Opatut, the Food Network's senior VP of programming and production. "While I admire his desire to be an anarchist and a rebel, he fits right in here. We love him precisely because he's not easy to turn into fluff. Although we did have to bleep him out a little."

Despite his entrée into the Food Network family, Bourdain isn't tempering his venom about its stable of stars. He's called Emeril Lagasse "Ewok-like" and Jamie Oliver (whose hit show The Naked Chef will precede his time slot) a "pretty-boy model who was probably beaten up in prep school." "There's no danger, I hope, of me becoming a beloved staple of the Food Network. I won't be doing tailgate parties with Bobby Flay," he promises. "I have already instructed my former sous-chef that if he ever hears of anything like that, he is to sneak up behind me and shoot me in the back of the head."

When Bourdain's new life overwhelms him, he retreats to his center of gravity, his old kitchen at Brasserie Les Halles, where he's worked as executive chef since 1996 but makes it in only a few nights a month now. There's a table of eight women out front, a reading group that's oohing over Kitchen Confidential, so Bourdain stays hidden in the back with his buddies. Tonight's dinner rush is in full swing, with platters of steak frites and slabs of foie gras hitting the deck. The narrow space is a cacophony of sizzle and profanity.

"This motherf---er we call El Guapo, the handsome one," Bourdain says, gesturing. "Your average busboy doesn't have that rottweiler gleam in his eye, those wide shoulders suitable for knocking down enemies. And this is Armando, he used to be the leather guy in the Village People but now he's our best waiter--and, of course, like most really good waiters, he's also our biggest pain in the ass."

Bourdain's crew can give as good as it gets, ripping into him about his clothes, his habit of dragging reporters back into their space, his sudden fame. When he returns from a tour of the restaurant's food supplies downstairs, he takes a swig of a beer he naively left unattended. "Hey, who's been f---ing with my beer!" he bellows as the fry cook in the corner feigns interest in the stove. "You motherf---ers! As long as there's no bodily fluids in there I'm okay." There's love in this room.

Bourdain seems more blown away by the day-to-day feats of his broiler guy or his dishwasher than by the notion that Brad Pitt may play him in David Fincher's movie adaptation of Kitchen Confidential. "That's an abstract concept in my mind," he says. "I would love to see a mass-market paperback with Brad Pitt's face on it, not mine. And having read the screenplay, which is really good, I can see him. But see, I'm already in the danger zone because I'm buying in, I'm hoping."

Chefs are a superstitious bunch, he explains, people with cynicism and a sense of impending doom bled into their bones. "My daily life is very much informed by the knowledge that I am one lucky motherf---er. I am fully aware, in fact I expect, that my 15 minutes could run out at any time. I could be cooking brunch again next year. And I wouldn't be too unhappy about it."