If you happen to find this book in audio, don't hesitate to listen. It's hilarious. Bourdain is a man of many talents, and one of them is picking up slangs in different languages quickly and adapting to accents. Like I said, hilarious.

Things I learned from this book:
-Never order fish on a Monday
-Stay away from "specials" of the day
-Avoid rush hours and weekends
-Restaurant kitchens are war zones
-All you'll ever need is a chef's knife--just one, a sharp one
-Every time you eat out is an adventure and a risk
-60% of people who go into the restaurant business end up failing
-The other 40% survive by sheer luck and good karma
-Don't open a restaurant
-Good food = fresh, high quality ingredients + basic cooking skills

That last one is his personal favorite saying. There's no room for pretentiousness in good food. Well, his exact words are "there's no room for pretentious assholes in my kitchen"--same difference. His back-to-basic take on food, at the time this book was written, was revolutionary. And it's coming from an experienced gourmet chef too. The public was just shocked and amazed because this was around the time the "celebrity chef" was born (and how we all cringed while facepalming). So by taking a stand against all that blatant advertising and product placements, Bourdain got the public's attention and he didn't disappoint.

If you have ever worked in a restaurant, there isn't anything in this book you don't already know. You might recognize a few of the characters due to having worked with or screamed at or wished you could have stabbed at one time or another during your time as part of the kitchen staff. You might even see yourself in the book somewhere. The point is the things in this book are an open secret. The term "restaurant secrets" is an oxymoron. Restaurant people talk a lot because that's what happens when you share such a high stress environment and tight confining space that's littered with sharp pointy blades. You talk and overshare to take the edge off. That's the impression I got from this book, that it's meant to be a snapshot of life in a restaurant kitchen.

What Bourdain did by writing a tell-all memoir about the life of a chef running a popular restaurant is nothing new. Lots of chefs before him have published similar books with similar contents detailing their childhoods, education, training, first jobs, first restaurants, rise to fame, etc etc, but none had the sense to tell it like it really is. How Bourdain writes is what sets him apart from the rest because he favors laying out the truth over romanticizing suffering. His writing style is subversive and inflammatory, of course, and offensive at times because it's meant to drag myths surrounding the restaurant business out into the open and flaying them. The most popular myths is one we're all familiar with, and that's the idea of opening a restaurant for personal enjoyment.

Many people still carry this romantic notion of running their own restaurant. Some day, they say. Because I just love to entertain, they also say. Besides, it'll be fun. Like throwing a party every single night. So romantic... until these people realize they have to do inventory, order food, prepare necessary items ahead of time, keep tight schedules in their heads, make sure food and supplies show up on time, make sure staff show up on time, make sure every table in the front is looked after, make sure vendors aren't ripping them off, make sure the cooks aren't trying to kill each other. Every single day. Not so much like a party now, is it? This is hard work. Romantics aren't cut out for such work. If you're gonna open a restaurant... don't. Just don't.

I think what really made this book a big seller were Bourdain's detailed firsthand revelations of all the failed restaurants he worked in and witnessed in the past. The thing they all have in common? Lost of control. Bourdain's CV is literally full of failed restaurants; some were once famous attractions, others never had a chance. He hadn't been able to save any one of them.

His writing, like his presence on his travel shows, is strangely erratically honest. It's the kind of honesty that you rarely see or hear anymore. It's the kind of honesty you get from people who've been to rock bottom and stayed a while. It's the kind of honesty you get from an addict, former addict in this case. The prose is bold yet within reason, vile yet heartfelt, punchy yet smooth, and oftentimes uncomfortable yet engaging, but it's also sincere like the kind of honesty you can trust. It makes you believe he's telling the absolute truth, that he wouldn't hold back to save face or spare feelings. That's just the kind of guy he is, the book seems to say.

There's an ugly truth at the end of every one of his stories that make them more than just tales worth reminiscing over a pint. There's pain, suffering, wisdom, blood, sweat, tears, hard liquor, cocaine, years of insomnia, crunchy aspirins, unemployment, the sights and sounds of reaching rock bottom in all of his stories. That's as close to the truth as a memoir can get.

