What a true delight it was to read my first Anthony Bourdain book! It was humorous, crude, exhilarating, mouth-watering, and highly informative. Oh, and I should mention, Bourdain may be a master at wielding a knife, but his skills with a pen aren’t too shabby either. I spent the past several days in his kitchens and dreaming about food and travel. (Well, I’m pretty much always fantasizing about these things, but let’s just say it became a bit of an incurable obsession of late!)

Martin believes that Bourdain embodies many of the contradictions common to the group of driven male auteurs of his era, men like David Chase of The Sopranos and Simon, whose self-styled machismo and obsession with perceived authenticity could periodically obscure their well-intentioned progressive views. While I love to be in the kitchen and think of myself as a decent cook, I still consider what goes on behind closed doors in a restaurant to be magical. After falling in love with Bourdain as a television personality, I thought I would try to deepen my connection with my burgeoning passion in the kitchen by listening to his memoir. I always loved Anthony Bourdain for his ability to "take off the gloves" when speaking about some of the industry’s best kept secrets. I honestly don’t think I would have the courage to push myself in the kitchen if it wasn’t for his sarcastic yet encouraging voice pushing me along. With his signature dry sense of humor and absolute refusal to muzzle himself,It tasted of seawater… of brine and flesh… and somehow… of the future… I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit and everything that followed in my life – the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation – would all stem from this moment.” But as a lighthouse in the darkness of melancholy, with so much joy, passion, and pure happiness, Bourdain describes the time he realized he fell hopelessly in love with food - the first time he tried oysters in France as a child - the picture than lingered vividly in his memory. I’m good. Im free, as it were, of the complications of normal human entanglements, untormented by the beauty, complexity and challenge of a big magnificent and often painful world.” Kitchen Confidential also mirrors some of the former newspaper reporter Simon’s uncanny talent for explaining complex hierarchies and ecosystems. Just as Simon laid bare the Byzantine world of Baltimore’s drug trade and the futile attempts at policing it, Bourdain’s rogues’ gallery of investors, managers, food purveyors, inspectors, underworld operators, and rank-and-file staff involved in a typical restaurant venture is an exhilarating window into what civilians might have misconstrued as prosaic. Little wonder that Simon would eventually hire Bourdain to write multiple episodes of his post-Katrina, New Orleans–set HBO drama, Treme.

He sounds pretty much like a conceited, arrogant asshole, even as he's admitting he was a conceited, arrogant, twenty-year-old asshole. In this case, though certainly there is a feel of realism added by listening to him talk, it is far, far too much arrogance for me. I work with that type quite a bit, so I'm not really enjoying it during my free time. Okay, so there were some interesting bits if you just skimmed through all the abuse and the nasty bits. He offers some cooking tips and a pretty decent insight into dining for customers. I personally find that restaurants in Pune are mostly useless with loud music, large TV playing sports, unbearably bright lights, and indifferent service. It's like they can't decide whether they are a club, sports bar, or operation theatre. Reading Kitchen Confidential gave me some real insights into why restaurants would make it such a chore to sit through a damn meal. Bourdain’s death is indeed a truly tragic one, and I was deeply sad and moved when I found out about it in 2018. From the time of writing of Kitchen Confidential, and before, to 2018, a year of his death, Bourdain continued to struggle with his mental health. He often brought out death, and in one of his last interviews, he said that he was going to “die in the saddle” — a sentiment that later proved chilling. His statements, as well some passages of the book proved how desperately he needed help. So it is somewhat puzzling that his loved ones expressed their disbelief after the event, with his mother saying he was “absolutely the last person in the world I would have ever dreamed would do something like this.” Published in 2000, Kitchen Confidential mostly revealed his wild streak. During his early years, his behavior and speech reflected somebody who didn't care whether he was liked. Bourdain reeked of privilege that was topped off by an expletive-laced attitude coming from a drug-addicted snob. Bourdain enters a lengthy period of unemployment, as his reputation and the mistakes he makes in interviews leave him unemployable. Pino Luongo, the owner of La Mardi, gives Bourdain a break, offering him the role of executive chef at another of his restaurants. Although Bourdain eventually leaves under a cloud, his career has been re-established.

