Kitchen Confidential Updated Edition: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (P.S.)
by Anthony Bourdain
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Book Summary Information
Author: Anthony BourdainEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-01-09
ISBN: 0060899220
Number of pages: 312
Publisher: Ecco
Book Reviews of Kitchen Confidential Updated Edition: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (P.S.)
Book Review: Passionate, Fascinating and Extremely Funny
Summary: 5 Stars
P.G. Wodehouse and Keith Richards have merged their sperm and implanted it into Julia Child's egg, giving the world Anthony Bourdain.
Don't read Kitchen Confidential on the subway. Like the best Bertie-and-Jeeves concoctions, Bourdain's memoir of his life as an over-educated journeyman pirate chef will have you bursting into such loud, sobbing laughter so often that your fellow passengers will be on their cell phones to the men in the white coats asking that you be carted off to protective custody.
The thing about Anthony Bourdain, though, is that he's far more than a prankster. That's what makes Kitchen Confidential so much more than "light summer reading." As is actually pretty obvious with Keith Richards, the charming bad-boy persona that Bourdain cultivates harbors a keen intelligence, professional passion of the highest order, a compassionate heart, and the wisdom of a man who's seen and done just about everything and lived to tell about it.
Kitchen Confidential is full of funny anecdotes about Bourdain's wayward life, falling in love with food as a child on family holidays in France, attending Amherst, and eventually ending up in culinary school and working in a series of B-movie cooking jobs.
Bourdain has traveled through the American Food Revolution. When he was coming up, Julia Child had started her little insurgency on American TV, but the nation's restaurants and supermarkets by and large lagged behind. In 1975, I remember my junior high home economics teacher telling our class that the "best" (or at least most expensive) restaurant in Seattle was using Bacos artificial allegedly-bacon-like bits in its salads, and my father reporting that his restauranteur golf buddies confessed to using margarine instead of butter to reduce food costs. Stay-at-home mothers everywhere were whipping up Hamburger Helper, or if feeling adventurous, turning to Peg Bracken's "I Hate to Cook Book" for tips on using canned cream of mushroom soup to turn any ordinary item--chicken, steak, carrots, ice cream--into a "gourmet" dish. All ends well when Bourdain lands at Brasserie les Halles, cooking his beloved French classics. In those dark years before (I hate to say it since I can see where Bourdain comes from when he calls her Pol Pot in a muumuu) Alice Waters changed the way high-end American restaurants approached food, no wonder he took comfort in powders and needles. Things, as Bourdain happily acknowledges, have changed, with "chef" a respected profession and American diners considerably more sophisticated in their tastes and expectations.
Where Bourdain digs deeper, he's even better. He tells a funny, heartbreaking tale of a gay couple who are good home cooks and decide they can run a restaurant because Lauren Bacall loves their meat loaf. They open a beautiful little jewel box of a place, and lose their shirts. Nobody, not even their dear friend Lauren Bacall, wants to eat the same dish at the same restaurant every night. The restaurant business is not for the faint of heart, the shallow of pocket book, or the inexperienced.
The things Bourdain shares with Julia Child are a passion for well prepared food and the desire and ability to proselytize about it in a highly opinionated but extremely engaging way (though I doubt Mrs. Child would approve of his language). He treasures adventurous diners. He treasures great chefs, among whom he is not conceited enough to count himself--and is wise enough to laugh at himself for becoming one of the celebrity chefs for whom he has such profound contempt. He treasures the Latin American immigrants who do the vast majority of American restaurant cooking while some white guy hogs the spotlight. He treasures his own opportunities to travel and try absolutely everything. He treasures what's best in people of all cultures--their capacity for hospitality and generosity. He hates people who impose artificial limits on their diets. He hates people who preach from a position of affluence to the poor about what they should eat. He doesn't like doing pastry. He hates whatever that stuff is that comes out of a garlic press.
Reading some of the negative reviews, I can't believe those people read the same book, but as Bourdain would no doubt agree, each to his own taste. This is a profane sort of book, with lots of swearing and a fair bit of intoxication, but it's hard to imagine the humor working nearly so well otherwise. It's true he can get a bit long-winded, and the effort at maintaining the bad boy facade shows strain from time to time. Still, the number of books out there that make you laugh this hard are few. The number of books out there that teach you this much are few. Five stars.
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Summary of Kitchen Confidential Updated Edition: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (P.S.)
A deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade from Chef Anthony Bourdain, laying out his more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine?now with all-new, never-before-published material.
Most diners believe that their sublime sliver of seared foie gras, topped with an ethereal buckwheat blini and a drizzle of piquant huckleberry sauce, was created by a culinary artist of the highest order, a sensitive, highly refined executive chef. The truth is more brutal. More likely, writes Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential, that elegant three-star concoction is the collaborative effort of a team of "wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts, and psychopaths," in all likelihood pierced or tattooed and incapable of uttering a sentence without an expletive or a foreign phrase. Such is the muscular view of the culinary trenches from one who's been groveling in them, with obvious sadomasochistic pleasure, for more than 20 years. CIA-trained Bourdain, currently the executive chef of the celebrated Les Halles, wrote two culinary mysteries before his first (and infamous) New Yorker essay launched this frank confessional about the lusty and larcenous real lives of cooks and restaurateurs. He is obscenely eloquent, unapologetically opinionated, and a damn fine storyteller--a Jack Kerouac of the kitchen. Those without the stomach for this kind of joyride should note his opening caveat: "There will be horror stories. Heavy drinking, drugs, screwing in the dry-goods area, unappetizing industry-wide practices. Talking about why you probably shouldn't order fish on a Monday, why those who favor well-done get the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, and why seafood frittata is not a wise brunch selection.... But I'm simply not going to deceive anybody about the life as I've seen it." --Sumi Hahn
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