This one short sampling is all you need to judge Bourdain for yourself

“So who the hell, exactly, are these guys, the boys and girls in the trenches? You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base. The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts 'fringe elements', people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong. Maybe they didn't make it through high school, maybe they're running away from something-be it an ex-wife, a rotten family history, trouble with the law, a squalid Third World backwater with no opportunity for advancement. Or maybe, like me, they just like it here.”

I feel like this review needs to end on a positive note because this book wraps up with an unexpectedly positive yet realistic perspective that cooks and non-cooks can relate to, but I haven't a clue what more to say.

Cross-posted at http://covers2covers.wordpress.com/20...

I almost feel the need to have to bring back my "3 stars is not a bad rating" disclaimer, since I've had a bizarrely rare couple of weeks with several 4 star rated books in my lineup. Well here we are again, settling back into the "3 star is the standard" normalcy of my world.

Kitchen Confidential was an entertaining read. The main reason why I couldn't swing a 4 is only because I think I'd expected there to be more "trade secrets" about the restaurant industry than there really were. I'd half expected to be terrorized into never wanting to eat in a restaurant ever again after finding out that 95% of restaurant employees either pee, spit, or masturbate into their food (I'm only half joking). I'd honestly thought that I was going to be reading the book like this :


Now, that's not to say that there weren't a few disgusting tidbits thrown out for me to contemplate. For example, I now know never to order fish specials on a Monday, or to eat Mussels just about anywhere. But...I think I wanted to know more about the "behind the scenes" dirt on what can really go wrong in restaurants than what we were given.

Something else that I'd expected to see more of was Anthony's hard-on for hating on the Food Network community. There were a couple of little digs in this book (the "you're halfway to making that fuzzy little Emeril your bitch" comment made me snort), but nothing even remotely at the level to which I would have expected (maybe that was a publisher reign-in, who knows?) I've followed some of his past interviews and blog posts and have to admit to being far more amused than I should be over his petty jabs at Rachael Ray, Emeril and others. Note : I have nothing against these people and have spent many hours watching the Food Network over the years.

I guess I wanted more of the "gritty" dirt that I thought AB could provide, so I found myself slightly disappointed. But again, the book itself was entertaining for a memoir of his experiences coming up in the foodie world.

This isn't to say that I wasn't amused over the fact that he walked around in his youth wearing nunchakus in a holster while carrying a samurai sword (and we're not talking the pre-teen years, we're talking college here), but I have to admit that I'm more fascinated by the sarcastic 50-plus-year-old man who has digestive issues, drinks like a fish, and got filmed eating an animal's poop chute on his television show.

We did get to see some of his irreverence in the book. This is not a politically correct read all of the time (and I don't agree with many of his opinions), but at least he's an equal-opportunity shit talker. He might be brash and crass, but he's definitely got a distinct point-of-view.

n  n    Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride. Sure, it's a 'play you pay' sort of an adventure, but you know that already, every time you ever ordered a taco or a dirty-water hot dog.n  n  

n

n

Interesting guy. Interesting life. Total train wreck, but he's honest about it, which somehow makes him very likable.

If I was interested in becoming a chef would I have liked this book more?

If I liked Anthony Bourdain would I have liked this book more?

Hard to say, but I think the answer to the first question might be "Maybe, but doubtful" and the answer to the second question is, "Probably not".

I thought the beginning of Kitchen Confidential was interesting but I don't need anyone advising me not to eat in restaurants with dirty bathrooms or to treat servers with respect. It was this blow-the-lid-off-the-restaurant-industry type of hype that brought me to Kitchen Confidential, but after the first couple of chapters of this type of not-so-eye-opening "insider" information, it was all downhill.

