"Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly" by Anthony Bourdain

When Chef Anthony Bourdain wrote "Don't Eat Before You Read This" in The New Yorker, he spared no one's appetite, revealing what goes on behind the kitchen door.In Kitchen Confidential, he expanded that appetizer into a deliciously funny, delectable shocking banquet that lays out his 25 years of sex, drugs, and haute cuisine.

From his first oyster in the Gironde to the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, from the restaurants of Tokyo to the drug dealers of the East Village, from the mobsters to the rats, Bourdain's brilliantly written, wild-but-true tales make the belly ache with laughter.





Most diners believe that their sublime sliver of seared foie gras, topped with an ethereal buckwheat blini and a drizzle of piquant huckleberry sauce, was created by a culinary artist of the highest order, a sensitive, highly refined executive chef. The truth is more brutal. More likely, writes Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential, that elegant three-star concoction is the collaborative effort of a team of "wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts, and psychopaths," in all likelihood pierced or tattooed and incapable of uttering a sentence without an expletive or a foreign phrase. Such is the muscular view of the culinary trenches from one who's been groveling in them, with obvious sadomasochistic pleasure, for more than 20 years.
CIA-trained Bourdain, currently the executive chef of the celebrated Les Halles, wrote two culinary mysteries before his first (and infamous) New Yorker essay launched this frank confessional about the lusty and larcenous real lives of cooks and restaurateurs. He is obscenely eloquent, unapologetically opinionated, and a damn fine storyteller–a Jack Kerouac of the kitchen. Those without the stomach for this kind of joyride should note his opening caveat: "There will be horror stories. Heavy drinking, drugs, screwing in the dry-goods area, unappetizing industry-wide practices. Talking about why you probably shouldn't order fish on a Monday, why those who favor well-done get the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, and why seafood frittata is not a wise brunch selection…. But I'm simply not going to deceive anybody about the life as I've seen it."

CONTENTS
APPETIZER
A Note from the Chef
FIRST COURSE
Food Is Good
Food Is Sex
Food Is Pain
Inside the CIA
The Return of Mal Carne
SECOND COURSE
Who Cooks?
From Our Kitchen to Your Table
How to Cook Like the Pros
Owner's Syndrome and Other Medical Anomalies
Bigfoot
THIRD COURSE
I Make My Bones
The Happy Time
Chef of the Future!
Apocalypse Now
The Wilderness Years
What I Know About Meat
Pino Noir: Tuscan Interlude
DESSERT
A Day in the Life
Sous-Chef
The Level of Discourse
Other Bodies
Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown
Department of Human Resources
COFFEE AND A CIGARETTE
The Life of Bryan
Mission to Tokyo
So You Want to Be a Chef? A Commencement Address
Kitchen's Closed
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR