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Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly Paperback – May 1, 2001

by Anthony Bourdain (Author)

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When Chef Anthony Bourdain wrote "Don't Eat Before You Read This" in The New Yorker, he spared no one's appetite, revealing what goes on behind the kitchen door. In Kitchen Confidential, he expanded that appetizer into a deliciously funny, delectable shocking banquet that lays out his 25 years of sex, drugs, and haute cuisine.

From his first oyster in the Gironde to the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, from the restaurants of Tokyo to the drug dealers of the East Village, from the mobsters to the rats, Bourdain's brilliantly written, wild-but-true tales make the belly ache with laughter.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Harper Perennial
Publication date

May 1, 2001
Dimensions

5.31 x 0.72 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0060934913
ISBN-13

978-0060934910
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Popular Highlights in this book

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If you need instruction on how to handle a knife without lopping off a finger, I recommend Jacques Pepin's La Technique.
Highlighted by 4,858 Kindle readers
Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.
Highlighted by 3,966 Kindle readers
Like I said before, your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.
Highlighted by 3,928 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 groveling 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 favor 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

Review

"...the kind of book you read in one sitting, then rush about annoying your coworkers by declaiming whole passages." -- USA Today

"Utterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and precise ear for kitchen patois." -- New York Magazine

"You'll laugh, you'll cry...you're gonna love it." -- Denver Post

A gonzo memoir of whats really going on behind those swinging doors.... Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain is unique. -- Newsweek

Hysterical.... Bourdain gleefully rips through the scenery to reveal private backstage horrors. -- New York Times Book Review

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; 1st Ecco Ed edition (May 1, 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0060934913
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060934910
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.72 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #945,408 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #268 in Mid Atlantic U.S. Biographies
- #986 in Culinary Biographies & Memoirs
- #2,024 in Wine & Spirits

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4.5 22,875 ratings

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Anthony Bourdain

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Chef, author, and raconteur Anthony Bourdain is best known for traveling the globe on his TV show Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. Somewhat notoriously, he has established himself as a professional gadfly, bête noir, advocate, social critic, and pork enthusiast, recognized for his caustic sense of humor worldwide. He is as unsparing of those things he hates, as he is evangelical about his passions.

Bourdain is the author of the New York Times bestselling Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw; A Cook’s Tour; the collection The Nasty Bits; the novels Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo; the biography Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical; two graphic novels, Get Jiro! and Get Jiro!: Blood and Sushi and his latest New York Times bestselling cookbook Appetites. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Times of London, Bon Appetit, Gourmet, Vanity Fair, Lucky Peach and many other publications. In 2013, Bourdain launched his own publishing line with Ecco, Anthony Bourdain Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. He is the host of the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning docuseries Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown on CNN, and before that hosted Emmy award-winning No Reservations and The Layover on Travel Channel, and The Taste on ABC.

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Brian

an industry Bible

Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2023

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If you’ve left blood and sweat in the BOH or FOH then this book is a must.
If not you may still enjoy it but you’ll never truly get it.

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Engrossing memoir from an author, traveler, and chef

Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2018

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Kitchen Confidential is Anthony Bourdain’s break-out book and memoir of his twenty-five years working in the restaurant business, mostly in New York City. Published before his second career as a TV personality and world traveler (most notably on the Travel Channel’s No Reservations) it is a candid depiction of one man’s life following his passion, and his desires. It is a gritty, grubby, way-honest, depiction of life as a restaurant worker that tells of sex, drugs, and cooking, at a level of which many of us would not dream. At least, most of us wouldn’t imagine that the life in restaurant kitchens is really the way this book describes it. It is evident, though, that what the book depicts is restaurant life as Mr. Bourdain experienced it. He makes no bones about his own biases and proclivities for walking on the wild side that color his story. Such honesty and introspection make this far more than a book about cooking.

Kitchen Confidential is well written and it maintained my interest even though I’m not into cooking. Anyone who is will certainly get much from it, but I was drawn mostly from having watched Mr. Bourdain on TV and connecting with his love of travel and of good food. Because his book is more about the larger issues of life than cooking, it touched me on an existential level much as a movie about baseball would that is about more than baseball (e.g., Field of Dreams).

Mr. Bourdain begins his story by recounting his encounters with good food as a child. Tasting vichyssoise and a raw oyster for the first time, struck him as experiences beyond just eating. They were examples of highs that could be reached by an ardent thrill-seeker. They also laid the groundwork that made his landing a job as restaurant dishwasher an inciting incident that he pursued to eventually become a line cook and later a chef.

I was really struck with the level of testosterone-driven, debauchery and near-criminality he describes in the restaurant kitchen. It’s more like what I would expect on a construction site. Actually, there may be similarities.

Several of the book’s chapters are devoted to characters Mr. Bourdain encountered in his restaurant career. These tended to be drug addicts, thieves, hedonists, and criminals, though many had a passion, or just the sheer aptitude, for either cooking or working in a professional kitchen. As contradictory as that sounds, it seems as if such environments are persistently common in the restaurant world. At least that’s what Mr. Bourdain avers and I take him as an authority.

This kitchen “underbelly” was attractive to Mr. Bourdain, and he describes it as one he understood and in which he thrived. It led him to some bad decisions and some bad addictions. He is very candid about the loose lifestyle that left him with a heroin addiction. Even so, it is clear that his love of the culinary arts kept him going, and that it drives many of those workers who might skip out on rent payments but are able to produce the most divine of, say, baked breads.

Indeed, in describing his life when he had reached the level of chef and kitchen commander, Mr. Bourdain gives us a compelling and intense vision of what that life is like. In fact, he almost goes too far in describing a typical day for him. Basically, he worked from before-sunup to after midnight to keep his kitchen running. He describes mind-numbing activity, dealing with the problems and personnel threatening his mission to get good food to customers, juggling a thousand variables. His description carries long (”A Day in the Life”), but being the good author he was, his description served to highlight points he makes later.

Seeing things, even his own life, from a higher perspective, he was able to appreciate and admire someone who did things differently from him and still achieve success (”The Life of Bryan”). Also, towards the end of the book, he further nails his love of sensation and travel—experiencing the exotic— that led to his second, televised, career (”Mission to Tokyo”).

Anthony Bourdain’s literary and video work is not for everyone, but for many, including me, he remains an inspiration. In Kitchen Confidential we see, not only his love for culinary art, but his love for creativity (he often said that he considered himself a storyteller).

Despite all the debauchery, bad attitudes, bad decisions, and chasing highs, he was a lover of life and squeezed every sensational drop from it. An excellent writer, he was able to step back from his own life and observe it, pulling lessons from its episodes. Kitchen Confidential was the watershed of Mr. Bourdain’s life, marking the end of his chef career and the beginning of his traveler-personality career. At the book’s close, though, he didn’t seem to anticipating that second act. It is to our good fortune and inspiration that there was one.

14 people found this helpful

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Monica

Great book

Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2023

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Amazon Customer

Essential read for anyone in the culinary world

Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2023

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Don't care if you work fast food, at a hospital or if you just think you're a good cook at home. Give this a read first.

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Tina

Bourdain never disappoints

Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2023

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A great view of the culinary underbelly and learned more than I’ve ever wanted to know about the bts of how my food is prepped and made. I could literally hear his voice reading this in my head. RIP LEGEND

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J. Seigle

He won't get out of the kitchen, he LOVES the heat

Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2005

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I bought this book on the recommendation of a friend, and had never heard of the author. If you are offended by four-letter words do not read this book. If you are offended by frank talk about sexual matters do not read this book. If you are offended by open discussion of drug use do not read this book. If you think Emeril Lagasse is the ultimate in chefs do not read this book.

Who should read this book?

This is not a book about how to cook, how to get a job as a chef, how to get the most when ordering in a restuarant, or even what it's really like to work in a professional kitchen, although the book touches on each of this topics. This is really a book about what it's like to be Anthony Bourdain, who happens to have used cooking to pull himself from an abyss of drug use and hand-to-mouth living to become the executive chef at Les Halles in New York.

Bourdain talks frankly and doesn't give a rat's patoot (not how he would have put it) about who he might offend by doing so. His web site even gives a recipe but warns against the possibility of hot liquid coming out of a blender because it hurts like a <12-letter word>. He openly disdains celebrity chefs who work only in a three-walled kitchen in front of the cameras, with their own line of prepared seasonings, preferring to admire those who bust their ass serving hundreds of meals a night, night after night. He doesn't name names but you know he's thinking of Lagasse.

This book does weed out wannabe chefs. I have had a few cooking classes at a French-operated cooking school and have daydreamed of cooking as a second career. This book pretty much cured me of that notion (which is true of many hobbyists in any field who discover that going pro takes all the fun out of it). The good ones work hard; in Bourdain's case it seems like he is either in the kitchen or thinking about it over 60 hours a week, every week.

Bourdain redeems himself in the final chapters when he contrasts his own experiences and leadership style against that of an admired colleague, showing us that despite the history depicted in the foregoing pages you don't have to have a kitchen full of shouting trash-talking, tatooed, sex-starved, fraternal macho men to turn out great food.

The book closes with a vivid description of Bourdain's trip to Tokyo, especially one particular meal. He is certainly an adventurous eater. His web site has a video taken during a trip abroad where he eats--stop here if you have a delicate stomach, or are a member of PETA--the heart of a cobra, freshly cut from the serpent and still beating.

A friend of mine owns a restaurant, and I was talking to the chef a couple of weeks ago and mentioned this book. She has read it three times and says it's fairly much dead on. She has worked with a few big names in the DC area and the management styles of many well-known chefs would get them called in on the carpet by HR if they behaved that way at a Fortune 500 company.

Do not draw the generalization that every restuarant is like the ones where Bourdain has worked--but I'll bet some are worse.

28 people found this helpful

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Mark Kopecky

An amazing read!!!!!!!!

Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2023

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This an amazing book book from an outstanding author. It can be a little vulgar and can be shocking to some who have never worked in the Food Service Industry.

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Top reviews from other countries

gearoid coyle

Great read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 10, 2021

Verified Purchase

More of a history lesson of the culinary world in the 70s 80s and 90s. Still a great read.

Richard A.

All been said I know - great read

Reviewed in Australia on July 28, 2023

Verified Purchase

I had to slow myself down in the last chapter as I realised the book is coming to an end. I finished and wanted more but resigned to the fact it won't be. As a former line cook, much of the book resonated well, had me laughing, gasping, wondering how the heck does this world operate so gritty, when the plates that come out look so pretty. Great read.

Vi Cuth

Thrilling read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 22, 2023

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Loved the book. Easy read with outrageous and thrilling stories. Bourdain writes in a very relaxed manner as if he’s talking to you and leaves you eager to hear more.

seawitch

Excellent

Reviewed in Mexico on October 21, 2023

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Good quality dfast delivery

coolbro

very good

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 28, 2023

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good book

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