Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

by Anthony Bourdain

The New York Times bestselling memoir from Anthony Bourdain, the host of Parts Unknown.

Kitchen Confidential reveals what Bourdain calls "twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine."

Last summer, The New Yorker published Chef Bourdain's shocking, "Don't Eat Before Reading This." Bourdain spared no one's appetite when he told all about what happens behind the kitchen door. Bourdain uses the same "take-no-prisoners" attitude in his deliciously funny and shockingly delectable book, sure to delight gourmands and philistines alike. From Bourdain's first oyster in the Gironde, to his lowly position as dishwasher in a honky tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown (where he witnesses for the first time the real delights of being a chef); from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, to drug dealers in the east village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain's tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable.

Kitchen Confidential will make your mouth water while your belly aches with laughter. You'll beg the chef for more, please.

• ISBN10: 158234082X
• ISBN13: 9781582340821
• Publish Date: 31 May 2000
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 9 November 2011
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 320
• Language: English

Reviews

[adamfortuna]

Anthony Bourdain is someone I could watch do anything. He was so entertaining and captivating that it was hard to turn away. Kitchen Confidential is no different, even if the subject is the dark underbelly of being a chef.

[jnkay01]

A weirdly excellent manifesto about leadership and surviving office life. Which was almost certainly unintentional, but certainly would make it a brilliant addition to business management syllabi.

[empressbrooke]

I found this book to be mildly amusing, although it suffered from not having much focus. It sort of whips back and forth between topics with no discernible plan - one chapter is about Bourdain's childhood discovery of how great food can be, and then suddenly he's talking about what tools an amateur cook can use to impress friends, and then it's another walk down memory lane, and then he's praising a fellow chef, and then talking about his trip to Tokyo. It's like he had all these little anecdotes he wanted to share and just sort of slapped them together with some Emeril bashing for glue.

[Terri M. LeBlanc]

I really enjoyed this memoir. It's straight shooting and a little raunchy, but if you've seen Bourdain on No Reservations, you know what to expect from his narration on the show. The memoir reads the same way.