Dana Reyes★ Contributor · Lv 4
todayBourdain's voice leaps off the page. Funny, filthy, and weirdly moving.
Memoir
Kitchen Confidential
4.6· 1,541 ratings
Published 2000320 pagesEnglishRaw · Hilarious
Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.
Why read it
Don't order fish on Monday, and never trust a hollandaise you did not make yourself: a working chef throws open the kitchen door and tells you everything the restaurant industry would rather you never knew.
The big idea
Anthony Bourdain recounts his rise from dishwasher to executive chef with profane, exhilarating honesty, exposing the grueling, pirate-crew reality behind the food you eat out. Part memoir, part expose, part love letter to cooking, it captures both the squalor and the romance of professional kitchens. It is the book that made a chef into a cultural icon.
The story behind it
Anthony Bourdain wrote an essay for The New Yorker in 1999 that he expanded into Kitchen Confidential, published in 2000. A surprise bestseller, it launched his career as a television host and writer and became a defining food-world memoir.
What you’ll take away
- 01
The kitchen underbelly
The takeaway is an unvarnished look at the labor, chaos, and characters behind restaurant food.
- 02
Insider survival tips
Bourdain shares blunt rules, from which day to avoid seafood to what the bread basket really is.
- 03
Cooking as calling
Beneath the grime is a genuine, hard-won love of craft and discipline.
- 04
A voice like no other
The book's profane, propulsive style is as much the draw as its revelations.
From the book
Bourdain's account of eating a raw oyster as a boy on a fishing boat in France, the visceral moment he traces his hunger for food and adventure to.
His warnings about the brunch shift, where he says he watched leftover and questionable ingredients get repurposed onto weekend plates.
4.6
1,541 ratings
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