About this deal
By the time I enrolled in the fieldwork class, I knew I was probably on my way out, and got permission to do my fieldwork assignments in restaurant kitchens. So it was with a heavy heart that I started flipping through Kitchen Confidential, the book that overnight made Bourdain a culinary sensation.
Despite his legions of fans, plenty of them well-read people, I hadn't expected his prose to be so sparky and propulsive. We all eat in restaurants, but we very rarely think about what goes on beyond the kitchen doors (until our steak is undercooked, then we are all opinion).
After twenty-five years of 'sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine', chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain decides to tell all. The culinary-school trained cooks in the restaurant commanded me to read this book when I was still just observing and volunteering (I later worked there until I moved away), and it solidified my love for an industry that I was already excited by because of my experiences.
Bourdain appears to have had a decent enough childhood and his chapter about discovering good food in France was nice. He did that with self-deprecating humor, and gave no-nonsense advice for people who want to cook like he did - at the risk of deeply offending vegetarians all over the world. Bourdain's book ranges freely over his French childhood where he first got obsessed with food, his time at fry-shacks, grill bars, and the Culinary Institute of America which variously taught him to cook, his exceedingly checkered career as chef for a variety of restaurants both doomed and successful, and his observations on the underbelly of the restaurant biz. A Day in the Life" revealed the realities of a 16-hour day at a busy eatery that served lunch and dinners. I would have loved to have eaten something dished up by Bourdain, it is astonishing what he knows about food and its preparation and I very much enjoyed these aspects of his book.As a result, you will want to hop the next flight and travel the world visiting as many restaurants and trying as many types of food as you can. If you've ever been curious about how a professional kitchen is run, well, this will satisfy that curiosity. While interesting for the non-culinary inclined, I think it would be better received by someone with a kitchen background or a person who has worked in food and beverage. He sounds pretty much like a conceited, arrogant asshole, even as he's admitting he was a conceited, arrogant, twenty-year-old asshole.
The ecstatic moments of sensual joy can be found in Proust's Swann's Way, and in Camus’s The Stranger and The Plague, where the characters experience the transference of absurdity of life in the sensory experience of the moment. Bourdain has cited George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), with its behind-the-scenes examination of the restaurant business in 1920s Paris, as an important influence on the book's themes and tone.I enjoyed greatly the first 150 pages of the book, but the last 150 pages I was struggling and dragging through, so be prepared for uneven writing.
They endured silently my gripes about cheesy butter and the seemingly endless amusement I took in advertisements for a popular soft drink of the time, Pschitt ("I want shit! THE CLASSIC BESTSELLER: 'The greatest book about food ever written''A compelling book with its intriguing mix of clever writing and kitchen patois .
But I admire anyone that can do it – and like Bourdain, I can see his point that “line cooks are the heroes.