Kitchen Confidential: Adventures In The Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

This book contains no recipes.

Notes about this book

  • Eat Your Books

    Read Gastronomy's review of this book.

You must Create an Account or Sign In to add a note to this book.

Reviews about this book

  • Eats Well with Others

    One of the things I admired most about Bourdain while reading this book was his refusal to conform either his food or his mentality to any kind of social standards. He said what he wanted to say...

    Full review
  • ISBN 10 0060934913
  • ISBN 13 9780060934910
  • Published May 08 2001
  • Format Paperback
  • Language English
  • Countries United States
  • Publisher Ecco

Publishers Text

New in paper! Most diners believe that their sublime sliver of seared foie gras, topped with an ethereal buckwheat blini and a drizzle of piquant huckleberry sauce, was created by a culinary artist of the highest order, a sensitive, highly refined executive chef.

The truth is more brutal. More likely, writes Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential, that elegant three-star concoction is the collaborative effort of a team of wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts, and psychopaths, in all likelihood pierced or tattooed and incapable of uttering a sentence without an expletive or a foreign phrase.


Such is the muscular view of the culinary trenches from one who's been groveling in them, with obvious sadomasochistic pleasure, for more than 20 years. CIA-trained Bourdain, currently the executive chef of the celebrated Les Halles, wrote two culinary mysteries before his first (and infamous) New Yorker essay launched this frank confessional about the lusty and larcenous real lives of cooks and restaurateurs. He is obscenely eloquent, unapologetically opinionated, and a damn fine storyteller--a Jack Kerouac of the kitchen.


Those without the stomach for this kind of joyride should note his opening caveat: There will be horror stories. Heavy drinking, drugs, screwing in the dry-goods area, unappetizing industry-wide practices. Talking about why you probably shouldn't order fish on a Monday, why those who favor well-done get the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, and why seafood frittata is not a wise brunch selection.... But I'm simply not going to deceive anybody about the life as I've seen it.

Other cookbooks by this author