To be honest - and this biased my view of the book - I'm not a fan of the "Shock" celebrity in today's media. Shock jocks, shock politicians, shock pundits and now, at least with this book, shock chefs. If you have something to say, please say it, I'm interested. But if what you have to say relies on insulting various groups of people and using offensive language to make a point or color a story, or if your abrasive dialogue is too often used to hammer home the idea that you're better/smarter/cooler than the people you're talking to, you can save it for someone else. The reality might be that you are better/smarter/cooler than the people you're talking to, but let us come to that conclusion ourselves.

In the end, after wading through insults to vegetarians and people who like to order items on the side and pretty much anyone Mr. Bourdain has worked with (or for) in his restaurant career, as well as droning stories of drugs and sex, I found little of any substance in Kitchen Confidential. Beyond that, I found Kitchen Confidential to be little more than a boring and vulgar rant by a chef/author who maybe spends a little too much time in front of the mirror thinking all sorts of wonderful things about himself and whose stories and writing remind me of the reminiscences of 28-year-old at his ten-year high school reunion. Like the food I send back, this one is tasteless and undercooked.

I loved this book when I read it.

I find myself without much to say about this book, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Bourdain was a talented, evocative writer who clearly had a great passion for his chosen profession. But it turns out, for me, all of that is overshadowed by the manner in which his life ended. And I don't want to go into detail about how knowing that affected my reading. I'll just say that Bourdain had some great, funny, profane, sublime moments in his life, and leave it at that.

This should be more aptly titled "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures of a Self-indulgent Arsehole."

That's it.

PS: If you still decide to pick this up, do yourself a favour and avoid the audiobook.

Anthony Bourdain is very much the punk rock rebel of celebrity chefs. The chef who isn't afraid to refer to Emeril as an Ewok, and poke fun of culinary-school trained cooks, when at the same time, he is a celebrity chef, and a culinary school graduate. He knows this, and it's not a problem for him.

Kitchen Confidential is part memoir, part how-to, and mostly about sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. It's basically a history of Anthony's obsession with food and drugs from his days as a young boy, until he finally landed a steady job, and got off the heroin. This is not the book you should read if you don't want to know who is cooking your food. If you'd rather be ignorant about what exactly is being served at Sunday brunch, skip this book. You may never eat fish on a Monday again.

In his typical style, he speaks his mind, sometimes harshly about the food industry. His cynicism and sarky nature are evident on every page, sometimes, honestly, it gets annoying. That may be due in no small part to the fact that I was reading this book as the new season of No Reservations started, so I might have just been on Bourdain overload.

I wanted to enjoy this book more, but as much as it was full of great writing, excellent imagery, and unique insight into the world of restaurants, I just found myself more annoyed than excited by the book.

I guess part of it was the fact that Bourdain seems to think that working all hours, miscreant geniuses, machisimo, and locker room humor are the sole province of kitchens. I guess it's a blessing that he's never worked in technology--especially in break-fix arenas. It's another place where calling someone a "cocksucker" means you like them, where even if you're a woman, you need to have a dick, or talk like you do. I guess I just felt like he wasn't giving me any new information. Get a bunch of guys together in a high stress, service environment, and you have to be abrasive, just to survive the night.

Anyhow... It wasn't a bad read. I do know now I never plan to work in a kitchen (the book also made me realize just how many cooks/dishwashers etc. I have known over the years, maybe another reason this wasn't such a revelation for me).

Anyhow, I'm going back to fantasy fiction for a while.

“People confuse me. Food doesn't.”

Kitchen Confidential is Bourdain's memoir that offers a deep look at the behind-the-scenes of restaurant kitchens. But two other things stood out to me in late Bourdains’s professional memoir. The first thing is his love of food, and the specific relationship he developed with food early in his childhood. The second thing is the frightening descriptions of his mental state, which I feel were largely overlooked as people were distracted with lushness and brilliant humor with which he described a world of restaurants. Having in mind Bourdain’s death from suicide in 2018, I can presume that he did not receive the adequate help that he desperately need, which is evident in his memoir written almost a decade before the tragic death.

