"Anthony Bourdain, 61, suicide" I want to un-know the news I woke up to this morning. Restless soul, brilliant, funny, beautiful man: I've been half in love with you and with your seemingly perfect life of travel and adventure. Mine is just one of many broken hearts today... May you find peace, and may the daughter and others who adored you find a way to understand without self-blaming.

----

There are three kinds of people: people who think Anthony Bourdain is too arrogant, people who think he's no more arrogant than he deserves to be, and people who don't give a damn which kind we think they are. Anthony Bourdain is the third kind. He is the last legitimate journalist on CNN and a tireless adventurer. I want to travel the world at his side, eating tentacled things to impress him. I would give him a baby if I could find a baby that I think he'd like to have.

Also, this is a pretty good book.

Reading this only now, in 2021, you could say I missed that gourmet meal when it was piping hot. The timing turns out perfect for that documentary that just came out, however, and I’ll try to watch Road Runner within the next few days. This wasn’t planned, believe it or not.

I enjoyed Kitchen Confidential. My picks are all over the place as of late, it feels like I’m trying things on for size again, but Eat a Peach by David Chang was already a hit with me in January and trying out Bourdain’s book this time around brought me back to a similar happy place. The twenty-year difference between the two memoirs makes itself immediately felt; I got a great kick out of it. Popular dishes, star ingredients, other celebrity chefs in the making and their own restaurants, bands the crew listened to while cooking: surely you can imagine the trip back in time Kitchen Confidential now represents. Ooh ah, Frank Sinatra just made it into the dining room. And wait, is that Kirk Douglas over there in that banquette?

Aside from loads of personal stories about bad boys – and girls – rubbing elbows in overheated spaces, there is a wealth of info in this book about restaurant dynamics in general and the constellation of people involved in the food business. I expect most of it to remain relevant to this day. Bourdain has a knack for pacing and never stays in place terribly long, literally or figuratively; one thing that Kitchen Confidential does to perfection, two decades after its publication, is to keep you entertained. Still works!

Now bring out the popcorn, I’m heading to the movies.

I am not, nor have I ever been, a foodie. I wish I was. I wish I had a more adventurous palette that loved encountering new things. But alas, such is not my lot in life. However, I’ve always loved cooking shows and food-based travelogues for reasons that honestly elude me. I still remember watching Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations on the Travel Channel when I was in high school and losing myself in daydreams of exotic locales and finding my way off of their beaten paths and into locals-only areas. I thought Bourdain had one of the most fascinating jobs on the planet. Because of this, I was intrigued by his early life and decided to read my first ever foodie memoir about how he got started in the business.

“I've long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we're talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime 'associates,' food, for me, has always been an adventure.”

Bourdain’s story was incredibly addictive. This was a no-holds-barred look at the industry and the people who populate it, written when such tell-all stories were far from the norm in the food world. I loved Bourdain’s honesty here, both about the kitchens and people who have such a huge place in his life and about his own failings. He didn’t try to show himself in a better light than he felt he deserved, and he had no qualms about confessing his own shortcomings. He also had no problem sharing the shortcomings of others or peeling back the curtains to let the outside world see the seedy underbelly of the food industry. I could have done without some of that knowledge, especially about certain hygienic issues, but the fun was worth the cringing.

“…your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”

I love Bourdain’s passion for food and for the people who prepare it. He passionately praises the people he’s worked with, from executive chefs to busboys and everyone in between. If you’re passionate about your job and give it your all, Bourdain loved you. Also, I had no idea that drugs and sex were such a huge part of the food scene in the 70s and 80s, and reading about Bourdain’s escapades with his fellows in the industry was wild.

“Writing anything is a treason of sorts.”

What I wasn’t expecting was Bourdain’s writing chops. The man really knows how to string together words in ways that not only entertain but inform and transport the reader straight into the heat of the kitchen. With this book, Bourdain launched an entire subgenre of memoir. Food memoirs are now hugely popular, and I honestly don’t think those would be as prevalent or as honest had Bourdain not written Kitchen Confidential. (Side note: If you’re an audiobook fan, Bourdain narrates this himself.)

“I’m not going anywhere. I hope. It's been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost.
But I wouldn't have missed it for the world.”

Have I ever thought about chefs being the rock star, pirate equivalents of the culinary world? Nope. Will I think of them as such from now on? Probably not. But Bourdain sure as hell was a rock star in the food industry, and the world lost him far too soon.

You can find  this review and more at Novel Notions.

It’s evident early on Anthony Bourdain lived the life on the edge and had a penchant for the underworld, the misfits and the miscreants. He depicts his early adventures in the kitchen, making life long friends with some of the seediest players, the kitchens he was most fond of were toxic masculine playgrounds, typical locker room behaviour, plenty of ass slapping, penis grabbing and hurled abuses and insults the order of the day. Very much a place to easily score drugs, get laid and get into all kinds of trouble, it’s also a place he discovers the kinship and loyalty of those same guys, most having his back and him returning the favour. I very much enjoyed hearing the warts and all scenes behind some of the kitchens of New York in the 80’s, the hits and the many misses of the restaurant world. Its a job that requires dedication and lots of stamina to keep up, the restaurant business is not for the faint hearted. It’s not hard to fathom his untimely death by suicide, he was always attracted to destructive forces and ultimately those dark forces sadly ended his life too early.

Ho consumato un barattolo di bicarbonato per arrivare alla fine (era una lettura condivisa, altrimenti avrei lasciato). E confesso, quando mi saliva lo schifo, qualche pagina l’ho saltata. Non ho uno stomaco così forte per reggere certi particolari.
Non ho colto l’utilità e nemmeno il senso di alcune descrizioni di Bourdain, cito come esempi lo sperma sulle scarpe del suo aiutante Steven, e le scopate di Steven-versione-porno con Chuletita loca, mentre, fra un grugnito e un asmatico quasi-orgasmo, telefona all’amico e collega Manuel, per chiedere: “indovina che cosa sto facendo?”. Mi son parse fanfaronate.
Non penso che molteplici e sovrabbondanti porzioni di sesso, alcol, droga, imprecazioni e violenze varie, consumate in cucina per mano di un’orda di disadattati, arricchiscano il menu e facciano effetto WOW!, anzi, già al secondo giro si rischia lo “sbadiglio da ripetizione”. Insomma, più che trasgressione m’è parsa mera e fastidiosetta operazione di marketing.
Serpeggia odio puro per i vegetariani. Io sono vegana (addirittura!). Ma non mi sono sentita offesa né incompresa, quindi non replico. Sorvolo. E penso che difficilmente m’imbatterò in un lupanare gastronomico come quelli descritti.
Farò attenzione ai coltelli, coi quali ho un pessimo rapporto.
Non mi preoccuperò dei ristoranti narrati, che non frequento, ma spargerò la voce tra le mie conoscenze. Anche se forse sono più informate di me.
Dirò ai miei amici onnivori di quanto sia pericoloso mangiare pesce, e non solo, al ristorante il lunedì, e li informerò anche di tutto il resto. Grazie.

Il ritmo narrativo m’è piaciuto. Qualche perplessità sulla traduzione, ma non cercherò la versione in lingua. Ho già dato. E il bicarbonato è finito.

P.S. Sono una voce stonata. Il libro in realtà ha ottenuto enorme successo a livello mondiale, è stato tradotto in svariate lingue e ha ispirato una serie TV.

Ho trovato questa dichiarazione di Bourdain del 2017 a proposito della sua opera:
“To the extent which my work in Kitchen Confidential celebrated or prolonged a culture that allowed the kind of grotesque behaviors we’re hearing about all too frequently is something I think about daily, with real remorse.”
Un atto di pentimento, pare.

