Kitchen Confidential

Anthony Bourdain

I now know where my neighbour got her source about not eating fish on Monday. This book is filled with tidbits, and hints at the characters that inspired Bobby Gold stories. The pizza twirling, saute bitch is one of the people he met when he was an apprentice in the kitchen. The gangsters came from the time when he worked in the kitchen belonging to the mob.

He certainly has a chequered career, and it seems to be filled with aimless drifting until he comes to the part about the really good chef, Scott Bryan. It's a bit hard not to imagine Bourdain having no envy of the guy's talents: obviously the good cook had pursued the craft whereas Bourdain as he said so himself pursued money.

So now moderately successful as a cook at Les Halles, he takes on his journeys, starting with the Les Halles sanctioned Tokyo trip. I can see how that trip opened his eyes and made him want to learn about the food in the world.

As for him returning to become a finer chef or cook, I doubt it.

This book is good for the first 10 or so chapters and then it kinda drifts off aimlessly with the same plot, the same dialogue as he surely must have had in his moderately successful "pirate kitchens" during all his cooking career.

Worth reading, but not again, unless you want to pick up the kitchen slang.