Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Let me preface this post first. I adore Anthony Bourdain. No one can convince me otherwise. I will not bend to another opinion and I will not look the other way from this unruly, opinionated, coarse and crass wonderful human being. My husband and I worship Bourdain with a passion and he was the only celebrity death recently that actually made my husband visibly sad. He means that much.

Okay, adoring rant now over. 

I got Kitchen Confidential for my husband as a Christmas gift a number of years ago and he devoured it so quickly over the remaining holiday time. He was obsessed the unforgiving, no-shits-given recollection from Bourdain. He's been trying to get me to read it for a while and I finally agreed to the audiobook version for our travels this fall. Question: HOW DID I WAIT SO LONG?!

The audiobook we got is the one actually narrated by Bourdain and that made it 100-million times better. He has such a voice, an inflection, that makes you feel like he is sitting there right beside you after a long shift regaling you with his own personal war-stories like you've been best buds for years. Listening to him read his own words and his own stories was like a hug -- and I needed it.

I knew going in that Bourdain had quite the upbringing in the culinary world and his road to foodie stardom was rough, but man, he really was no-holds-barred in this book. I loved it! It was funny, raw, crass, dark and everything I'd hoped and more.

He wrote about cooking on the line in the 70's and meeting some of the other cooks that he would look to for the rest of his career. The stories about those men and women were some of the funniest in the book. He wrote about going on job interviews, and fucking them up. Actually, he wrote about how he fucked up a lot of stuff up, but how those experiences made him stronger and he learned and he never gave up.

You hear about how the world of cooking can be dirty, mean and downright appalling and Bourdain was here to tell you its all true. Maybe we really all needed to hear it, buck up and carry on. The people that buy, cook, and prepare our food are some of the most grueling, skilled and badass people around. 

I will never run out of great things to say about this book, but I will stop because I have just two words:

READ IT.