Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Anthony Bourdain, 2000
HarperCollins
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060899226
Summary
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.
New York Chef Tony Bourdain gives away secrets of the trade in his wickedly funny, inspiring memoir/expose. Kitchen Confidential reveals what Bourdain calls "twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine." (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 25, 1956
• Raised—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—Vassar College (2 years); Culinary Institute of America
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Anthony Michael Bourdain is an American chef, author, and television personality. He is known for his 2000 book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, and in 2005 he began hosting the Travel Channel's culinary and cultural adventure programs Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and The Layover. In 2013, he joined CNN to host Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.
Bourdain is a 1978 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and a veteran of numerous professional kitchens. Though Bourdain is no longer formally employed as a chef, he maintains a relationship with Brasserie Les Halles in New York, where he was executive chef for many years. He is described by Les Halles as their "chef-at-large".
Early life and family
Bourdain was born in New York City, to Gladys Bourdain (nee Sacksman) and Pierre Bourdain (d. 1987). His father was an executive for Columbia Records in the classical music recording industry Bourdain's paternal grandparents were French: his paternal grandfather emigrated from Arcachon to New York following World War I, and his father grew up speaking French and spent many summers in France. Bourdain's mother worked for the New York Times as a staff editor. Bourdain has said he was raised without religion, and that his ancestors were Catholic on his father's side and Jewish on his mother's side.
He grew up in Leonia, New Jersey, and graduated from the Dwight-Englewood School in 1973. He attended Vassar College before dropping out after two years, but then enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America, from which he graduated in 1978.
Bourdain married his high-school girlfriend, Nancy Putkoski, in the 1980s, and they remained together for two decades before divorcing; Bourdain has cited the inevitable changes that come from traveling widely as the cause of the split. He currently lives with his second wife, Ottavia Busia, whom we married in 2007. Together, they have a daughter, Ariane. Busia has appeared in several episodes of No Reservations—notably the ones in Sardinia (her birthplace), Tuscany (in which she plays a disgruntled Italian diner), Rome, Rio, and Naples.
Culinary training and career
In Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain describes how his love of food was kindled in France, when he tried his first oyster on an oyster fisherman's boat as a youth, while on a family vacation. Later, while attending Vassar College, he worked in the seafood restaurants of Provincetown, Massachusetts, which sparked his decision to pursue cooking as a career. Bourdain graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978, and went on to run various restaurant kitchens in New York City—including the Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue, and Sullivan's—culminating in the position of executive chef at Manhatttan's Brasserie Les Halles, beginning in 1998.
Writing
Bourdain gained immediate popularity from his 2000 New York Times bestselling book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, an outgrowth of his article in The New Yorker called "Don't Eat Before Reading This." The book is a witty and rambunctious expose of the hidden and darker side of the culinary world, as well as a memoir of Bourdain's professional life.
Bourdain subsequently wrote two more New York Times bestselling nonfiction books: A Cook's Tour (2001), an account of his food and travel exploits across the world, written in conjunction with his first television series of the same title, and The Nasty Bits (2006), another collection of essays mainly centered on food. Bourdain's additional books include Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, the culinary mystery novels Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo, a hypothetical historical investigation Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical, and No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach. His latest book, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, the sequel to Kitchen Confidential, was published in 2010.
Bourdain's articles and essays have appeared many places, including in The New Yorker, New York Times, The (London) Times, Los Angeles Times, Observer, Gourmet, Maxim, Esquire (UK), Scotland on Sunday, The Face, Food Arts, Limb by Limb, BlackBook, The Independent, Best Life, Financial Times, and Town & Country. On the Internet, Bourdain's blog for Season 3 of Top Chef was nominated for a Webby Award for best Blog-Cultural/Personal in 2008. In 2012, Bourdain co-wrote the original graphic novel Get Jiro! for DC Comics/Vertigo along with Joel Rose, with art by Langdon Foss.
Television
The acclaim surrounding Bourdain's memoir, Kitchen Confidential, led to an offer by the Food Network to host his own food and world-travel show, A Cook's Tour, which premiered in January 2002. In July 2005, he premiered a new, somewhat similar television series, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, on the Travel Channel. As a further result of the immense popularity of Kitchen Confidential, the Fox sitcom Kitchen Confidential aired in 2005, in which the character "Jack Bourdain" is based loosely on the biography and persona of Anthony Bourdain.
