Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (Ecco) - Softcover

Bourdain, Anthony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060899220 ISBN 13: 9780060899226

Publisher: Ecco Press, 2007

Synopsis

Kitchen Confidential The updated edition of the wickedly funny and insightful bestseller filled with "25 years of sex, drugs, bad behavior, and haute cuisine," now includes three new chapters about the author's adventures since the book was originally published. Full description

About this title

Review:

Kitchen Confidential is for diners who 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, 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.

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 favour 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." --Sumi Hahn

Review:

Bourdain captures the world of restaurants and professionally cooked food in all its theatrical, demented glory.--USA Today

"You'll laugh, you'll cry...you're gonna love it."--Denver Post

"Utterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and precise ear for kitchen patois."--New York magazine

"The kind of book you read in one sitting, then rush about annoying your coworkers by declaiming whole passages."--USA Today

"A gonzo memoir of whats really going on behind those swinging doors.... Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain is unique."--Newsweek

"Bourdain's prose is utterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and a precise ear for kitchen patois."--New York magazine

"Hysterical.... Bourdain gleefully rips through the scenery to reveal private backstage horrors."--New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0060899220
• ISBN 13: 9780060899226
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352