Kitchen Confidential

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His work has appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker, and he was a contributing authority for Food Arts magazine.

The structure of the book is choppy and doesn’t have a linear narrative, which makes it hard to follow the thread of his story. 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. 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.So for my first few weeks in France, I explored underground passageways, looking for dead Nazis, played miniature golf, sneaked cigarettes, read a lot of Tintin and Astérix comics, scooted around on my friends' motorbikes and absorbed little life-lessons from observations that, for instance, the family friend Monsieur Dupont brought his mistress to some meals and his wife to others, his extended brood of children apparently indifferent to the switch. I'm just not a group-orientated person, most of the people I get on best with aren't either, and I think there can be something peculiarly suffocating about large single-sex groups when one is expected to fit in with them as a member of the same sex.

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. Though one notable thing about AB and most of his colleagues here, in contrast to people with similar lifestyles in other industries: if they were anything, they were reliable. I had to admit whilst reading Kitchen Confidential - in a way that I wouldn't have allowed myself to when I was in my twenties - that the extended banter described there is equally irritating and dislikable (though there is arguably a verbal creativity to it - before it gets too repetitive - that I can respect).

The menu selections for my brother and me expanded somewhat, to include steak-frites and steak haché (hamburger). I saw Boeing Boeing with Jerry Lewis and Tony Curtis in the Queen's movie theater, and a Bardot flick. The descriptions of certain food ‘encounters’ were probably some of my favorite morsels in the book.

By talking about his own addiction, he his able to present himself and the story not as just a smug tell-all but as equally flawed as the over the top, dishonest and delusional people he worked with. I never got around to reading it when it was first published back in 2000, but I've always been a fan of his, catching his No Reservations and Parts Unknown whenever I had the chance. 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. For Bourdain, food is sex as the sensory pleasure that comes from food is life-invigorating and gives existence a new purpose.All of our books are 100% brand new, unread and purchased directly from the publishers in bulk allowing us to pass the huge savings on to you! My chef friends in New York would have gouged out an eye or given up five years of their lives for the meal I was about to have. The kind of book you read in one sitting, then rush about annoying your coworkers by declaiming whole passages. The softcover edition introduces a new preface by Anthony Bourdain that is not in the hardcover edition. The sections where he’s relating stories about his coworkers and the New York restaurant scene are great; the personal sections, not so much.

Some parts of this book are eye-opening and interesting, you definitely won't look at a restaurant or its food the same way again. After twenty-five years of 'sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine', chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain decides to tell all. Excerpted from Kitchen Confidential Updated Ed by Anthony Bourdain Copyright ©2007 by Anthony Bourdain. I’m an amateur home cook but really appreciate the effort and creativity it takes to be a Chef or work in any commercial kitchen. 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.

As I listened to Bourdain's narration of Kitchen Confidential, his memoir of how food transformed his focus and led to his culinary career, I still miss Tony and am saddened by his suicide.