Kitchen Confidential

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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. 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. Bourdain's book ranges freely over his French childhood where he first got obsessed with food, his time at fry-shacks, grill bars, and the Culinary Institute of America which variously taught him to cook, his exceedingly checkered career as chef for a variety of restaurants both doomed and successful, and his observations on the underbelly of the restaurant biz. Yet other parts of the book get really tedious, going through endless names of people and different restaurants kind of made me glaze over.

In his book, cooks are a dysfunctional lot - drug-addicted, unable to hold a "normal" job, people from the fringes of the society. 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! During his early years, his behavior and speech reflected somebody who didn't care whether he was liked. Fining both meaning and drive for life in sensory experiences is by no means a new stance in the world of literature.

Sure, for the first twenty-some years of my cooking life, I flattened and chopped with my chef's knife, but I confess the press I started using was perfect for garlic in homemade salad dressing. In this more recent update, he even points out that he learned he was wrong about Emeril Lagasse (as a chef and person, not as a TV Celebrity) and frequently comments that he isn't a top-tier chef because of his own mistakes. Having attended culinary school, I'm fairly obsessed with all things cooking-related, and consider myself to be a bit of a foodie. It is no surprise that most industries are sexism, racism, homophobia, and whatever other "isms" you care to mention. I certainly hope things have changed over the last twenty years since this book was published, but Kitchen Confidential does a brilliant job of presenting the insanity of the aggressively masculine kitchen culture I remember.

After twenty-five years of 'sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine', chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain decides to tell all.

Even though he does not share a lot from his early childhood and primary family life, except for the notion they traveled frequently, his early life has a veil of melancholy, the veil that grows into the depression of adult age. I loved that he reads the audiobook, because hearing his inflection and emphasis made me know when he was being serious and when he was being sarcastic.

From a foodie perspective, he's focused on proteins and presentation: it was surprising to me that he recommended a solid chef's knife for the home cook, but not necessarily a paring knife (essential, imo, for delicate fruit and veggie work).It came as a particular blow as somebody who enjoyed eating, traveling and writing in equal amounts. There's some good advice here to aspiring chefs and "regular" people who just like to eat in restaurants.

I wanted dirty stories from the seedy underbelly of the high-class dining world, but it didn't really get much wilder than a bunch of cooks making racist, sexist, homophobic jokes. Having in mind Bourdain’s death from suicide in 2018, I can presume that he did not receive the adequate help that he desperately need, which is evident in his memoir written almost a decade before the tragic death. Released in 2000, the book is both Bourdain's professional memoir and a behind-the-scenes look at restaurant kitchens. I lay in bed all day, immobilized by guilt, fear, shame and regret, my ashtrays overflowing with butts, unpaid bills stacked everywhere, dirty clothes heaped in the corners.To enjoy the instant gratification of making something good with one's hands--using all one's senses.