Kitchen Confidential

Over the past several weeks I have been enjoying "Kitchen Confidential": Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain has a show on the Travel Channel where he goes to exotic locales and eats their local fare. Fox had a sitcom last season based on this book starring Bradley Cooper, or as I refer to him, Sack Lodge. I liked that show which was a behind the scenes look at a kitchen at a fine dining restaurant. Wow, what an introduction.

The book was eminently enjoyable. There were no punches pulled by Bourdain. He describes kitchens as unbridled cruelty and pain, what I like to refer to as scraped knuckles. There is no coddling in a kitchen; slice your hand open? Stick it in ice water, wrap it up, get back on the line. Burn your hand? Shut up and get back on the line. Get your feelings hurt? Leave.

Bourdain takes several enjoyable detours through his life story, such as items for your home kitchen, how to cook like a chef, and what not to do at a restaurant; such as don't get fish on a Sunday. Bourdain's life story is rough. His early line cooking days were done as a junkie as well as copious amounts of weed and coke. Nowadays, just 7 or 8 drinks while doing a shift in the kitchen.

Bourdain tells a great story and his love of cooking shines through his surprisingly good writing, being that he's a cooking school graduate and never went to college. I'm probably the only person to put this combination together but "Kitchen Confidential" reminded me of "The Things They Carried". The way Bourdain tells story is not unlike how O'Brien tells a story. Towards the end of "Kitchen Confidential" when Bourdain is telling of how a chef he greatly admires runs a kitchen is completely unlike how he himself runs a kitchen, writes that everything the reader has read in the book before is obviously wrong. That reminded me of O'Brien's chapter explaining that it didn't matter whether a war story actually happened because it could have happened. Bourdain's explanation just struck me as being similar.

"Kitchen Confidential" was a very enjoyable read. I will probably read Bourdain's new book, "The Nasty Bits" and another book called "Heat" which has interested me on the New Releases table at Barnes & Noble. Having never worked in a restaurant before, yet loving restaurants, I enjoy the look that Bourdain gives.