Kitchen Confidential is a very gripping and funny book, beautifully written by the famous chef Anthony Bourdain. When I saw Bourdain on TV for the first time, I didn’t like him very much. However, I continued watching the tv show because I found it exciting and enjoyed it a lot in the end. After reading this book, I watched most of his tv shows and thought he was a fascinating man.
Kitchen Confidential tells the story of the life of this truly colourful chef in the restaurant world. Saying that he will tell everything honestly at the very beginning of the book, the chef truly enjoys talking about all the chaos in a restaurant kitchen; his excitement shines through the pages. And Kitchen Confidential teaches you a lot about restaurants. One of my cousins is a chef, and he has worked all around the world. He told me that when someone told him that they want to be a chef, he would recommend Kitchen Confidential to them to see if they are still willing to be one.
Few things excite me as much as people in love with their job talk excitedly about what they do. I always felt the same excitement while reading Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. He was an interesting person and a good author and I’m sure we’ll watch his shows and read his books for many years to come. If you want to learn something about restaurants’ exciting world, laugh and read a good book, I would say don’t miss Kitchen Confidential. Enjoy!
Kitchen Confidential
Most diners believe that their sublime sliver of seared foie gras, topped with an ethereal buckwheat blini and a drizzle of piquant huckleberry sauce, was created by a culinary artist of the highest order, a sensitive, highly refined executive chef. The truth is more brutal. More likely, writes Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential, that elegant three-star concoction is the collaborative effort of a team of “wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts, and psychopaths,” in all likelihood pierced or tattooed and incapable of uttering a sentence without an expletive or a foreign phrase.
Such is the muscular view of the culinary trenches from one who’s been grovelling in them, with obvious sadomasochistic pleasure, for more than 20 years. CIA-trained Bourdain, currently the executive chef of the celebrated Les Halles, wrote two culinary mysteries before his first (and infamous) New Yorker essay launched this frank confessional about the lusty and larcenous real lives of cooks and restaurateurs.
He is obscenely eloquent, unapologetically opinionated, and a damn fine storyteller–a Jack Kerouac of the kitchen. Those without the stomach for this kind of joyride should note his opening caveat: “There will be horror stories. Heavy drinking, drugs, screwing in the dry-goods area, unappetizing industry-wide practices. Talking about why you probably shouldn’t order fish on a Monday, why those who favour well-done get the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, and why seafood frittata is not a wise brunch selection…. But I’m simply not going to deceive anybody about the life as I’ve seen it.” –Sumi Hahn
Anthony Bourdain
Raised in New Jersey, Bourdain first took an interest in food when he ate an oyster as a young boy on a trip to France with his family. He attended Vassar College for two years before ultimately graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978. Bourdain later moved to New York City, where he ran the kitchens at a series of respected restaurants. While working as a chef, he began to try his hand at writing, which resulted in two crime novels: Bone in the Throat (1995) and Gone Bamboo (1997).
In 1999, while he was working as the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles, Bourdain published an exposé of the restaurant industry in The New Yorker, called “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” The article became something of a cause célèbre, as many of the ugly inner workings of the restaurant world were brought to light to the wider public for the first time via Bourdain’s caustically witty writing. He expanded his article into the popular memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (2000), which contained not only additional accounts of the inner workings of restaurant kitchens but intimate details of Bourdain’s personal life as well, including his long battle with heroin addiction.
The memoir established Bourdain as one of the “bad boys” of gastronomic culture, and he parlayed his book’s success into a cable-television travel show called A Cook’s Tour (2002–03). He then took the basic concept of A Cook’s Tour—Bourdain providing a humourous guide to a locale with a focus on local cuisine and offbeat cultural features—and developed it into an hour-long cable program, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (2005–12). Bourdain also saw his memoir adapted into a short-lived sitcom (2005–06).
Bourdain’s newfound television fame led to frequent stints guest-judging the cooking reality show Top Chef as well as an appearance on The Simpsons. He later launched another travel show, The Layover (2011–13), which centred on Bourdain spending between 24 and 48 hours in a select destination. In 2013–15 he was a judge on the cooking-competition program The Taste. His other TV credits included the travel show Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, which premiered in 2013 and won multiple Emmy Awards for outstanding informational series. While filming the show’s 12th season in 2018, Bourdain committed suicide. Later that year he posthumously won an Emmy for outstanding writing for nonfiction programming.
In addition to Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s writings included A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal (2001), The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006), Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (2010), and another foray into crime fiction, Bobby Gold (2001), along with contributions to numerous magazines, blogs, and newspapers. His cookbooks included Appetites (2016; cowritten with Laurie Woolever).
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