Sometimes mouth-watering, other times nauseating, and at all times 100% candid, Anthony Bourdain's memoirs of the underbelly of the culinary world might very well turn you off completely from ever eating out again, even as it celebrates the life-affirming, glorious, and sensual nature of food in our lives.

Bourdain is not just a celebrity who ghost wrote a bestseller. He is a true writer who happens to write about food. His flamboyant, rich style may not sit lightly on every reader's stomach and may even cause indigestion. Overall, I found it highly entertaining but I did think that the book tended to drag on a bit.

A travelogue to Japan, in particular, felt like an appendage to an otherwise coherent narrative. For all his worldliness, Bourdain's impressions of Japan reminded me of a wide-eyed, 19th century European poet in the first throes of Orientalism.

If you are looking for politically correct, polite, refined, collection of tips and advice to improve your next dinner party, please stay FAR FAR AWAY. Bourdain's culinary world makes the debauched world of drug-addled, over-sexed, grimy rock stars and their groupies feel quaint.

My first exposure to Anthony Bourdain, via his show No Reservations, left me with with the sense of a true asshole who sneered down his nose with aging punk-rock disdain at people and things he deemed beneath him, and, honestly, it seemed like most people and things were beneath him. For some reason, even though he crossed my Southern sensibilities and turned me off to him on that first exposure, I kept watching the show and realized that there is a lot more to him than that first impression suggested. No Reservations is now my favorite show and when I saw a copy of Kitchen Confidential for sale in the book store, I snapped it up and began reading it that night. I unfortunately wasn't able to keep his voice in my head (his delivery is a large part of the draw of his show for me) but the series of stories from his past that he lays out are captivating even when heard inside my skull as coming from the disembodied larynx of my standard reading voice.

Personally, I didn't find the shocking bits all that shocking. I've been backstage at good restaurants. I've heard it all before. Honestly, I'm not really all that hung up on food safety. Instead it was the parts dealing with his own erratic career path that kept me interested. Instead of leaving this book with the impression that Bourdain was an even bigger jerk than my first impression left me with (as someone suggested would happen), I left the last page of the book with an even more positive view of the guy. Sure, Bourdain is still cynical, obscene, and wears that brusque New York attitude like a badge of honor, but what stands out in his book is his glowing admiration for people who earned his respect for their willingness to work or pushing him down the right path as a chef (his almost loving references to Bigfoot and Pino are prime examples), his seeming compulsion to take in less than desirable underlings, and his complete willingness to point out when and where he screwed up. In this more recent update, he even points out that he learned he was wrong about Emeril Lagasse (as a chef and person, not as a TV Celebrity) and frequently comments that he isn't a top-tier chef because of his own mistakes. He even goes so far as to point out that the only reason he is able to hang out with and talk to the Michelin-starred chefs he always admired from afar is because of his notoriety as author and TV host.

This isn't some self-aggrandizing piece literary self-pleasuring. This is a very human piece of literature that reveals its author to be a man who may have grown up a couple of decades too late, but isn't too vain to admit that when he did it was in a large part because of those who took a chance on him and supported him when he was at his worse.

I love food and I love hot sexy chefs with potty mouths.
I remember first discovering Anthony Bourdain on the Food Network many years ago. It was 3am and I was unable to sleep and here was this brooding, hot piece of ass chain smoking and touring Russia.
I never remembered his name but he haunted my dreams until I re-discovered him years later on the Travel Channel show, No Reservations.
In Kitchen Confidential, he is able to translate his sultry self onto paper.
But he is not just a piece of meat, my friends. He is a very good writer with a quit wit and he conveys a passion that touched my [fill in the blank] like no other.
Anthony Bourdain pretty much despises vegetarians, but I do not hold it against him. In fact, he makes me wish I was a heartless carnivore like him. And we would eat steak tartar together and take bathes together in a pool of goats blood.

I've said too much. I'm sorry.

