Book Blog #225: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

Title: Kitchen Confidential
Author: Anthony Bourdain
# of Pages: 321 (ebook)
Genre: Nonfiction, Food, Autobiography
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Synopsis: After twenty-five years of 'sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine', chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain has decided to tell all. From his first oyster in the Gironde to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown; from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop the 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, as shocking as they are funny.
Review: I took way too long to finish this book.

Since I didn't know much about Anthony Bourdain before he committed suicide, I wanted to take the time to understand the grief people were feeling over the loss of this well-respect figure in the culinary world.

Bourdain was a much better writer than I was expecting. There are many people outside of the literary world (I'm looking at you Youtube authors) who were not meant to write novels and merely do so because they have the platform to do so. However, Bourdain did write for the sake of saying he wrote a book; he actually has experiences and knowledge that are worth sharing, and he can actually WRITE.

Although his crazy tales of what happens behind the scenes at restaurants began to blend together (I never truly understood all of the lingo), I found the beginning half of the book to be incredibly relatable. Most notably, I liked the chapter called "What do you know about meat?" (anyone who has had some cringe-y interview experiences will be able to relate to this chapter).

However the latter half of the book, especially the last chapter, is best appreciated by those with culinary experience. He even goes as far as to give tips to the reader on how to succeed in the restaurant business (some advice I will probably never use, but others may find extremely helpful). While I love reading about food, I found that I was unable to appreciate the dishes he talked about with such passion. I'm no food critic; one chef's beef bourguignon is the same as the next's as long as they are half decent at cooking. But I'm sure the admiration Bourdain expressed in his book over the way Adam cooked his bread and Bryan ran his kitchen will be appreciated by someone.

My perception of the restaurant industry has completely changed and not necessarily for the better. From Bourdain's perspective, what I once perceived as a classy operation (something along the lines of what you'd see in the movie Ratatouille) is more like a pirate operation (rough working conditions, crude conversation, etc.).

This book was a decent read; I definitely don't regret reading it at all. However, if you are not interested at all in the culinary business, I would hold off on reading it; you'll lose interest fairly quickly. On the other hand, if you have some background in the business then you'll probably be fairly interested in this book.