Oct 13 min read

Kitchen Confidential (Insider’s Edition): Bourdain’s Beautifully Brutal Memoir On Life Behind The Kitchen Door

I have just read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential for the first time and it’s like nothing I have read before. Perhaps a similar spirit of adventure and endurance can be found on the pages of a classical winding western novel. Perhaps it emulates the intensity and grit of a gangster movie. Maybe even the relentless aggression that runs throughout is reminiscent of a heavy metal rock song. But I think the closest comparison would be the Dangerous Book For Boys, but for the boys who grew up. Kitchen Confidential is Bourdain’s first book catapulting off the chaos and controversy of his first article published by The New Yorker in 1999, 'Don’t Eat Before Reading This'. From the first chapter of Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain plummets the reader into the hellish reality of his first kitchen job, delivering the explosive thrill promised by his iconic article.

Since the book's release in 2000, it has continued to satisfy a growling hunger for information about the nature and experience of life working in the culinary industry. The content of this memoir has already been dissected, names and faces have been attached to stories, locations and restaurants investigated by the media following Bourdain’s tales. What I want to explore is not the lore or gossip enveloped within this book, but the unique sensory experience of reading this memoir.

There is something distinctively boyish about Bourdain’s writing: the grossness; the gore; he captures the ugliness and brutality of a real professional kitchen and the humans which inhabit it in the same way a little boy would observe and play with creepie crawlies and insects in the garden. The foundation of this book is firmly located within the reality of adulthood, suffocating days filled with work, darkness, responsibility, disappointment and dilemma. However, Bourdain’s cheekiness and defiance have the power to puncture this like a naughty schoolboy.

Kitchen Confidential follows Bourdain from kitchen to kitchen. From his ferocious first job, to grungy New York kitchens, to crisp white tablecloths and marble surfaces. From French to Italian, to American cuisine; from deep-fried foods to beautiful fresh dishes; from quality restaurants to repulsively commercial ones. Each location, people and experience offers a contrasting note of flavour on the reader’s palette.

Sometimes pages upon pages of the gruesome reality of the professional kitchen can feel relentless. A deep tension bubbles throughout every chapter like a boiling pan of water. Rich, vivid imagery pours over every paragraph like a sickly sauce. Kitchen Confidential is a chef's life written in a way as brutal and honest as a raw, unseasoned steak.

As a reader, you may find yourself questioning why you are enduring the horror of these stories for any motivation beyond nosiness and curiosity about what happens behind the kitchen door. It seems at every point when the book almost becomes too unbearable, through the flames and sweat, Bourdain hits you with the clearest and most refreshing lessons on life and (potentially more importantly) food. Bourdain is funny, he is fierce, but at the end of every chapter, his powerful thoughtfulness is unveiled. Like a stainless steel knife, his writing delivers clean-cut philosophies effortlessly “I’ve long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk.” It is now impossible to eat an oyster without thinking of him.

There is something Biblical and almost Godly about this book. Bourdain himself becomes an omnipotent, omniscient narrator outside of space and time. Kitchen Confidential is composed of distant memories, Bourdain’s near present and his notes and reflections from the future. Tales of his formative and tender childhood memories are melted together with the ferocity and chaos of his years of experience in the kitchen. However, in the Insider’s Edition of the book, the flow is constantly interrupted and overpowered by the Anthony Bourdain of the future. Featuring his own handwritten footnotes and afterthoughts, his assertive, bold handwriting is printed over the majority of pages of the original typed edition. The notes and edits he makes are scrawled everywhere. They relish, regret and reflect on his journey to Head Chef. As I closed this book, I recognised what an incredibly remarkable thing I had just experienced. Just like the Bible, where the ineffable entity of God is described through the elements of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Kitchen Confidential also explores the nature of a complex man from child, to adult and future self. Between the pages of this book, I read not only what the entirety of the kitchen looks like. But the entirety of a man, too. Bourdain was certainly a man, that we all should know.