Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly: Updated Edition

by Anthony Bourdain

978-0-0608-9922-6 (copyright 2000) published by Ecco, and Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers

This is the ground-breaking memoir of the late, beloved chef, author, TV personality, and globe-trotter, Anthony Bourdain. Despite the explosion in recent years of celebrity chefs and TV foodie programs, this scintillating exposé of the culinary world is superbly written, and it stands the test of time as a classic.

Written by the now famous and infamous Anthony Bourdain, readers get a sneak peek into professional kitchens — without filter — by way of Bourdain’s sharp tongue, intelligence, and wit. Imagine the storyteller with cigarette in mouth, white jacket on, eyes locked, and leaning in. He describes his incredible personal drive to become a master in the kitchen, whether he recognized it as that at the time or not, starting by nostalgically recounting his upbringing in France, where his palate was awakened to sophisticated international cuisine. This foreshadowed the same intrepid curiosity and hunger for culinary perfection and adventure that would later be revisited when Bourdain talks about his visit to Les Halles Toyko and his time spent wandering the streets in search of the undiscovered. He talks about his first days working in the lowest positions at a dive in Provincetown, to his experience earning his way through a degree at the Culinary Institute of America, and to inventing exciting new culinary techniques in a bold entrepreneurial catering business venture.  

The introduction to the book is relatable even to those outside the culinary world. It states that the book is simply about a guy who followed a career path that was challenging, but he did it because it felt like a calling. And yet his calling, his story, even years after it has become mainstream, is so fantastical, because he was a trailblazer for documenting it all. Waking in the early hours of the morning before another 17 hour shift and sitting at the typewriter, he pulled the curtain back, revealing the secrets that lurk right behind every kitchen door. He crafted a genius insider look at the life of a chef before there was such a thing as a celebrity chef — and he captured countless hearts with his daring passion for food and gripping, tactile storytelling. His mission with the book was to transport the reader into his special world, behind-the-scenes of the kitchen as a whole, and he did that.

But it’s not all adventure and misadventure. In keeping with his claim that the book is actually intended specifically for other chefs to read, he truly provides the lay of the land. There is a whole chapter on knives and other kitchen staples, along with some basic cooking techniques. That chapter might be a little tedious were it not for all the home chefs now who will read it like gospel. There is a long, hilarious guide to multi-lingual kitchen lingo and insider terms of endearment for the equipment and various tasks and commands of the kitchen. He passes along the advice of all his hard-earned lessons in the restaurant business. He knows every trick of the trade and lays bare which will help you survive and which will get you killed. Chefs and foodies alike will delight that the book is chock full of details about all the figures and influences he mingled with in the NY culinary scene, some familiar, some foreign. To read the book is truly to escape into Bourdain’s workaholic world.

He talks about the psychology of food – eating it and wanting to serve it. He explains the masochistic tendencies and insanely inflated ego of the kind of person who wants to open a restaurant. He gives a glimpse into that frenetic, precarious world, telling the reader in loving detail about his mentor who showed him true grit and inspired him to follow his instincts towards success. He talks with brutal clarity not just about his mentors but all the intense bonds he created along the way. The characters who comprise every kitchen he describes range from sweet to insane to downright thuggish.  One could argue that even the candor and reverence with which Bourdain describes the personalities of kitchen staff is endearing in all its forms, but it would be hard to deny his penchant for the motley, sleep-deprived, highly volatile, knife-wielding forms.

Bourdain describes how he spent a couple of years working at the Rainbow Room in New York, during which time he had no life outside of the daily grind. The restaurant was like a well-oiled bootcamp for learning to serve scores of people with exacting repetition. No glamour involved. He frequently references his time at Supper Club and Les Halles in New York, where he found a home for many years. In some ways, he describes kitchen ethics like the Wild West, anything goes as long as the plate is impeccable and served on cue. In other ways he describes it through rigid codes of conduct, militant cleanliness, and team work. The kitchen is described as a submarine-like space with dangers at every turn. As such, he describes the chef’s station like an extension of the nervous system. There are known rhythms and actions to the organism and an environment that perpetuates survival only with adaptation. 

For the bulk of the book, Bourdain describes working at various well- and lesser-known restaurants that have dotted the New York landscape over the years — navigating the successes and failures of those ventures, and gathering savvy all the while navigating his own personal ups and downs. He recounts tales of helping new restaurateurs, and of sabotaging them. He’s candid about the grueling, often violent, nature of kitchen work and business, and about how taxing it is on the body, not the least of which is because of rampant drug use from weed to cocaine to heroin. The kitchen is a place for tattoos, scorch marks, lacerations, rashes, and other skin wounds. Life in the kitchen is full of battle scars, mental and physical, with permanent gnarls, callouses, blotches, and amputations. He somehow maintains this as a price worth paying to work in a kitchen. Each plate of food is a reminder of the worth of the journey. And it goes without saying the book is abundantly full of passionately described dishes, from the simple to the complex. And the reader starts to viscerally understand, like an electric charge through the spine, that the energy of a well-oiled kitchen plays like an orchestra at crescendo.

One of the most fascinating and fun chapters is his warning list of do’s and don’t’s for consumers. He spills some major beans. He suggests never to order fish on a Monday because it’s probably on the verge of expiring after the high turn-over of the weekend stock. When a restaurant presents you with a “special,” it’s actually clearance of food about to expire. Never order mussels. Never order “well-done” or meat and fish covered in sauce. Never, ever order hollandaise. Table bread is recycled from other tables about 50% of the time. The secrets go on and on and you’ll have to read the book to delight and fear in them all.  

Despite that celebrity chefs are more common since the book was first published and kitchens have somewhat cleaned up their acts, the behind-the-scenes grit of this book remains jarringly evergreen and true. Bourdain didn’t just write his own life in vivid detail, he transcended it, and wrote universally about the life of anyone who works in a professional kitchen. No reader will eat at a restaurant again without thinking of the relationship between the food and the good souls who prepared it.

The Updated Edition contains additional postscript material by and about Bourdain.