Food is sex

Best chapters in the book for me were the first few chapters about Bourdain's relationship with food. Bourdain eloquently describes the origin of his passion for food. In Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain does not share a lot of his private life nor emotions, and he is kinda hiding, or revealing himself metaphorically, through his trajectory of the professional life in the kitchen. In a lot of ways, the kitchen has all of the space in his memoir, much more than he himself has, or his private life and relationships.
One thing can be presumed from that, of all relationships in life, the relationship he had with food was one of the most important, if not the most important relationship he had.
Even though he does not share a lot from his early childhood and primary family life, except for the notion they traveled frequently, his early life has a veil of melancholy, the veil that grows into the depression of adult age.
But as a lighthouse in the darkness of melancholy, with so much joy, passion, and pure happiness, Bourdain describes the time he realized he fell hopelessly in love with food - the first time he tried oysters in France as a child - the picture than lingered vividly in his memory.

“It tasted of seawater… of brine and flesh… and somehow… of the future…
Everything was different now. Everything.
I'd not only survived-I'd enjoyed.”

Bourdain did not only taste oysters - he experienced the ecstatic sensory joy, the deep value of the sensual experience that can give meaning to life. In rich flavors, he experienced happiness, creativity, inspiration, id, the life force itself. For Bourdain, food is sex as the sensory pleasure that comes from food is life-invigorating and gives existence a new purpose.
For Bourdain, this was transformative experience, the moment of apotheosis.

“I'd learned something. Viscerally, instinctively, spiritually-even in some small, precursive way, sexually-and there was no turning back. The genie was out of the bottle. My life as a cook, and as a chef, had begun.
Food had power.
It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me and others.”

Fining both meaning and drive for life in sensory experiences is by no means a new stance in the world of literature. The ecstatic moments of sensual joy can be found in  Proust's Swann's Way, and in Camus’s The Stranger and The Plague, where the characters experience the transference of absurdity of life in the sensory experience of the moment. But it is beautiful to find such an experience eloquently described in a memoir. Life replicates art and art replicates life.

“I had, as yet, no plans to cook professionally. But I frequently look back at my life, searching for that fork in the road, trying to figure out where, exactly, I went bad and became a thrill-seeking, pleasure-hungry sensualist, always looking to shock, amuse, terrify and manipulate, seeking to fill that empty spot in my soul with something new.”

Kitchen’s closed

The environment of the professional kitchen is intense, unpleasant, and oftentimes ruthless, which Bourdain demonstrates, again and again, through the narrative of memoir. The narrative is somewhat fragmented from chapter to chapter as they're not linked, and each individual chapter could be a standalone short story. I enjoyed greatly the first 150 pages of the book, but the last 150 pages I was struggling and dragging through, so be prepared for uneven writing. There were a few magnificent chapters and a lot less magnificent ones. I think the book would be much better if it had been a more continuous narrative. I feel that a few stories about the kitchen atmosphere of cursing, swearing, boiling, steaming are enough and at times the anecdotes described seemed to me as something you would tell to a group of people that you are trying to impress at the dinner table, not stories of adequate quality to put in a book. But through Bourdain's stories, one learns about the world of the kitchen, the predominantly world of macho men, and one definitely has to have a defensive strong facade to survive sometimes hazardous workplace environment staffed by the misfits.

“The basic character of the chef and cook hasn't wandered too far from the same recognizable personality types found in Orwell, Freleng or Bemelmans: Sensualist, often socially inept outside the kitchen, frequently dyslexic——people with appetites that go beyond food. The kitchen remains a refuge for the fugitive, the obsessed, the border jumper and the borderline, people who are only truly confident behind a stove or standing at the pass. They still and likely always will share a common ethos and patois.“

One of my feelings was constant, that by telling the macho stories Bourdain tried to hide the depth of his psychological suffering that became painfully evident in only a few, but terrifying passages.
Bourdain had prominent personality traits that were present from early adolescence. This is how he described himself;
“Let it suffice to say that by age eighteen I was a thoroughly undisciplined young man, blithely flunking or fading out of college (I couldn't be bothered to attend classes). I was angry at myself and at everyone else. Essentially, I treated the world as my ashtray. I spent most of my waking hours drinking, smoking pot, scheming, and doing my best to amuse, outrage, impress and penetrate anyone silly enough to find me entertaining. I was-to be frank-a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking. Rudderless and unhappy...”

