Kitchen Confidential: A Hoot for Foodies
Written: Mar 01 '03 (Updated Mar 01 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Well crafted prose by a skilled, insightful journeyman chef
Cons: Book occasionally loses focus. One suspects more than a little exaggeration
The Bottom Line: If you love honest food and people who share that appreciation, you're likely to enjoy this book.
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| Mr.Eyore's Full Review: Anthony Bourdain - Kitchen Confidential: Adventure... |
Anthony Bourdain, the author of Kitchen Confidential, Adventures in The Culinary Underbelly, reminds me of nobody so much as ... well, me.
Arrogant and underachieving, Bourdain thinks he’s a bigger bad-ass than he is. He’s prone to hyperbole, has misanthropic tendencies, is fiercely devoted to his friends, and is a borderline snob. But the man knows people. He also knows and loves food and the folks who make it. And he crafts a pretty fine yarn about his own rise in the restaurant business and the “outlaws” he believes make up its core.
You’re likely to know early on if Kitchen Confidential is the sort of book you are going to enjoy. Even if you skip the introduction (in which he notes that Emeril Lagasse is an ewok blowhard, and foreshadows his later discussions about how restauranteurs do nasty things to you behind your back) you’ll discover in the first few pages that Bourdain either is or is not your kind of guy. The first chapter details his time in France as a snot-nosed pre-teen Ugly American who falls in love with food both because he can out-gross his family with what he’s willing to eat and because he describes his first experience eating an oyster as being “more memorable than the first pussy he got.” Although Bourdain is decidedly blue-blood in background, the way he describes his love-affair with simple, fresh ingredients prepared “cleanly” under difficult conditions by outlaws and losers, and his compulsive desire to someday have hands covered with scars and burns like the cooks he apprenticed under in P-Town, paints him as someone who’s not just trying to slum. Sure, he gets a kick out of the underbelly of professional cooking, but more than anything else, Bourdain has a healthy respect for honesty: In people, in food and in thought.
Much of the book follows Bourdain’s career through the kitchens of Provincetown, to the CIA, to dozens of Manhattan restaurants, bars, pubs and hotels, and to his final destination, Les Halles, Manhattan. That rise, in itself, is compelling. Bourdain has a novel-worthy personal narrative filled with drugs, accomplishments taken for granted, deep falls from grace, physical pain ... and the simple joys that keep him moving.
Most of the reviews I’ve read of Kitchen Confidential focus on Bourdain’s brief expose of unsanitary conditions, rancid food, and restauranteur scams that pervade the industry, and that’s a shame. I suppose it is of some passing interest that restaurants pass off bad fish on Sunday and Monday, that most places don’t store mussels correctly, and that prep cooks are none too careful about keeping their blood off your food. But to focus on such abominations is to miss a really wonderful tale about good food, good cooks, good workers and the love of all of these. And it’s also to miss the central themes of Bourdain’s message: Food is sex. Food is risk. Food is life. That readers focus on risk as a negative reveals the pitiful American myopia with regard to cleanliness, homogenization, purification and fat. And I love Bourdain’s expressions of disgust for that myopia almost as much as I love his descriptions of food.
While I know it is unorthodox to praise one book of an author’s by quoting another book of his, a passage from his recent A Cook’s Tour says, I think much better than I can, what Bourdain is about, and what Kitchen Confidential really has to offer:
What is an oyster if not the perfect food? It requires no preparation or cooking. Cooking would be an affront. It provides its own sauce. It’s a living thing until seconds before disappearing down your throat, so you know – or should know – that it’s fresh. It appears on your plate as god created it: raw, unadorned. A squeeze of lemon, or maybe a little mignonette [...] about as much of an insult as you might care to tender against this magnificent creature. It is food at its most primeval and glorious, untouched by time or man. A living thing, eaten for sustenance and pleasure, the same way our knuckle-dragging forefathers ate them. And they have, for me anyway, the added mystical attraction of all that sense memory – the significance of being the first food to change my life. I blame my first oyster for everything I did after: my decision to become a chef, my thrill-seeking, all my hideous screw-ups in pursuit of pleasure. I blame it all on that oyster. In a nice way of course.
It’s this sort of tight, emotional prose that I find most impressive about Bourdain. He is a multi-talented Renaissance man who appears well schooled in the liberal arts classics in spite of his constant disparaging remarks about his failure to take to formal education (at Vassar) and his many wasted years on the bottle and the needle. He gives food context, which is something that many better chefs couldn’t do it their life depended on it. And his background as a journeyman chef places him in a unique position, above many fine food critics writing in this country today, to provide detail to that context. That makes this book a pure joy to read.
Kitchen Confidential does occasionally lose focus. Bourdain bounces back and forth between tricks of the trade, the business operations of skilled and unskilled owners, and side-track anecdotes. But it’s an understandable lack of focus. It was Bourdain’s first attempt at food writing, and it makes sense that he would want to pad by throwing in everything he knows about the business. And even those tangents are well executed and enjoyable in their own right.
Overall, I thought Kitchen Confidential was a complete hoot. It’s only been about four months since I first read it, and after having read his more recent book, I feel compelled to go back and read this one again.
Recommended:
Yes
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Mr.Eyore
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I come for the pervasive sense of elitist self-importance and semi-witty expressions of faux camaraderie
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