Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

Publisher: Ecco

Year: 2000/2007

Pages: 312

At some point during my teenage years (1997-1998, specifically), Fox aired a series of specials called Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed; an anonymous masked magician performed all the old reliable magic tricks and then revealed how they were done. If you believed Fox, it was a big deal, except that of course it wasn’t. Still, the shows were ratings successes, because people would like to believe they are gaining firsthand knowledge of a heretofore inaccessible realm of knowledge—especially, I suppose, if there are pyrotechnics and showgirls involved.

In 1999, Tony Bourdain was a chef working in New York City, unknown outside of a small circle of NYC chefs and accomplished foodies. This began to change after he published an article entitled “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” in The New Yorker; a collection of helpful hints garnered from his time in the cooking industry, it was precisely the sort of insider knowledge that seems as though it should be clandestine but probably isn’t. Ordering beef well-done ensures you get the worst cuts; order fish on Monday means you get fish leftover from last week; the atmosphere in a kitchen is a little like a frat house, but with more French sauces.

Riding the success of this article, Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential the next year (and catapulted himself into stardom), essentially expanding the article into book length with extensive autobiography and even more lurid details. It still has that “Here’s what They don’t want you to know” sort of conspiratorial allure, but generally speaking you could save yourself no small amount of time and boredom by just reading the original article instead.

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