

Toward the book’s end, Bourdain recalls the time he traveled to Japan to help train the chefs at the new Les Halles Tokyo. He finds his Zen in the everyday pleasure of dishing out good steak-frites, happy to just be alive.īut then, he hints that maybe there’s more to life waiting ahead. “Stabilized on methadone, I became nearly unemployable by polite society: a shiftless, untrustworthy coke-sniffer, sneak thief and corner-cutting hack, toiling in obscurity in the culinary backwaters.” He puts his life together with the help of an old mentor, and his ultimate triumph isn’t a Michelin star but a normal head chef’s job overseeing the kitchen at Les Halles, a popular but not flashy brasserie. (The book is really a pretty loose collection of essays, but it still manages an arc.) “It is one of the central ironies of my career that as soon as I got off heroin, things started getting really bad,” he wrote of his low point. With Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain grafted a classic addiction and redemption story onto the cooking world. My father struggled with depression and substance abuse-he had a brief and ill-fated run trying to deal coke in the early ’80s-but centered himself as a parent, literally putting dinner on the table. You'll beg the chef for more, please.When I finally picked up the book as an adult, it was easy to see why. Kitchen Confidential will make your mouth water while your belly aches with laughter. From Bourdain's first oyster in the Gironde, to his lowly position as dishwasher in a honky tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown (where he witnesses for the first time the real delights of being a chef) from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, to drug dealers in the east village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain's tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable. Bourdain uses the same "take-no-prisoners" attitude in his deliciously funny and shockingly delectable book, sure to delight gourmands and philistines alike.

Last summer, The New Yorker published Chef Bourdain's shocking, "Don't Eat Before Reading This." Bourdain spared no one's appetite when he told all about what happens behind the kitchen door. Kitchen Confidential reveals what Bourdain calls "twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine." The New York Times bestselling memoir from Anthony Bourdain, the host of Parts Unknown. Print Kitchen Confidential: Insider's Edition
