Kitchen Confidential
Anthony Bourdain, 2000
A chef's memoir of the restaurant underworld: late nights, bad behavior, raw oysters, and the strange brotherhood of the line.
Anthony Bourdain
Bourdain's 1999 New Yorker essay 'Don't Eat Before Reading This' led to this book and made him famous.
Feels like curiosity, wonder and freedom.
The people who cook your dinner are not who you think.
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. Books by Anthony Bourdain
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