Working-Class Contradictions 101…

Preamble:
--I’ll forever be grateful of this American bloke travelling the world (esp. Global South), having the courage and respect to actually visit the “underbelly” of inequality, all the unglamorous work that keep society running (which most tourists avoid), and popularizing his findings to sheltered and propagandized American/Western audiences.
…However, this doesn’t happen in this book (Bourdain’s debut nonfiction), so I’ll save this for his next book.

Highlights:

1) Immigrants: Foundation of the Domestic Working-Class:
--The seeds for empathy were planted with Bourdain’s experiences working with migrant workers in the sweltering confines of US restaurant kitchens:

[…] and their comrades, the Refugees, usually emigres and immigrants for whom cooking is preferable to death squads, poverty or working in a sneaker factory for 2 dollars a week. […]

Generally speaking, American cooks-meaning, born in the USA, possibly school-trained, culinarily sophisticated types who know before you show them what monter au beurre means and how to make a bearnaise sauce-are a lazy, undisciplined and, worst of all, high-maintenance lot, annoyingly opinionated, possessed of egos requiring constant stroking and tune-ups, and, as members of a privileged and wealthy population, unused to the kind of 'disrespect' a busy chef is inclined to dish out. No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American. The Ecuadorian, Mexican, Dominican and Salvadorian cooks I've worked with over the years make most [Culinary Institute of America]-educated white boys look like clumsy, sniveling little punks.

In New York City, the days of the downtrodden, underpaid illegal immigrant cook, exploited by his cruel masters, have largely passed-at least where quality line cooks are concerned. Most of the Ecuadorians and Mexicans I hire from a large pool-a sort of farm team of associated and often related former dishwashers-are very well-paid professionals, much sought after by other chefs. Chances are they've worked their way up from the bottom rung; they remember well what it was like to empty out grease traps, scrape plates, haul leaking bags of garbage out to the curb at four o'clock in the morning. A guy who's come up through the ranks, who knows every station, every recipe, every corner of the restaurant and who has learned, first and foremost, your system above all others is likely to be more valuable and long-term than some bed-wetting white boy whose mom brought him up thinking the world owed him a living, and who thinks he actually knows a few things. […]

[Suggestions for future chefs] 2. Learn Spanish! I can't stress this enough. Much of the workforce in the industry you are about to enter is Spanish-speaking. The very backbone of the industry, whether you like it or not, is inexpensive Mexican, Dominican, Salvadorian and Ecuadorian labor-most of whom could cook you under the table without breaking a sweat. If you can't communicate, develop relationships, understand instructions and pass them along, then you are at a tremendous disadvantage.

Should you become a leader, Spanish is absolutely essential. Also, learn as much as you can about the distinct cultures, histories and geographies of Mexico, EI Salvador, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic. A cook from Puebla is different in background from a cook from Mexico City. Someone who fled EI Salvador to get away from the Mano Blanco is not likely to get along with the right-wing Cuban working next to him. These are your co-workers, your friends, the people you will be counting on, leaning on for much of your career, and they in turn will be looking to you to hold up your end. Show them some respect by bothering to know them. Learn their language. Eat their food. It will be personally rewarding and professionally invaluable.

--Growing up in an immigrant family, we never ate at restaurants, but we worked in them. By the time we finally settled down, I was privileged to not have to work there for survival, so my first job as a dishwasher was only a casual glance.
--When I read to learn about the world, I'm not just looking for deconstructive criticisms. I'm also looking for constructive opportunities in this contradictory world, gems like the above. Another example I always go to: War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier

