By KURT ST. THOMAS | November 15, 2012

Right from his debut book, Kitchen Confidential — which notes that the playing of Billy Joel is a firing offense in his kitchen — Anthony Bourdain established himself as a man with an appetite for badass rock. So with his Guts and Glory speaking tour coming to Symphony Hall on Friday, we asked WFNX executive producer (and chef-in-training) Kurt St. Thomas to grill Bourdain on the intersections between music and cuisine. Here's a taste; for the rest, tune into WFNX.com on Thursday at noon and hear the pair spin tunes from Bourdain faves like Richard Hell and Queens of the Stone Age. (Click here for full details on Bourdain's Friday show.)

It's obvious from watching your show that you're a great fan of music. And it seems like you're a fan of New York punk bands from the late '70s? Yeah, basically. I love that New York punk period. But I love pre-disco, funk. If I could come back as a musician, Bootsy Collins would have been a good choice, I think.

When you were starting out as a chef and living in New York, were you going down to CBGB and seeing the Ramones? All of us in the kitchen at the time, we had sort of the same hours as a lot of musicians, and none of them had any money. Punk at the time was not a commercial enterprise to say the least. No one was buying any records. They weren't getting any radio airtime. So we'd feed them and they'd give us free passes to their shows, so it was a very symbiotic relationship.

When you were in culinary school, did you ever think this was the path it would lead to? Absolutely not. At age 44, when I was still standing next to a deep fryer, if I was sure of anything, it was that I would never get to fulfill my childhood dream of seeing Vietnam or even Rome. I pretty much thought that was it for me.

What is your new CNN show? Is it drastically different thanNo Reservations andThe Layover? It's the same camera people, editors, production team, and production company I've been working with all along. . . . [CNN] has an infrastructure on the ground that will allow us an experience in a lot of these countries. We never would have been able to get into places like the Congo or Libya or Myanmar with the Travel Channel, so this kind of opens up the world for us in whole new ways.

Codeine’s careful rock returns to Boston
Bands named after drugs have a spotty history of making music that fits their substances.
Review: Neil Young Journeys
Young is old now, and in Demme's film, looking like a stubbly coot in a battered Panama hat, he's having the time of his life.
Photos: Slash at the House of Blues
Slash performs live at the House of Blues on August 2, 2012.
Review: Searching for Sugar Man
An obscure, forgotten singer-songwriter, Sixto Rodriguez was first discovered in a Detroit bar by celebrated producers Dennis Coffey and Mike Theodore in the late '60s.
Interview: God save John Lydon
When Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren coined the phrase "cash from chaos," he may have been describing his own filthy lucre, but for the members of rock's most explosive group, the fiduciary comeuppance was and has been eternally forthcoming.
The recorded rebirth of Mean Creek
Outside their rehearsal space, Mean Creek are standing with their hands in their pockets, excited to dig into some discussion about their anticipated new record, Youth Companion .
As he is
For all the defiant, anguished fists we shake in the general direction of New York and Los Angeles whenever a musician becomes way more famous after they leave Boston, perhaps this city's gypsy-attracting disposition has advantages.
Why there won't ever be another 'Big Four' - and why that's a good thing
In April, thrash metal's self-billed "Big Four" — Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax — played a one-off American show in the middle of the desert in Indio, California.
Photos: Girls Rock Boston Showcase at Brighton Music Hall
Girls Rock Boston presents a showcase at Brighton Music Hall on August 13, 2011.
Identity Festival rocks out the dance party
Genre predictions are dumb, but there is one thing absolutely certain in music: rock music is dead, and the era of electronic dominance is finally here.
Review: Janie Jones
Borrowing the name of a Clash song with which it has nothing in common, this generic riff on the Crazy Heart template by writer/director David M. Rosenthal ( Falling Up ) also cribs from Sofia Coppola's Somewhere .
Less