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Kitchen Confidential

ebook
1 of 4 copies available
1 of 4 copies available
Anthony Bourdain, host of Parts Unknown, reveals "twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine" in his breakout New York Times bestseller Kitchen Confidential.
Bourdain spares no one's appetite when he told all about what happens behind the kitchen door. Bourdain uses the same "take-no-prisoners" attitude in his deliciously funny and shockingly delectable book, sure to delight gourmands and philistines alike. 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.
Kitchen Confidential will make your mouth water while your belly aches with laughter. You'll beg the chef for more, please.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 22, 2000
      Chef at New York's Les Halles and author of Bone in the Throat, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business. His fast-lane personality and glee in recounting sophomoric kitchen pranks might be unbearable were it not for two things: Bourdain is as unsparingly acerbic with himself as he is with others, and he exhibits a sincere and profound love of good food. The latter was born on a family trip to France when young Bourdain tasted his first oyster, and his love has only grown since. He has attended culinary school, fallen prey to a drug habit and even established a restaurant in Tokyo, discovering along the way that the crazy, dirty, sometimes frightening world of the restaurant kitchen sustains him. Bourdain is no presentable TV version of a chef; he talks tough and dirty. His advice to aspiring chefs: "Show up at work on time six months in a row and we'll talk about red curry paste and lemon grass. Until then, I have four words for you: `Shut the fuck up.' " He disdains vegetarians, warns against ordering food well done and cautions that restaurant brunches are a crapshoot. Gossipy chapters discuss the many restaurants where Bourdain has worked, while a single chapter on how to cook like a professional at home exhorts readers to buy a few simple gadgets, such as a metal ring for tall food. Most of the book, however, deals with Bourdain's own maturation as a chef, and the culmination, a litany describing the many scars and oddities that he has developed on his hands, is surprisingly beautiful. He'd probably hate to hear it, but Bourdain has a tender side, and when it peeks through his rough exterior and the wall of four-letter words he constructs, it elevates this book to something more than blustery memoir.

    • Booklist

      June 1, 2000
      When the rest of the world is leaving the day's work behind, a restaurant staff's workday is just moving into high gear. Chef Bourdain writes intensely and personally about his career in New York's restaurants, leaving little to the imagination. Drugs, crime, aggression, violence, and sex all commingle with the pots and pans. Bourdain recognized people's passion for food on a boyhood trip to France, when his parents left him in the car for three hours while they ate at Fernand Point's legendary La Pyramide. Work in a Provincetown restaurant on Cape Cod led him to enroll at the Culinary Institute of America in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he learned his craft. In restaurant kitchens, Bourdain encountered the real characters, the line cooks, who actually turn out the food, many of them addicts, struggling immigrants, loners, and misfits. Bourdain's respect for those "fringe elements" makes the narrative worthwhile. For the foodie, Bourdain's prescriptions for kitchen equipment and cooking staples offset the grungier aspects of restaurant life. ((Reviewed June 1 & 15, 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)

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  • English

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