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| Kitchen Confidential |
I want to cook again. No, that’s not entirely accurate. I want to eat well and if I get to cook, bonus. Even though Kitchen Confidential is not a cookbook, or even a book about eating, Bourdain really makes me want to be adventurous about my food. (His show on the Travel Channel, No Reservations, makes me want to be adventurous about food in as many different places as I can manage.) Plus, he writes about what’s really going on behind those swinging doors as the cooks and garde-mangers and sauciers and all the rest try and get dinners into stomachs.
It’s highly entertaining, if you have my kind of warped sense of humor. If you expect restaurant kitchens to be like the ones on the Food Channel, you’re in for a surprise.
In Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain writes about his life in the anarchic world of cooking in New York, how he went from dishwasher, to prep cook, to line cook, to chef, to celebrity chef. He makes the world of professional cooking seem as hard as army life, but with less job security considering the failure rate of new restaurants. One could see Kitchen Confidential as an expose, but I saw it more as a book about a philosophy of food. Bourdain, as he’s declared in his books and on TV, really believes in the pleasures of eating good food.
What I enjoyed most about this book, though, were the descriptions of what the kitchen staff were doing and their camaraderie that developed among the staff. A lot of his stories remind me of some of my dad’s stories from his time in the Navy. There is an us v. them mentality, a hierarchy, hazing of new recruits, in-jokes, and profanity that might grace the dressing downs of a linguistically-gifted sergeant. Also, I think my hick’s awe of eating in an upscale restaurant has been blown and I’m not half-afraid of it anymore. (I used to be more afraid of exotic/unfamiliar food before now, and I don’t like snobs.)
The only problem I had with the book was that Bourdain uses so many kitchen and recipe names that I didn’t know. I understood a few words here and there but, after a couple of chapters, I thought about try to talk one my local librarians into letting me take home their Reference copy of the Larousse Gastronomique.