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Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly Hardcover – May 22, 2000
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A NEW YORK TIMES-BESTSELLING PHENOMENON
The bestselling breakout chef-tells-all from Anthony Bourdain, the globally beloved Emmy award-winning host of Parts Unknown and No Reservations.
In the now classic memoir that launched Anthony Bourdain's long career, the globally beloved chef took us through the swinging kitchen doors and turned the culinary trade on its head. The result was a deliciously funny, shocking banquet of wild tales that drew from "twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine.”
Sure to delight gourmands and philistines alike, Bourdain recounts everything from his first oyster in the Gironde to his lowly position as dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown (where he became hooked on chef work for life); from the stovetops of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center to drug dealers in the east village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again.
Bourdain's tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable, and Kitchen Confidential will make your mouth water and your belly ache with laughter and leave you wanting more.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBloomsbury USA
- Publication dateMay 22, 2000
- Dimensions6.45 x 1.05 x 9.55 inches
- ISBN-10158234082X
- ISBN-13978-1582340821
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What's it about?
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Editorial Reviews
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From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Benedict Arnold. Alger Hiss. Anthony Bourdain." ―London Evening Standard
"With equal parts wit and wickedness, Bourdain [does] the unthinkable by revealing trade secrets that chefs and restaurateurs cringe to read" ―Restaurant Business magazine
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Let's talk about tools first. What do we have in our kitchens that you probably don't? The joke is that many of our stock items - herb oils, crushed spices, chiffonaded parsley, pured starches and veggies - are often made with home-model equipment, just like yours. I may have a 25-quart professional Hobart mixer and an ultra-large Robot-Coupe, but chances are I used a home blender to make that lovely roast red pepper coulis dotted with bright green basil oil drizzled around your plate. So, what do you absolutely need?
You need, for God's sake, a decent chef's knife. No con foisted on the general public is so atrocious, so wrongheaded, or so widely believed as the one that tells you you need a full set of specialized cutlery in various sizes. I wish sometimes I could go through the kitchens of amateur cooks everywhere just throwing knives out from their drawers - all those medium-size 'utility' knives, those useless serrated things you see advertised on TV, all that hard-to-sharpen stainless-steel garbage, those ineptly designed slicers - not one of the damn things could cut a tomato. Please believe me, here's all you will ever need in the knife department: ONE good chef's knife, as large as is comfortable for your hand. Brand name? Okay, most talented amateurs get a boner buying one of the old-school professional high-carbon stainless knives from Germany or Austria, like a Henkel or Wusthof, and those are fine knives, if heavy. High carbon makes them slightly easier to sharpe! n, and stainless keeps them from getting stained and corroded. They look awfully good in the knife case at the store, too, and you send the message to your guests when flashing a hundred-dollar hunk of Solingen steel that you take your cooking seriously. But do you really need something so heavy? So expensive? So difficult to maintain (which you probably won't)? Unless you are really and truly going to spend fifteen minutes every couple of days working that blade on an oiled carborundum stone, followed by careful honing on a diamond steel, I'd forgo the Germans.
Most of the professionals I know have for years been retiring their Wusthofs and replacing them with the lightweight, easy-to-sharpen and relatively inexpensive vanadium steel Global knives, a very good Japanese product which has - in addition to its many other fine qualities - the added attraction of looking really cool.
Global makes a lot of knives in different sizes, so what do you need? One chef's knife. This should cut just about anything you might work with, from a shallot to a watermelon, an onion to a sirloin strip. Like a pro, you should use the tip of the knife for the small stuff, and the area nearer the heel for the larger. This isn't difficult; buy a few rutabagas or onions - they're cheap - and practice on them. Nothing will set you apart from the herd quicker than the ability to handle a chef's knife properly. If you need instruction on how to handle a knife without lopping off a finger, I recommend Jacques Pepin's La Technique.
Okay, there are a couple of other knives you might find useful. I carry a flexible boning knife, also made by the fine folks at Global, because I fillet the occasional fish, and because with the same knife I can butcher whole tenderloins, bone out legs of lamb, French-cut racks of veal and trim meat. If your butcher is doing all the work for you you can probably live without one. A paring knife comes in handy once in a while, if you find yourself tourneing vegetables, fluting mushrooms and doing the kind of microsurgery that my old pal Dimitri used to excel at. But how often do you do that?
A genuinely useful blade, however, and one that is increasingly popular with my cronies in the field, is what's called an offset serrated knife . It's basically a serrated knife set into an ergonomic handle; it looks like a 'Z' that's been pulled out and elongated. This is a truly cool item which, once used, becomes indispensable. As the handle is not flush with the blade, but raised away from the cutting surface, you can use it not only for your traditional serrated blade needs - like slicing bread, thick-skinned tomatoes and so on - but on your full line of vegetables, spuds, meat and even fish. My sous-chef uses his for just about everything. F. Dick makes a good one for about twenty-five bucks. It's stainless steel, but since it's serrated it doesn't really matter; after a couple of years of use, if the teeth start to wear down, you just buy yourself another one.
Product details
- Publisher : Bloomsbury USA; First Edition (May 22, 2000)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 158234082X
- ISBN-13 : 978-1582340821
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.45 x 1.05 x 9.55 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #15,659 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #19 in Gastronomy Essays (Books)
- #27 in Culinary Biographies & Memoirs
- #660 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Anthony Bourdain was the author of the novels Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo, the memoir A Cook’s Tour, and the New York Times bestsellers Kitchen Confidential, Medium Raw, Appetites and World Travel. His work appeared in the New York Times and the New Yorker. He was the host of the popular television shows No Reservations and Parts Unknown. Bourdain died in June 2018.