In July 2006, Bourdain was in Beirut filming an episode of No Reservations when the Israel-Lebanon conflict broke out. The crew had filmed only a few hours of footage, but the producers compiled behind-the-scenes footage of Bourdain and his production staff, including their eventual escape on July 20, by the United States Marines. The Beirut episode aired on August 21, 2006, and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2007.
Travel Channel announced in July 2011 that it would be adding a second one-hour ten-episode Bourdain show to be titled The Layover, which premiered November 21, 2011. Each episode features an exploration of a city that can be undertaken within an air travel layover of 24 to 48 hours.
Bourdain has since left the Travel Channel to host a show titled Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown for CNN, focusing on other cuisines and cultures; the new show premiered April 14, 2013.
Public personae
Bourdain has labeled by Gothamist as "culinary bad boy." Because of his liberal use of profanity and sexual references in his television show No Reservations, the network placed viewer discretion advisories on each segment of each episode.
He has been known for being an unrepentant drinker and smoker. In a nod to Bourdain's (at the time) two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, renowned chef Thomas Keller once served him a 20-course tasting menu which included a mid-meal "coffee and cigarette": a coffee custard infused with tobacco, together with a foie gras mousse. Bourdain stopped cigarette smoking in the summer of 2007 because of the birth of his daughter.
He is also a former user of cocaine, heroin, and LSD. In Kitchen Confidential he writes of his experience in a trendy SoHo restaurant in 1981:
We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in refrigerator at every opportunity to "conceptualize." Hardly a decision was made without drugs. Cannabis, methaqualone, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey and used to sweeten tea, secobarbital, tuinal, amphetamine, codeine and, increasingly, heroin, which we'd send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to Alphabet City to get.
In the same book, Bourdain frankly describes his former addiction, including how he once resorted to selling his record collection on the street in order to raise enough money to purchase drugs.
Bourdain is also noted for his put-downs of celebrity chefs, such as Paula Deen, Bobby Flay, Guy Fieri, Sandra Lee, and Rachael Ray, and appears to be irritated by both the overt commercialism of the celebrity cooking industry and its lack of culinary authenticity. He has voiced a "serious disdain for food demigods like Alan Richman, Alice Waters, and Alain Ducasse."
At the same time, he has recognized the irony of his own transformation into a celebrity chef and has, to some extent, begun to qualify his insults; in the 2007 New Orleans episode of No Reservations, he reconciled with Emeril Lagasse. He has been consistently outspoken in his praise for chefs he admires, particularly Ferran Adria, Juan Mari Arzak, Mario Batali, Fergus Henderson, Jose Andres, Thomas Keller, Martin Picard, Eric Ripert, and Marco Pierre White, as well as his former protege and colleagues at Brasserie Les Halles. Bourdain has also spoken very highly of Julia Child, saying that she "influenced the way I grew up and my entire value system."
Bourdain is also known for his sarcastic comments about vegan and vegetarian activists, saying that their lifestyle is rude to the inhabitants of many countries he visits. Bourdain says he considers vegetarianism, except in the case of religious strictures as in India, a "First World luxury." He has since said that he believes Americans eat too much meat, and admires vegetarians who allow themselves to put aside their vegetarianism when they travel in order to be respectful of their hosts.
Known for consuming exotic local specialty dishes, Bourdain has eaten sheep testicles in Morocco, ant eggs in Puebla, Mexico, a raw seal eyeball as part of a traditional Inuit seal hunt, and a whole cobra—beating heart, blood, bile, and meat—in Vietnam. According to Bourdain, the most disgusting thing he has ever eaten is a Chicken McNugget, though he has also declared that the unwashed warthog rectum he ate in Namibia and the fermented shark he ate in Iceland are among "the worst meals of [his] life.
Bourdain is an advocate for communicating the value and tastiness of traditional or "peasant" foods, including specifically all of the varietal bits and unused animal parts not usually eaten by affluent, 21st-century U.S. citizens. He also consistently notes and champions the high quality and deliciousness of freshly prepared street food in other countries—especially developing countries – as compared to fast food chains in the U.S.
