Kitchen Confidential

First of all, let me just say that I'm no foodie. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

What little I know about line cooking, I learned watching the early seasons of Gordon Ramsey's Hell's Kitchen. Do I apply anything I've learned on TV in my own kitchen? Hell no! I'm just a simple guy. I love to eat, but I hate to cook. Due to the fact that I have no interest in starred chefs and haute cuisine, I actually discovered Anthony Bourdain quite late in his career. Indeed, it's through his No Reservation TV show that I came to like the guy. He's quite a character, no doubt about it.

I bought the digital edition of Kitchen Confidential a few years back and I should have read it before his death. Returning from my hiking trip in New Hampshire, I decided that it was high time to finally give it a shot. I'm glad I did because the book is an absolute riot! I had no idea Anthony Bourdain wrote so well. His narrative voice is great and he really knows how to grab your attention. This was a fantastic change of pace for me and I reckon that many of you would enjoy this one as well.

Here's my favorite quote:

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It's healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I've worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I'll accomodate them, I'll rummage around for something to feed them, for a 'vegetarian plate', if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine.

Here's the blurb:

A deluxe, annotated edition of Kitchen Confidential to celebrate the life of Anthony Bourdain, featuring new photo inserts.

Over two decades ago, the New Yorker published a now infamous article, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” by then little-known chef Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain spared no one’s appetite as he revealed what happens behind the kitchen door. The article was a sensation, and the book it spawned, the now iconic Kitchen Confidential, became an even bigger sensation and megabestseller. Frankly confessional, addictively acerbic, and utterly unsparing, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business.

Fans will love to return to this deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade, laying out Bourdain’s more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine. Including a handwritten introduction and annotations done by Bourdain about a decade after the book was originally published, this edition also features previously unpublished photos to accompany the now-classic text.

For more info about this title, follow this Amazon Associate link.