But also, Bourdain was an incredibly charismatic, passionate, intelligent, well-read, eloquent, funny and honest human being, a sensualist that had plenty of life inside himself and who truly appreciated the pleasures of life. Under the strong facade he was deeply sentimental and empathetic, and also suffering from a raging depression he tried to self-medicate through large amounts of alcohol and all kind of drugs, including heroin, an addiction he later on recovered from. This passage shows the depths of his depression and is terrifying in the light of the future event.

“I was utterly depressed. I lay in bed all day, immobilized by guilt, fear, shame and regret, my ashtrays overflowing with butts, unpaid bills stacked everywhere, dirty clothes heaped in the corners. At night, I lay awake with heart palpitations, terrors, bouts of self-loathing so powerful that only the thought of diving through my sixth-floor window onto Riverside Drive gave me any comfort and allowed me to lull myself into a resigned sleep.”

Bourdain’s death is indeed a truly tragic one, and I was deeply sad and moved when I found out about it in 2018. From the time of writing of Kitchen Confidential, and before, to 2018, a year of his death, Bourdain continued to struggle with his mental health. He often brought out death, and in one of his last interviews, he said that he was going to “die in the saddle” — a sentiment that later proved chilling. His statements, as well some passages of the book proved how desperately he needed help. So it is somewhat puzzling that his loved ones expressed their disbelief after the event, with his mother saying he was “absolutely the last person in the world I would have ever dreamed would do something like this.”

“I'm still here. And I'm surprised by that. Every day.”

But oftentimes it is hard to look through the facade of the persona, of cheerful person that makes laugh everyone at the table with self-deprecating humor, the charismatic passionate man, the traveler that loves life, a chef rockstar, watched and loved by millions, with appeal stretched beyond the delicious food he cooked and ate. It is hard to see through all of that and even admit to oneself that there are people in the world quietly suffering as much Bourdain did, haunted by the darkness that they cannot seem to shake. In the last paragraph of the book he writes farewell;

“I’m good. Im free, as it were, of the complications of normal human entanglements, untormented by the beauty, complexity and challenge of a big magnificent and often painful world.”

Rest in peace, Anthony.

I loved the information about the nitty-gritty of restaurant cook station life, how hard and physical that life truly is. It was for me a 3 star read, but rounded to four for the realistic nature of the reveals. Which, I know, are still fairly accurate.

Bourdain in print is exactly as Bourdain in travels, or in audio/tv media work. He's the same anti-establishment let's all tramp along to the lowest common denominator factor (drugs, liquor, any form of low life crudity possible) in friendship and in association that he can then "talk" up and help establish as some quantity definition of being the "norm". It's not original, btw, how Anthony speaks and thinks. There are tons of Boomers of my generation who in repartee and in backgrounds fall similarly into that particular "look at me and my sharp, individual everyman snark" pattern of existence. Anthony is a born ego-maniac. You won't forget that at all in this book reading. It took 2 stars away for me, but that's not fair to the actual content information, so I put one back.

Lots of info here that is important to not eating in restaurants that are "on their way" out, especially in this current economy. In my Michigan there were 11 restaurants in 3 towns. Now there are 4 and one is in that category of "on their way" out and I don't trust the fish on ANY day, let alone a Monday.

There is probably little I myself agree upon with Anthony in any sphere but in the kitchen, but I do think he found his own way and did it his way. Thankfully it was a long distance from where I was at the time. LOL!

Un racconto "onesto" sulla vita da chef di A. Bourdain.
L'autore non si fa sconti.
Interessante anche per tutti i suggerimenti culinari disseminati nel libro.