Bourdain frequently champions the industrious Spanish-speaking immigrants—often from Mexico or Ecuador—who are chefs and cooks in many U.S. restaurants, including upscale restaurants, regardless of cuisine. Bourdain considers them to be talented chefs and invaluable cooks, underpaid and unrecognized even though they have become the backbone of the U.S. restaurant industry.
Awards
2001 - Bon Appetit, Food Writer of the Year (Kitchen Confidential)
2002 - British Guild of Food Writers, Food Book of the Year (A Cook's Tour)
2008 - Induction, James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who
2009 - Creative Arts Emmy Award, Outstanding Cinematography (No Reservations)
2011 - Creative Arts Emmy Award, Outstanding Cinematography (No Reservations)
2010 - Honorary CLIO Award
2012 - Critics' Choice, Best Reality Series Award (No Reservations)
2013 - Emmy Award, Outstanding Informational Series (Parts Uknown)
2014 - Emmy Award, Outstanding Informational Series (Parts Unknown)
2014 - Peabody Award (Parts Unknown)
(Bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/1/2014.)
Book Reviews
The guy is hysterical…in a style partaking of Hunter S. Thompson, Iggy Pop and a little Jonathan Swift, Bourdain gleefully rips through the scenery to reveal private backstage horrors.
New York Times Book Review
Bourdain captures the world of restaurants and professionally cooked food in all its theatrical, demented glory.
USA Today
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry...you’re gonna love it.
Denver Post
A gonzo memoir of whats really going on behind those swinging doors.... Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain is unique.
Newsweek
Bourdain’s prose is utterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and a precise ear for kitchen patois.
New York magazine
Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business. His fast-lane personality and glee in recounting sophomoric kitchen pranks might be unbearable were it not for two things: Bourdain is as unsparingly acerbic with himself as he is with others, and he exhibits a sincere and profound love of good food.... Bourdain has a tender side...[that] elevates this book to something more than blustery memoir.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these talking LitLovers points to help start a discussion about Kitchen Confidential:
1. Talk about Bourdain—as a drug-induced young man working his way up through the ranks and, eventually, as the more mature executive chef of Brasserie Les Halles. Have his essential qualities changed as he's aged, or is he basically the same individual, perhaps with a little mellowing around the edges? Is he someone you admire, like, or find offensive? What do you think of him...then and now?
2. Talk about the restaurant business as Bourdain describes it—the male-dominated, testosterone-drenched atmosphere. What, if any, has your experience been with restaurant kitchens? Do your experiences match Bourdain's, or do they differ? If so, in what way? If you have never worked either as a server or at a food station, would Bourdain's portrayal encourage you to do so?
3. What is Bourdain's attitude toward women, the waitresses and the few female cooks he's worked with?
4. What surprised you most about restaurant dining? What appalled you? Will you EVER order fish on Monday again? What about well-done beef?
5. Talk about the skills required to be a top-notch line cook during a frantic Saturday night dinner service? What are the qualities admired by Bourdain in both line cooks and sous chefs. Do you have the ability, either mental or physical, to work in a kitchen environment? Why does Bourdain prefer to work with talent from Mexico, San Salvador or Ecuador over Americans, especially young American men as he was himself?
6. Were you surprised by Bourdain's frank comparison of Scott Bryan's career path, success, kitchen management, and cuisine to Bourdain's own? What are the differences between the two chefs? Which path (be honest now) would you have chosen (not knowing what you know now, but as you were going through it)?
7. Discuss the second-to-last chapter of the book, the so-called Commencement Address. Is the advice Bourdain offers sound—are they words to live by for anyone in any endeavor? Do you find Bourdain's warnings hypocritical, or his the voice of a man who has gone through it all and learned form his mistakes? Has he learned from his mistakes?
8. Have you watched any of Bourdain's TV serials—No Reservations or Parts Unknown? If so is Bourdain the same or different as he comes across in his books? Have you read any of his other books, A Cook's Tour or Nasty Bits?
9. Finally, you might try to get hold of the few Kitchen Confidential TV episodes with Bradley Cooper that were aired on Fox in 2005 (go to IMDb). What do you think?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)