Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain - Review

I regretfully admit to being largely unfamiliar with the work of Anthony Bourdain when he was still with us. I had seen a few clips here and there of his exploits on his hit travel shows Parts Unknown and No Reservations, and I was vaguely aware of his background as a chef in New York. It wasn’t until I started Bread and Butter that I discovered how special he was as a writer and as a culinary influence in America, capturing the magic of that invisible, tenuous thread between the kitchen preparing the food and the diners who eat it.

For background I came to Bread and Butter as someone who has always had a great appreciation for food (read: I love to eat food). But I think my knowledge of food has certainly lagged behind my appetite. In the pursuit of remedying this I’ve sought out resources that I felt could make me smarter about the culinary world and give me fresh insight. So to envelop myself in this world I felt it was necessary to go deeper.

Overwhelmingly, the place I was suggested to start at was Anthony Bourdain’s classic memoir, Kitchen Confidential. I don’t think I had a lot of expectations for where it would take me or what I wanted to get out of it, but I had seen Bourdain’s late night visit to Waffle House with Sean Brock and was enamored by his ability to wax poetic about the experience a lot of Americans hold true about the wonders of an always-open waffle eatery that in its wee hours of the night caters almost exclusively to the inebriated among us.

For those that are a quarter-century late to the party like I was, it’s a collection of anecdotes from Bourdain’s life as a budding chef in the New York culinary scene in the ‘80s and ‘90s. And for those of you like myself that were largely unfamiliar with his work as a writer, I was pleasantly surprised to learn how well-written Bourdain was.

He creates this fascinating world, full of individuals that came in and out of his life over the course of a few decades, and the debauchery and the mayhem and the carnage that this colorful cast of characters led is punctuated by his singular way of getting these swashbucklers down on the page. Every inch of this book is fought over, bled for, and earned. Nothing comes easy and every person, including Bourdain himself, is presented as a self-sabotaging, drug-addled, sleep-deprived maniac.

And for those of us who have never worked in a kitchen (admittedly, I did spend a summer on the line at a local Burger King, but I hardly consider it to be the same thing—the abrasive, existential stories I have pale in comparison to the walk through Dante’s Inferno that some of these kitchens appear to have been), it’s hard to fathom that these are the faceless people behind the swinging kitchen doors that handle our food. It’s best not to even think about it.

The book details the career of Anthony Bourdain through his own eyes and through his pen as he hops from restaurant to restaurant laying siege to seedy ownership, incompetent management, and corrupt suppliers; and all the while climbing the ranks of the kitchen hierarchy, creating a sphere of influence with its own gravitational pull. Corruptible pirates—important members of his brigade—that follow him all across Manhattan.

I can hardly say if the culinary world Bourdain occupied in this memoir still exists today in much the same fashion, but those parts of New York during the late twentieth-century read like a a gritty, dark world where restaurants were filed down to the bone to save a dime—a breeding ground for the contemptible. And it’s in that world that Bourdain was necessary. Someone who could live that grind and submit to the culture of excess and humiliation, while also serving as protector for its inhabitants.

And though he eventually moved on from his occupations primarily inside a restaurant kitchen, and took strides towards finding peace in sobriety, it’s clear to me that same guy never fully disappeared. I watched some of his episodes from his travel shows after reading this memoir, and I was struck by how much I could see of that younger Bourdain lurking beneath—calmer, measured, for sure, as he shares Vietnamese noodles and Hanoi beer with President Obama, but still someone who can effectively call out his own pretensions and faults while finding the beauty in the human moments that bind us.

And for anyone that relates to these soliloquies about life and food and connections with people we love (and people we love to eat with), Kitchen Confidential is a perfect musing for those same values of love and connection over a shared meal from a different perspective: the psychopaths in the kitchen who make any of it possible.

Topic: Book Reviews

Subject: Kitchen Confidential