Book: Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain

This past weekend I finished reading Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain, first published in 2000.

One of thirteen books written by Bourdain, this is his personal memoir and behind the scenes look into the inner-workings of East Coast restaurant kitchens from Provincetown in Cape Cod to New York City.

Bourdain was an early riser and would wake up, light a cigarette, and write pages for Kitchen Confidential on his computer before going to cook at work.

What I love about the book is that it’s clearly his voice. His bawdy descriptions and candid accounts of his adventures to becoming a chef give you an appreciation into how difficult it is to create a successful restaurant.

He begins his story as a young boy in the early 1960s developing his palate and learning to appreciate food. The book takes you through the 1970s where he worked through the sweaty ranks of grueling kitchen shifts, through his adventures later in the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), to the inner workings of being a top executive chef at places like New York’s Brasserie Les Halles back at the start of the 21st century. He chronicles a cast of gritty misfits, sometimes conniving, and hard working characters from under-appreciated line cooks and kitchen staff, to food suppliers, to restaurateurs, to customers, and so on, that are the heart and soul of the often painful and tough-as-nails restaurant industry.

He describes in detail his wake-up call that food could be important. As a fourth-grader, Bourdain with his parents sailed aboard the Queen Mary to France where he discovered Vichyssoise, a chilled potato soup. While in Europe his penchant grew for runny cheeses, fish, sweetbreads, eels, oysters, and baguettes dipped in hot chocolate.

Through his odyssey from basic knife skills, understanding ingredients, learning Spanish in the kitchen (a must have skill if you’re going to be in the restaurant business), to understanding people really, he gives the reader insights into who he was as a cook, commanding and leading kitchens, a writer, a focused human and one of the great American storytellers.

[Photo caption: Water color sketch of Anthony Bourdain by Harry Gold -instagram.com/harry24k]

Shockingly, Bourdain died by suicide while on location in France on June 8th, 2018. This blog post is published on June 8, 2020 marking the anniversary of his death. Obviously, I never met or knew Bourdain, but I miss him. I’ll read more of his books so I can visit with him again.