The Kitchen Confidential Pirate Crew and Other Tales
Written: Oct 11 '05 (Updated Feb 01 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Breezy, bawdy, fun book about a life behind the steam table.
Cons: Bourdain loves vulgarity and other cuts of meat.
The Bottom Line: Kitchen Confidential is well written and well worth reading (especially for "foodies"), as the book contains any number of tips for improving your restaurant experience and your own culinary attempts.
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| MiDoyle's Full Review: Anthony Bourdain - Kitchen Confidential: Adventure... |
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underground is a bawdy, breezy, boastful memoir, full of chef Anthony Bourdain’s rapid fire wit and sarcasm, not to mention some unpleasant revelations about the origins of the daily special, why fish should never be ordered on Monday, and how the brunch menu is a garbage pail of the restaurant world.
The book grew out of a column that Bourdain had written for The New Yorker about the terrors to be found in a conventional New York City restaurant. He then set out to chronicle his life in the kitchen and his life-long love for good food; the start of which he traces to a trip to France with his parents at about the age of 9-10 or so. From there, food became something else entirely for him.
Bourdain doesn’t pull many punches and his targets are many: celebrity chefs, idiotic owners, dishonest food purveyors, stupid people, and the general public. He’s no saint and makes little apology for his lifestyle, which includes some past forays into drug use, nor his personality which includes displays of insolent behavior and general boorishness. However, his arrogance is overcome, in part, by his self-deprecating style in which he is able to admit his cluelessness at various times in his life and he is generally cheerful throughout the book, which covers about 25 years or so of his life in the kitchen. [That said, his use of hyperbole can be a bit off-putting in spots.]
He reminisces about his start as a dishwasher in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, during the summer season to hilarious effect, and chronicles his up and down career through an untold number of failed restaurants, poor fits, and personal failures before finally getting his act together as the chef at Les Halles Brassiere in New York City. It is there that he truly found his calling and also a certain level of celebrity that he feigns disinterest about.
There is something of an “act” to Bourdain operating here and it’s hard to totally take him at his word. His persona is that of the kitchen’s bad-boy, complete with leather jacket and cowboy boots, and a “jones” for cigarette after cigarette. He likens running a kitchen to running a pirate ship or a criminal enterprise. He takes great pride in an ability to meet any vulgarity with an even bigger one in response.
But he loves food.
Bourdain, the writer, is at his best when he writes about his love affair with food and the reasons why people should seek out the pleasures of a good meal. He writes emotional impressions and riffs/rants on food in a highly stylized stream of consciousness fashion at times, as if he has engaged you in conversation and the words come tumbling out of him. In many cases, Bourdain is a sensualist when it comes to food and this love for the senses excited by good cooking comes through in his writings and musings on the art of the meal.
Bourdain’s aesthetic is that of simplicity trumping gimmicks. He adores simple cooking of high quality ingredients with a minimum of fuss. He makes a persuasive case for the pleasure of simple food being the perfect meal.
Bourdain’s tale is also a search for himself in some ways. He was a bit of a slacker, a guy just shuffling through life at times, and he had affinity for high risk behavior that he mentions matter-of-factly throughout his memoir. Whatever his personal demons are he does not divulge them, but he never puts up the front that he is misunderstood, or somehow not responsible for his own misdeeds.
Kitchen Confidential is well written and well worth reading (2000, St. Martin’s Press, 320 pages). It is especially recommended for “foodies,” as the book contains any number of tips for improving your restaurant experience and your own culinary attempts.
Other books by Bourdain include A Cook’s Tour (based on his Food Network show) and Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, which includes recipes from the Brasserie in NYC and other locations where he remains chef-at-large. In addition, he has written 4 works of fiction in the murder-mystery genre.
Sources
www.anthonybourdain.com, www.leshalles.net
Recommended:
Yes
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MiDoyle
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Member: Michael Doyle
Location: Morris County, NJ
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Schadenfreude is worth living for.
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