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Kitchen Confidential is well written and it maintained my interest even though I’m not into cooking. Anyone who is will certainly get much from it, but I was drawn mostly from having watched Mr. Bourdain on TV and connecting with his love of travel and of good food. Because his book is more about the larger issues of life than cooking, it touched me on an existential level much as a movie about baseball would that is about more than baseball (e.g., Field of Dreams).
Mr. Bourdain begins his story by recounting his encounters with good food as a child. Tasting vichyssoise and a raw oyster for the first time, struck him as experiences beyond just eating. They were examples of highs that could be reached by an ardent thrill-seeker. They also laid the groundwork that made his landing a job as restaurant dishwasher an inciting incident that he pursued to eventually become a line cook and later a chef.
I was really struck with the level of testosterone-driven, debauchery and near-criminality he describes in the restaurant kitchen. It’s more like what I would expect on a construction site. Actually, there may be similarities.
Several of the book’s chapters are devoted to characters Mr. Bourdain encountered in his restaurant career. These tended to be drug addicts, thieves, hedonists, and criminals, though many had a passion, or just the sheer aptitude, for either cooking or working in a professional kitchen. As contradictory as that sounds, it seems as if such environments are persistently common in the restaurant world. At least that’s what Mr. Bourdain avers and I take him as an authority.
This kitchen “underbelly” was attractive to Mr. Bourdain, and he describes it as one he understood and in which he thrived. It led him to some bad decisions and some bad addictions. He is very candid about the loose lifestyle that left him with a heroin addiction. Even so, it is clear that his love of the culinary arts kept him going, and that it drives many of those workers who might skip out on rent payments but are able to produce the most divine of, say, baked breads.
Indeed, in describing his life when he had reached the level of chef and kitchen commander, Mr. Bourdain gives us a compelling and intense vision of what that life is like. In fact, he almost goes too far in describing a typical day for him. Basically, he worked from before-sunup to after midnight to keep his kitchen running. He describes mind-numbing activity, dealing with the problems and personnel threatening his mission to get good food to customers, juggling a thousand variables. His description carries long (”A Day in the Life”), but being the good author he was, his description served to highlight points he makes later.
Seeing things, even his own life, from a higher perspective, he was able to appreciate and admire someone who did things differently from him and still achieve success (”The Life of Bryan”). Also, towards the end of the book, he further nails his love of sensation and travel—experiencing the exotic— that led to his second, televised, career (”Mission to Tokyo”).
Anthony Bourdain’s literary and video work is not for everyone, but for many, including me, he remains an inspiration. In Kitchen Confidential we see, not only his love for culinary art, but his love for creativity (he often said that he considered himself a storyteller).
Despite all the debauchery, bad attitudes, bad decisions, and chasing highs, he was a lover of life and squeezed every sensational drop from it. An excellent writer, he was able to step back from his own life and observe it, pulling lessons from its episodes. Kitchen Confidential was the watershed of Mr. Bourdain’s life, marking the end of his chef career and the beginning of his traveler-personality career. At the book’s close, though, he didn’t seem to anticipating that second act. It is to our good fortune and inspiration that there was one.
This is a wrong-headed, borderline irrational conception of writing. Unsexy fundamentals like structure and theme are just as crucial to a story's success, if not far more so, than individually memorable moments. Yet "Kitchen Confidential" is a textbook example of why some evaluators feel justified in applying the "loved the writing, BUT..." judgment. Bourdain does a great job of pulling back the curtain to reveal the often seedy, frequently manic, surprisingly enlightening realities of the restaurant world. His anecdotes are entertaining. The characters he encounters and his renderings of them are novelistic. On the surface then, he's an ideal guide for this journey.
The problem is that the journey itself often feels meandering and, at times, uncomfortably close to aimless. After a strong start, the story left me confused again and again about where in Bourdain's chronology I was -- whether he was skipping me back and forth through time, moving me in a straight line, or some combination of the two. Worse, whatever the answer was, I often couldn't figure out WHY it was being chosen.
A large part of this problem stems from Bourdain's disappointing unwillingness to connect the plot points strongly to his own mental and emotional state in the moment. The book is littered with surface references to his substance abuse problems, the strain in his personal relationships (especially with his wife), and his near financial ruin -- yet these elements are rarely used to meaningfully ground the narrative. The chapters thus tend to feel episodic in the worst way: a series of "A to B to C" events that Bourdain witnesses, but which seem to have only a tangential connection to him personally. Soon enough he starts to feel like less like the story's protagonist than a disembodied narrator. The fade-out of human connection leads to the book's becoming increasingly less compelling as it progresses. One restaurant stint blurs with the next and the next, until the last chapter finally attempts to pull the narrative out of its rut with Bourdain's first eye-opening culinary trip abroad as a chef. Unfortunately, by that point, it's too little, too late.
Overall, if you're looking for an entertaining and eye-opening glimpse into the secrets of professional cooking, I would highly recommend picking up "Kitchen Confidential." But if you're looking for either a satisfying, well-constructed memoir or just an introspective accounting of Bourdain's life, sadly, I'd advise you to lower your expectations.
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Version avec les commentaires de l'auteur
Très drôle, interessant et divertissant