Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Anthony Bourdain
A deluxe, annotated edition of Kitchen Confidential to celebrate the life of Anthony Bourdain, featuring new photo inserts Over two decades ago, the New Yorker published a now infamous article, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” by then little-known chef Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain spared no one’s appetite as he revealed what happens behind the kitchen door. The article was a sensation, and the book it spawned, the now iconic Kitchen Confidential, became an even bigger sensation and megabestseller. Frankly confessional, addictively acerbic, and utterly unsparing, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business. Fans will love to return to this deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade, laying out Bourdain’s more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine. Including a handwritten introduction and annotations done by Bourdain about a decade after the book was originally published, this edition also features previously unpublished photos to accompany the now-classic text.
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the restaurant world is crazy. was interesting to hear anthony bourdain tell his story.
0I grew up watching Bourdain’s travel shows with my Dad and I absolutely loved them. He was so entertaining! An hour would breeze by as we watched Bourdain live a life that was cooler than I could’ve ever imagined; filled with beautiful places, exotic foods, and not always wholesome mischief.
Knowing the direction Bourdain’s career would take, I’d always wanted to go back and read the book that put him on the map. Kitchen Confidential is equal parts memoir and restaurant industry exposé, told with Bourdain’s usual flair. I think that was what struck me the most - the writing in this book is so reminiscent of his later work! I can see how this became so popular. Bourdain is a total asshole, he’s the first to admit it, but he’s incredibly charming. He is a degenerate with his own rigid moral code and more than that, he is a man who loves what he does and the people he does it with. That was by far my favorite part of the book - the way Bourdain writes about food and the chefs, seedy as they sometimes are, is striking. I love someone who can so clearly show the beauty of something that isn’t always seen as beautiful.
I appreciated the inclusion of the afterword which showed a kitchen that was the exact opposite of Bourdain’s. I think it was a necessary counterexample and it hits on one of the only major issues I have with this book. I think it needs a bit of a re-frame. To me what this book really is is a memoir about Bourdain’s experience as a chef in NYC. But since it came out before he was famous, it was marketed as a culinary tell-all in the line of his famous New Yorker essay and I simply don’t think there’s enough material for that in here. I also don’t think describing Bourdain’s experiences as standard restaurant experiences is necessarily accurate? He says himself that he not only gravitates towards these lawless kitchens, but he actually creates them which is more than a little biased. I think the timeline also needed some editing help - there was a lot of jumping around that was difficult to keep track of at times.
I loved ending on the Tokyo chapter - it was like a foreshadowing of what was to come in Bourdain’s career. I loved that he showed how he was nervous to try new foods and participate in new cultures. It was so reassuring that even someone like him felt those things!
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