Kitchen confidential: adventures in the culinary underbelly, by Anthony Bourdain

 

Anthony Bourdain's 2000 memoir about his more than (at that point) 20 years in the restaurant industry is fascinating but also a little off-putting. He writes about how his love for good food was awakened during a childhood summer in France visiting his extended family. His admirable later career started out with a not very admirable young adulthood with a few years at Vassar wasted with too many drug and alcohol fueled indulgences. A summer in Provincetown working in a seafood restaurant led to his decision to attend the Culinary Institute of America and commit to the culinary industry. While Bourdain is perhaps famous for his bad-boy image and irreverence, I found it to be unlikable in the book. I don't know if he's exaggerating or dramatizing for comedic effect, but if it's not then I think it's a little horrifying what goes on in even upscale restaurants' kitchens. As I read I was torn between going out for a bite right now and never eating out again. Bourdain also seems to have a high level of contempt for restaurant owners, his bosses, his coworkers, and the dining public. There are no moments when he seems to feel gratified or appreciated by the people eating his food. He acknowledges some of these criticisms in the preface to the 2000 Ecco edition, which is the one I have, but he writes that he wrote the book for other people in the industry, not the public, so he has no apologies for them or any of the (sometimes gross) practices that he reports on in his kitchens. (There have been subsequent editions with updated prefaces, so he may have changed his attitude over time.) He seems to mellow out near the end of the book when he is asked to go to Tokyo to help the chef with French cooking practices. He describes his first day trying to find breakfast in the city and being intimidated by the many choices. He finally settles on getting a latte in Starbucks before getting up the courage to go into the first noodle shop he saw and just asking for the same thing the guy next to him had. That humanized him a bit for me. As the trip went on he became more and more adventurous, walking and eating all over the city. His descriptions of those quests made it clear how suited he was to his later TV shows. Overall, this book is worth reading, although it's sad to read about his adventures knowing how he later died.