“Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly” by Anthony Bourdain
You know when you talk to people who are passionate about their craft, and you can now see their subject of affection from a completely different light and you can feel their enthusiasm being contagious to you? This is what this book makes me feel, where suddenly I can see “chefdom”, as Anthony Bourdain describes it, from a new exciting angle.
This book is Bourdain’s intriguing autobiography from his previous life, the time before he became world famous for being an adventurer. It is narrated in a familiar way like the way he used to narrate his travel adventure shows: with raw honesty, sarcasm, skepticism, dark humor, somehow wisdom, and of course no bullshit. But instead of the slums and villages around the world, it is the brutal and unforgiving jungle of his home turf: the messy, chaotic, tough world of New York’s food scene.
As Bourdain describes it, “I want to tell you about the dark recesses of the restaurant underbelly – a subculture whose centuries-old militaristic hierarchy and ethos of ‘rum, buggery and the lash’ make for a mix of unwavering order and nerve-shattering chaos – because I find it all quite comfortable, like a nice warm bath. I can move around easily in this life. I speak the language. In the small, incestuous community of chefs and cooks in New York City, I know the people, and in my kitchen, I know how to behave (as opposed to in real life, where I’m on shakier ground).”
He tells it all, in a brutally honest way, from the time he was being a dishwasher in a pizza place straight after high school, to the best culinary school in the country, the long and difficult tale of climbing up the ladder in chefdom (or more precisely, moving around restaurants within the city), being fed up with all of it and stay away from being a chef, living in the wilderness for years, working at a restaurant owned by a mob, getting fired from a Mexican place, working at a Chinese food place for a while, working under “New York’s Prince of Restaurant Darkness”, and many more tales before finally becoming one of the top chefs in the city.
All the foul mouthed scenes in the heat of the kitchen, his serious (but hilarious) contempt towards vegetarians, his take on food freshness, him actually teaching us how to properly cook a meal, on owning a restaurant, a guy nicknamed “Bigfoot” who taught Bourdain everything about the industry, that time when he was burnt out and swore to never work in the restaurant industry again, his addiction to drugs, lessons from the many shitty restaurants that he worked for, all of them make some highly amusing tales. A stuff of legend.
Funny how looking back to his insanely turbulent life as a chef, can really prepare him for his next life as a travel adventure superstar. It’s like his whole life was preparing him to toughen up and wise up in order to be able to travel into the most difficult corners of the world.
I really enjoyed reading it due to its rawness and vulgarity, a kind of no-bullshit attitude that I increasingly grow to love. Like the Ernest Hemingway of the world, or Dave Chapelle, Mark Manson, or even Charles Bukowski. The chaos-ness of it all also reminds me of the beautiful disaster of the book “Please Kill Me”, the oral history of punk music. But instead of musicians, Bourdain makes chefs and their kitchen staffs look like the ones who are the rock stars. And rightly so.
THE CHAOS THEORY 