A deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade from Chef Anthony Bourdain, laying out his more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine—now with all-new, never-before-published material

Mr. Bourdain may be a fine chef. He could have benefited from an editor who could help him tell his tale, and perhaps also caught the several typos sprinkled throughout the text.


I laughed so hard, I forgot (on purpose) to eat! Yes! Yuk!   May 15, 2000
 169 out of 184 found this review helpful

Oh, you are really going to enjoy this book...while you're reading it, that is. Then afterwards you'll be torn between the memories of the hilarious antics Bourdain describes in his book...and memories of the disgusting things that go on every day in restaurant kitchens. Believe it or not, it IS worth reading! (And take it from a former restaurant manager, it is, unfortuately, true - the after-hours shenanigans, especially!)

Bourdain has put together a truly gonzo collection of restaurant tales that aren't all depraved...but, like his restaurateur/chef subjects, most of them are! Kudos to him for a book that is this honest while being this hysterical. If you have the, um, stomach for it, this is a book you'll remember fondly. Well worth digesting!


An offbeat life story with some tips   August 12, 2002
 79 out of 89 found this review helpful

I eat in restaurants nearly everyday. I find that I don't have time to cook, and there are plenty of places in town that are cheap and good. There was a time after reading George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London that eating out brought up bad visions. It's happened once again with Anthony Bourdain's informative and often times hilarious book, Kitchen Confidential.

We know that restaurants are dirtier than our own kitchens, but Bourdain explains what to look for when choosing a sanitary eating environment. He suggests that restaurant food is better during the weekdays when a chef is preparing food for what he believes to be his regular customers, whereas weekend food is for tourists and has to be rushed by the nature of the crowds. To hear Bourdain tell it, Sunday Brunch is the absolute worst time to eat anywhere, because the main chef is off and the food is mostly stale bread and other leftovers from throughout the week.

The book really serves as an autobiography of how Bourdain came to be a chef and his experiences up to the present day. To hear him tell it, the kitchen is full of characters. He describes many of these nuts that have filled his life, and their exploits from past to present. Some of these people are so antisocial in Bourdain's opinion that they would be hardly functional anywhere but a kitchen. He describes a baker so doped up that he frequently missed work for a week, but he'd be welcomed back, because his bread was like no other. In the same vein, it's not an exaggeration to say the author refers to (maybe even brags about) his own ... habit at least 20 times.

Bourdain does seem to have a knack for the kind of self-effacing promotion that is so popular these days with audiences. Here's a guy that is a high paid chef at a well-known restaurant, but much of the story is about his screw-ups and feeble attempts at making a living. His style is hard-hitting like a noir detective novel. You'll know after 10 pages whether you'll enjoy the book. I did.


Is it so bad to be an arrogant SOB?   August 3, 2000
 58 out of 61 found this review helpful

I don't think you're going to regret reading this book. But when you're done, you might find yourself wondering what exactly you just read. Just be aware beforehand that it's much more about the author than it is about cooking or restaurants.

I was surprised at the incredible coarseness of the book, but I thought, OK, that's real life in the restaurant world, if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen so to speak. But then towards the end he shows you that actually that's NOT how it is all through the restaurant world. Forget the last couple hundred pages.

So maybe he's just a jerk. Do I feel good about giving my money away to some jerk? But then again, he'll gladly TELL you he's a jerk. That's almost his point. Isn't the view of a crude, wild, hedonistic lifestyle that most of us would never live but still find fascinating why we buy these memoirs in the first place?

I found myself saying, "Wow, what an SOB (turn page) I can't stand this jerk (turn page)..." And that's not necessarily a bad thing, although it did leave me wondering whether I could really say I "liked" the book. What bothered me more was the poor structure of the book and the almost total lack of editing. Really weird things, like commas constantly popped up at random in the middle of, sentences. Like that. It grew more than a little annoying. And it was almost the last chapter before he actually defined all the cooking terms and the slang he had been using for hundreds of pages. People showed up whose significance he didn't explain until a number of chapters later.

So he's annoying, in many ways the book is annoying, but it's a fun and wild ride that will definitely give you something to talk about with your friends.


Telling It Like It Is   November 3, 2000
 57 out of 60 found this review helpful

In this book, Anthony Bourdain, executive chef at New York's Brasserie Les Halles, takes us on a wild ride through that city's food supply industry that includes surprises such as heavy drinking, drugs, debauchery, Mafiosi and assorted seedy personalities.

It is clear that Bourdain enjoys a true passion for both food and cooking, a passion he inherited from the French side of his family. He tells us he decided to become a chef during a trip to southwestern France when he was only ten years of age and it is a decision he stuck to, graduating from the Culinary Institute of America.

Kitchen Confidential is a surprisingly well-written account of what life is really like in the commercial kitchens of the United States; "the dark recesses of the restaurant underbelly." In describing these dark recesses, Bourdain refreshingly casts as many stones at himself as he does at others. In fact, he is brutally honest. There is nothing as tiresome as a "tell-all" book in which the author relentlessly paints himself as the unwitting victim. Bourdain, to his enormous credit, avoids this trap. Maybe he writes so convincingly about drugs and alcohol because drugs and alcohol have run their course through his veins as well as those of others.

The rather raunchy "pirate ship" stories contained in this fascinating but testosterone-rich book help to bring it vividly to life and add tremendous credibility. The book does tend to discourage any would-be female chefs who might read it, but that's not Bourdain's fault; he is simply telling it like it is and telling it hilariously as well.

In an entire chapter devoted to one of the lively and crude characters that populate this book, Bourdain describes a man named Adam: "Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown, the psychotic bread-baker, alone in his small, filthy Upper West Side apartment, his eyes two different sizes after a 36-hour coke and liquor jag, white crust accumulated at the corners of his mouth, a two-day growh of whiskers--standing there in a shirt and no pants among the porno mags, the empty Chinese takeout containers, as the Spice channel flickers silently on the TV, throwing blue light on a can of Dinty Moore beef stew by an unmade bed." Apparently Bourdain made just as many mistakes at the beginning of his career as did Adam, but the book however, doesn't always paint and bleak picture.

Another chapter entitled "The Life of Bryan," talks about renowned chef Scott Bryan, a man, who, according to Bourdain, made all the right decisions. Bourdain describes Bryan's shining, immaculate kitchen, his well-organized and efficient staff. It's respectful homage, but somehow, we feel that Bourdain, himself, will never be quite as organized as is Bryan, for Bourdain is just too much of the rebel, the original, the maverick.

Kitchen Confidential can be informative as well as wickedly funny. Bourdain is hilarious as he tells us what to order in restaurants and when. For instance, we learn never to eat fish on Mondays, to avoid Sunday brunches and never to order any sort of meat well-done. And, if we ever see a sign that says, "Discount Sushi," we will, if we are smart, run the other way as fast as we possibly can.

Kitchen Confidential isn't undying literature but it's so funny and so well-written that no one should care. It made me hungry for Bourdain's black sea bass crusted in sel de Bretagne with frites. It also made me order his novel, Bone in the Throat. If it is only half as funny and wickedly well-written as is Kitchen Confidential it will certainly be a treat.