"No, I want to tell you about the dark recesses of the restaurant underbelly - a subculture whose centuries-old militaristic hierarchy and ethos of 'rum, buggery and the lash' make for a mix of unwavering order and nerve-shattering chaos - because I find it all quite comfortable, like a nice warm bath. I can move around easily in this life. I speak the language. In the small, incestuous community of chefs and cooks in New York City, I know the people, and in my kitchen, I know how to behave (as opposed to in real life, where I'm on shakier ground). I want the professionals who read this to enjoy it for what it is: a straight look at a life many of us have lived and breathed for most of our days and nights to the exclusion of 'normal' social interaction. Never having had a Friday or Saturday night off, always working holidays, being busiest when the rest of the world is just getting out of work, makes for a sometimes peculiar world-view, which I hope my fellow chefs and cooks will recognize. The restaurant lifers who read this may or may not like what I'm doing. But they'll know I'm not lying."

Before No Reservations, there was Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain's straightforward, occasionally too-honest account of the restaurant industry and the demented geniuses who make their living from it. Although there are plenty of meditations on food (the very first section describes the moment when Anthony Bourdain first fell in love with food) and cooking, this is first and foremost a book about restaurants: what kind of people work there, what sort of people should and shouldn't own one, and what goes on behind the scenes. This really functions more as a collection of essays rather than a straightforward memoir, because although events happen in mostly chronological order, there are large gaps missing (for instance, in one chapter Bourdain discusses the time he worked at an Italian restaurant and learned to love Italian food, and in the next chapter he's describing a typical day at his job as head chef of Les Halles) and there's no clear narrative arc. It's a good, in-depth look at the inner workings of restaurants, well-written and brimming with Bourdain's signature no-bullshit piss-and-vinegar tone that I love so well:

"Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is not a life worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all that I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food."

I've worked as a waitress for about two and half years now, so most of the things Bourdain reveals about the food service industry weren't all that shocking to me (people working in a restaurant are often drinking and/or on drugs during service? yawn.) but the book was still able to give me a new perspective into a part of the restaurant industry that I was unfamiliar with. In a restaurant, working the floor and working back of house are two very different worlds, and it was cool to get a look into how the other side lives. It also gave me more sympathy to how damn hard the cooks have to work - after reading sections like the description of Bourdain working as the head chef during the dinner rush, I will never complain again about the cooks where I work taking twenty minutes to make two burgers in the middle of Friday night dinner rush:

"The printer is going nonstop now. My left hand grabs tickets, separates out white copy for grill, yellow copy for sautee, pink copy for me, coffee orders for the busboys. My right hand wipes plates, jams gaufrette potatoes and rosemary sprigs into mashed potatoes, moves tickets from the order to the fire positions, appetizers on order to appetizers out. I'm yelling full-time now, trying to hold it together, keep an even pace. My radar screen is filled with incoming bogeys, and I'm shooting them down as fast as I can. One mistake, where a whole table comes back because of a prematurely fired dupe, or a bad combination of special requests ties up a station for a few critical seconds, or a whole roasted fish or a cote de boeuf has been forgotten? The whole line could come grinding to a dead stop, like someone dropping a wrench into a GM assembly line - utter meltdown, what every chef fears most. If something like this happens it could blow the whole pace of the evening, screw up everybody's heads, and create a deep, dark hole that could be very hard to climb out of."

Required reading for anyone who plans to eat at a restaurant in the near future.

One last thought: does anyone else remember Kitchen Confidential being a failed sitcom once upon a time? I faintly remember watching one episode when it briefly aired, and it was about one of the chef guy's mentor coming to the restaurant, and I remember that he was this really tough exacting guy who would tell his students that he "made two chefs like you in the toilet this morning." I was sure that I was misremembering and that the two weren't related, but then I got to the bit where Bourdain describes his time at the Culinary Institute of America and one of his instructors totally used to say that. Does anyone remember that this show happened?