Book Review: Anthony Bourdain - Kitchen Confidential

The New Yorker article "Don't Eat Before Reading This" that this book was based on turned 20 in April 2019, so it's interesting to read the book only now, yet still be able to see exactly why this guy became so famous. Food content is everywhere now - personal blogs, Yelp reviews, and impossibly lengthy SEO-optimized recipes for grilled cheese sandwiches - so it's hard to remember what it was like before the internet turned writing itself into fast food, but Bourdain's irreverent peek behind the kitchen curtains was genuinely novel at the time. Even now his writing is frequently spectacular: his keen and gossipy characterization, amusing but still affecting storytelling, and wry, appreciative voice all give a side of the restaurant industry that was not really seen 20 years ago and is still often underappreciated all the glamour and human interest that he would later make a career out of exposing viewers to on TV. It's a mix of memoir, philosophizing, career retrospective, apologia, and plain old complaining that he uses to make being a chef seem heroic and pathetic at a stroke, writing from the perspective of a man who has experienced the closely-linked extremes of crippling failure and stunning success, showing why restauranteur is such a fascinating profession in the aggregate yet any given chef is not to be trusted one bit.

I remember reading once that to get truly famous you have to excel at at least two different things and corner the market on the intersection of your talents. It seems like most chefs are not also good writers, let alone also good TV personalities, and likewise very few television hosts or authors are classically trained French chefs (as a sidenote, a lot of the French techniques and items he discusses are totally alien to me, although to be fair I'm not the kind of person who's making reservations at Dorsia - I mean Les Halles - very often). While I'll never have the opportunity to eat a meal that Bourdain cooked, if it was anything like his writing it would have been a real treat. He's good at making you think about your own food experiences: the opening chapter contains such a lovingly detailed description of learning to love oysters as a child on vacation in France that you can't help but think about great meals you've had, and right up until the end of the book he's raving about sushi he once had in a way that has actually changed how I view what I'm eating.

Sometimes his rule-breaking renegade shtick wears a bit thin over the course of the book - he really wants you to know that he's done a lot of drugs and seen a lot of misbehavior and lived a wild and crazy life, etc - but I don't begrudge him for getting as much mileage as he can out of his life story, and honestly, a lot of it is simple jealousy. The exact same questions about food authenticity apply to chef authenticity, and the same answer - just relax and enjoy what you're served - also applies. You can go a long way in America by playing the bad boy with a hidden soft side, and Bourdain's voice is just the perfect blend of wasn't-I-a-scoundrel and sincere passion for his craft, neatly balancing his (very) lengthy assurances about how much he loves dick jokes with more humanizing moments like his unashamed love letter to the bread one of his cooks makes. And his closing humility, where he reveals that everything he's said was just his own personal opinion, and just like there's no one right way to live there's no one right way to run a restaurant, cements him as surely one of the coolest people to evangelize the art of appreciating food. RIP.