--Since the 2024 Trump victory in the US elections was a couple days ago, let me add a few points:
i) The fearmongering around a recent “illegal immigrants crisis” is fascist scapegoating 101. I’ll write an entire review countering each myth in the future; in the meantime, see Hasanabi’s video You Are Wrong About Immigration... countering the key myths (drain on resources, being “illegal”…and the most vulgar myth on violent crimes which starts at 20:40 of the video).
ii) The Republican Party have been accelerating down the fascist road for a while now. The key change in the 2024 election is the corporate leaders of the Democratic Party reversing their rhetorical protests against Trump’s “Build The Wall” fascism to accept the “illegal immigrants crisis”. This spineless attempt at opportunism only normalizes fascism’s invented reality, shifting the “Overton Window” (range of mainstream political debate) further into fascism, where obviously the fascists have the advantage. See Hasanabi’s How did Donald Trump Win The Election video.
…This is one of endless examples of liberalism paving the way to fascism:
-Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
-how fascism is colonial practices returning home: Discourse on Colonialism
-Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
-The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump
…These Republican and Democrat elites deserve to be deported off the planet, in one of Musk’s rockets (along with Musk himself, another blatant example of the liberal-to-fascist pipeline).
iii) This fascism is directed from the top (Republican/Democrat politicians, think-tanks and media). The American public, despite all their baggage, actually poll with contradictory views on immigration, both being readily triggered by fearing “illegal aliens”, but also recognizing the need for amnesty. This is another crucial point that Hasanabi highlights. Please understand that ignorant cynicism of “human nature” is a key tool in the liberal-to-fascism pipeline.

2) Contradictions:
--There’s a reason why Bourdain seems universally popular. He’s a bundle of contradictions which he communicates with a crude yet poetic flair, so everyone can take their pick.
…However, I’m less inspired by vicariously enjoying the roller-coaster ride of a man struggling with addiction.

[…] your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.

[…] 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.

…Yes, debauchery and the abyss are fascinating, it’s difficult to look away, but when my mind is sober I prefer not to elevate this to the top. This is why I started with the gem on immigrants, to highlight those moments of healing.
--Ultimately, Bourdain’s working-class framework is still mired in a capitalist vicious cycle ("American Dream" meritocracy). Yes, it’s important for workers to find some dignity in their work (and often an important start in communications, like Bernie Sanders, to bridge to deeper explorations), but the manner in which this is described in the book still seems to normalize extreme hierarchical exploitation as just life/human nature.
...I do appreciate Bourdain finishing with an example of a restaurant he greatly respects where the kitchen environment was not the vulgarity that he was used to. But there was still little structural substance of creative alternatives for worker empowerment which I focus on (radical political economy).

I am ashamed to say I knew very little about Anthony Bourdain before he died. I knew he was a celebrity chef, with a pile of published books, TV shows and a reputation for being abrasive, but not much else. After reading this, I regret not paying more attention when I could, because I found Mr. Bourdain to be an incredibly passionate, well-read, deeply articulate, hysterically funny and brutally honest human being. It is creepy to think I could have crushed on him super hard was he still around?

I'm amused by people who think he was arrogant: I mean, half French, half New Yorker is not a blueprint for humility, but I also found him to have worked his ass off and to have earned his success. He decided he wanted to be the best, and then single-mindedly gave everything to that goal. There's a strong working class ethic that transpires from his writing, a love of work well-done, of hard work that makes him someone with very high standards - because he knew how tough it is to do your best. I have a lot of respect for that, and as far as I am concerned, he earned the right to be a snob. He also acknowledges how grateful he is to anyone who helped him, anyone who gave him an opportunity, anyone who showed loyalty and shared his love of food and good work. That shows a lot of heart; most prickly people are kinda gooey in the middle, and I feel that Bourdain was like that too.

A career in food is a hard, hard thing to do. I don't know if everyone realizes it's not really glamorous, that it requires the weirdest hours, the most strenuous pace and the most frustrating interactions. Bourdain wanted everyone to know what there is behind the curtain, who teams up to put together the beautifully plated and delicious things you eat at fancy restaurants. He did that with self-deprecating humor, and gave no-nonsense advice for people who want to cook like he did - at the risk of deeply offending vegetarians all over the world.

Reading this after Bourdain committed suicide is a bit rough, because while he certainly had a tendency for self-destructive behavior (he mentions excessive drinking and developing a heroin addiction), he also clearly loved to feel alive. How hard it must get for a man who loved life as much as he did to decide it wasn't worth living anymore is beyond what I can imagine, and it makes me incredibly sad to think he took his own life.

