Kitchen Confidential

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Best chapters in the book for me were the first few chapters about Bourdain's relationship with food. So then the guy gives him a weird look, and the interview ends with Bourdain knowing he's not getting the job.

Kitchen Confidential is a definite recommendation for Bourdain fans and for those interested in the restaurant business. From Bourdain's first oyster in the Gironde, to his lowly position as dishwasher in a honky tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown (where he witnesses for the first time the real delights of being a chef); from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop ROckefeller Center, to drug dealers in teh East Village, from TOkyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain's tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable. Registered office address: Unit 34 Vulcan House Business Centre, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EF.

Filled with wild anecdotes of kitchen misbehaviour, drugs, sex, rock and roll, more drugs, truffle oil. Almost two decades ago, the New Yorker published a now infamous article, "Don't Eat before You Read This," by then little-known chef Anthony Bourdain. Unlike many memoirs, Bourdain was never afraid to admit his flaws, his transgressions, his pet peeves, all of which served to make him more human and make his story more compelling.

Yet only now, in the few months since his shocking suicide, did I sit down to read his nearly 20-year-old look at his journey to executive chef, the knowledge he gained and the trouble he stepped into, time after time. I thought I simply had a misfortune of working in crappy places, but, apparently, all cooks are exactly like that! However, my romantic notions of having lost yet another a great person to the tragedy of suicide, have simmered somewhat, down to a dull sauce. There is a particularly powerful chapter towards the end of the book where he goes through blow by blow an average day in the life of a chef and damn by the end I almost wanted to get up at 5:00 the next day and join him on the line… Almost. Released in 2000, the book is both Bourdain's professional memoir and a behind-the-scenes look at restaurant kitchens.After twenty-five years of 'sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine', chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain decided to tell all. Chef, author, and raconteur Anthony Bourdain is best known for traveling the globe on his TV show Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

He walks a few blocks down the street before he realizes the guy actually asked, "What do you know about MEAT. Kitchen Confidential is a fast, compelling read, and currently I don't have time (especially if I want to catch up with reading challenges) to start a bunch of big old classics.

While interesting for the non-culinary inclined, I think it would be better received by someone with a kitchen background or a person who has worked in food and beverage.

Halfway through this book I remembered I don't have the slightest bit of interest in the culinary arts whatsoever. 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. The only really funny anecdote I found was when he was in an interview for chef at a new steakhouse in New York, things were going smoothly until the owner asked him, "What do you know about me? In particular, his chapter on his first visit to Japan has all the flavors of what would become his trademark later. From the perspective as an outsider and a ghastly food nerd myself, it is fascinating to see the unsanitary truth (did you see what I did there?He supports this statement by numerous stories of his drug-, crime- and sex-infused culinary career. He talks about genius or near-genius chefs he has worked with, and how some of these people have become his loving, lifetime friends in which he has absolute trust and faith.