See a Problem?

I’m asked a lot what the best thing about cooking for a living is. And it’s this: to be a part of a subculture. To be part of a historical continuum, a secret society with its own language and customs. To enjoy the instant gratification of making something good with one’s hands – using all one’s senses. It can be, at times, the purest and most unselfish way of giving pleasure (though oral sex has to be a close second).” Conscious of his influences and the inheritance of a specific literary legacy, Kitchen Confidential is often cannily referential. Martin correctly points out how closely Bourdain follows the beats of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, a 1933 social-realist depiction of the anarchic and frequently thrilling life of restaurant staff laboring in a pitiless metropolis, which doubles as a Marxist critique of the desperate and even inhumane conditions encountered by those workers. Garlic is divine. Misuse of garlic is a crime. Old garlic, burnt garlic, garlic cut too long ago, garlic that has been smashed through one of those abominations, the garlic press, are all disgusting. Sliver it for pasta, like you saw in Goodfellas. Smash it with the flat of your knife blade. And try roasting garlic. It gets mellow and sweeter if you roast it whole, to be squeezed out later when it's soft and brown.

The writing style is also somewhat over-done. It reminds me of when I was in high school and a group of us learned how to write humorous essays, that mostly consisted of wild exaggeration coupled with sarcasm. It's tiring. But even during his so-called "wilderness" years, his love of food led to an atypical perspective on race and kitchen people, his tribe.I first heard of author, Anthony Bourdain, in a review discussion of his exposé of behind the scenes restaurant life on BBC Radio Four over twenty years ago. Two days later I bought and read Kitchen Confidential, and was totally blown away. I bought copies for family members, bored anyone who'd listen with excerpts and advice from the book, then started on a succession of other cook's tales, but none was as funny, scary, evocative as that by Bourdain. He remained an hero throughout the years to come. His recent, sad departure from this world prompted me to read the book again but this time literally in his own voice as he is also the narrator. And if I thought it breathtaking before, well, he really has to be heard to be believed. Kitchen Confidential is Bourdain's memoir that offers a deep look at the behind-the-scenes of restaurant kitchens. But two other things stood out to me in late Bourdains’s professional memoir. The first thing is his love of food, and the specific relationship he developed with food early in his childhood. The second thing is the frightening descriptions of his mental state, which I feel were largely overlooked as people were distracted with lushness and brilliant humor with which he described a world of restaurants. Having in mind Bourdain’s death from suicide in 2018, I can presume that he did not receive the adequate help that he desperately need, which is evident in his memoir written almost a decade before the tragic death.

One thing can be presumed from that, of all relationships in life, the relationship he had with food was one of the most important, if not the most important relationship he had.If you are like me and love food, watching Top Chef and Food Channel, think that cooking is art, an outlet for creativity, consider chefs featured on such shows (including Anthony Bourdain) as super-sophisticated artists, you are up for a surprise with this book. I have long been a Bourdain fan, we watched all of his shows and his enjoyment of food and travel has encouraged us more than once to get out of our comfort zones and to embrace new and unique experiences. I was devastated when I heard news of his suicide, I feel like the world is a bit less bright without him in it. Having just listened to Marco Pierre White's autobiography, I decided again to return to Bourdain's tales of life as a Chef, my fourth reading now, and still as good as first time around. It was so wonderful to hear his brilliant narration, too, a voice to remember. A voice filled with his love of life, his life and all it's imperfections, the people he'd worked with, be they good, bad or quirky. So full of humour and the enjoyment of discovery. How different from the coldness and self obsession of White. My chef friends in New York would have gouged out an eye or given up five years of their lives for the meal I was about to have... Each time the chef put another item down in front of us, I detected almost a dare, as if he didn't expect us to like what he was giving us, as if any time now he'd find something too much for our barbarian palates and crude, unsophisticated palates. Reading this after Bourdain committed suicide is a bit rough, because while he certainly had a tendency for self-destructive behavior (he mentions excessive drinking and developing a heroin addiction), he also clearly loved to feel alive. How hard it must get for a man who loved life as much as he did to decide it wasn't worth living anymore is beyond what I can imagine, and it makes me incredibly sad to think he took his own life.