Four and a half stars, rounded down because I know a few of those chapters are old articles Bourdain wrote for various publications, and I think the book would hold itself together better if it had been a more continuous narrative. But I will be looking up his other books and scour Netflix for his shows.

--

Additional thoughts:

-Yup, food is sex. I can't trust people who don't enjoy food, who eat just to sustain their bodies and not for the amazing sensual pleasure that eating can be. Maybe its the French and Italian upbringing, but that's just not right to me. Love and fully experience your food! Giving someone delicious, lovingly prepared food is a profound act of love in my opinion. All these thoughts also apply to sex. Obviously.

-My (French) father always said that margarine is the devil's lubricant, and I think he would have disowned me if he had ever found that greasy blasphemy in my fridge. It's nice to have this opinion vindicated. Apologies to my father-in-law and his "I can't believe it's not butter" spray bottles: I will never surrender, Ed!

-Sorry my darling Anthony, but demi-glace is overrated. And no one gets between me and a plate of smoked salmon eggs Benny and lives to tell the tale. Hollandaise is LIFE. Bacteria, shmackteria. What happened to living dangerously?!

-Yes, excessive meat consumption increases the risk of lifestyle diseases. It's also terrible for ecological sustainability. Less meat and a lot more veggies is definitely the way to go, but people who preach about veganism and try to make other people feel like bad human beings for not hopping onto their high-horse really, really need to pipe the fuck down.

-This book made me fall in love with Bourdain; I started reading all his other books and binging every one of his shows I could find. A piece of my heart will always belong to him - not just because he was a smokin' hot, smart-mouthed hunk, but because of how inspired I am by his work, and because of how much I've learned reading him and watching him explore the world. Thank god he wrote this book, which started it all.

n  My book club voted on this memoir as our Book of the Month for December.n

I was totally on board. I know next to nothing about Anthony Bourdain, except that he visited West Virginia in 2017 for his show, CNN's Parts Unknown. The reason I know this? I'm a born and bred West Virginia girl, and he genuinely seemed to like my home state, Tweeting:

n  

This place moves me like very, very few other places. And I been everywhere. #WestVirginia

n
After that, he held a special place in my heart. West Virginia gets such a bad rap in the media...it was nice to see a celebrity portray it in a positive light. I was genuinely saddened to hear he'd passed away last year.

Needless to say, because of his genuine affection for my home, I was excited to read his memoir.

Unfortunately, it felt as though Bourdain was strolling down memory lane and sharing stories about his odd assortment of friends/co-workers. Yes, he talked about food, but mostly in French, which I didn't understand. And yes, I chuckled a few times (especially about the "me/meat" story), but my enthusiasm was dampened by the repetitive nature of the story and lack of a clear timeline. The book seemed more like a random collection of stories and memories with zero cohesion, though at times, he'd share little gems like this one:

“I'm not going anywhere. I hope. It's been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn't have missed it for the world.”

Rest In Peace.

Recommended for foodies everywhere.
2.5 stars

n  "I'll be right here. Until they drag me off the line."n

Like many of my generation I grew up with Anthony Bourdain's various TV series playing in the background, and I always had a warm place for him in my heart. He was one of those public figures whose air of candidness allows you feel like you know them personally, even if you also know that that's an illusion.

Maybe because of that sense of closeness, it took me awhile to fully register his death. Only in the last couple of years has it really sunk in for me that he's gone, and what that means—the usual but never-easy ordeal of coming to terms with a cherished life cut short before it had to be. But I've also been a little wary of the mythologizing that's gone on since that day in June of 2018. In those five years I've seen Bourdain transformed into an almost saintly figure by his fans, even as the sordid details of his last months are repeatedly dredged up for tabloid-like sensationalism. I suspect the latter would have infuriated him and the former would've made him laugh, while also probably infuriating him. Whatever else he may or may not have been, Tony always made it clear that he was no saint, and had no intention to be. That was, for lack of a less skin-crawling word, a core part of his "brand."

That's extremely obvious when reading this book, the tell-all memoir of culinary New York that first put Bourdain on the map as a media personality right at the turn of the new millennium. Now that he's been known primarily as a TV host and professional traveler for over twenty years, it's easy to forget that Tony spent the first quarter-century of his working life in restaurant kitchens. His shows were always food-centric, sure, but he rarely did the "celebrity chef" thing of showing off his own know-how on camera, and he seemed to resent the prospect that he might be grouped together with the likes of Bobby Flay, Gordon Ramsay, or Emeril Lagasse.

But Kitchen Confidential came before all that. This book is all about the chef's (or sous-chef's, or line cook's, or dishwasher's) lifestyle, with the scope rarely expanding beyond the insular world of higher-end New York dining. The approach is snarky and deliberately provocative, full of profanity, semi-politically-incorrect remarks, and gross-out details about the nastier side of food prep. This is not Anthony Bourdain the TV host, soulfully meditating on the legacy of U.S. imperialism in Cambodia. This is Tony Bourdain the punk rock chef, gleefully spilling the dirty secrets of an industry with plenty to hide, apparently unconcerned that he might be implicated in the process.

The book is definitely a product of its time, with its distinctly '90s edginess and swaggeringly masculine POV. There's a lot of "boys will be boys"-style commentary on behavior that would today be considered workplace harassment or worse, and Bourdain admitted in later years to feeling guilty for the role he played in normalizing these sorts of toxic, male-dominated work environments. At the same time, most of the depictions of bad behavior here arguably serve more of a documentary purpose ("This is who's cooking your food, like it or not") than a celebratory one, and—without letting him off the hook too much—I think it's pretty clear that Bourdain himself is much more sensitive than he lets on. He is, for instance, very very insistent about flagging up the crucial role that Latin American immigrants play in virtually every New York kitchen, and takes every opportunity to express his admiration for these underappreciated and maligned workers. He's also refreshingly open about his own privileged upbringing and access to resources many of his colleagues didn't have.

Either way, I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into when I started, so I wasn't caught off-guard by the tone. Honestly it was even a relief to go back to this younger Tony, when he was still full of vigor and not quite as haunted as his later manifestations seem, at least in hindsight, to be. I was reading this because I respect and miss him, sure, but I was also reading it for fun, and it was nice to find that I could still do that. Even listening to the audiobook, energetically narrated by Bourdain himself, I never felt overwhelmed by emotion in the way even a few minutes of one of his shows can sometimes make me feel nowadays. The written word can be intimate, but it's also mediated in a way that candid footage of a person isn't.

That's not to say that there aren't painful passages here. Bourdain doesn't linger on his personal life, but he is upfront about his struggles with heroin addiction, and even after he kicks that particular habit he still depicts a lifestyle saturated with booze, painkillers, and cigarette smoke. He never explicitly mentions depression or mental illness, but he speaks of passing years of his life in an aimless fog. He muses a few times about his eventual death and legacy, and at one point talks casually about a period when he consoled himself with the reminder that he could always take his own life. But these are fleeting glimpses; mostly the tone is life-affirming and forward-looking. The book ends with Tony just starting to discover the joys of world travel, and seemingly excited for what the future holds.

Tempting as it is now to search for significance in Bourdain's every word, I don't think Kitchen Confidential invites or even holds up to that sort of deep scrutiny. It's a pretty casual affair, more of a hodge-podge of topical essays, obviously-exaggerated anecdotes, and autobiographical sketches than anything more linear or coherent, and there's frankly little insight into Tony the human being as opposed to Tony the chef; we get one brief episode from his childhood, a few fleeting mentions of a wife, some offhand remarks about his addiction, and that's about it. The rest is focused on the food. Personally I enjoyed it for what it was, and didn't need or even particularly want it to be anything more.