Kitchen Confidential Updated Ed: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (P.S.) by Anthony Bourdain Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Kitchen Confidential Updated Ed: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (P.S.)
Book Review: The grot behind the culinary glitter
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great read although you may turn a bit queasy if you eat in expensive restaurants. Bourdain in a terrific writer and restraint is not in his vocabulary. Compared to Bourdain our home grown chefs pitter pattering around their kitchens seem like elves and fairies. We are told that hidden from the overdressed, overfed and over wealthy customers sitting in the dining room lies a world of sex, drugs,booze, theft and aggravation. The culinary edifice rests on an army of underpaid and exploited non white (usually} serfs who are often in the USA illegally. The whole business, on this telling, is often grotesque with many employees whom Bourdain regards as barely employable and some seem to be psychopaths.
Apart from the human misery (I don't mean the innocents with their sated palates paying a fortune for the stuff) there is the indifference to the the raw produce where boiling live lobsters alive is taken as a matter of course and gutting live fish isn't worth a mention. I read parts of this book with the kind of guilt you get when you look voyeuristically at a traffic accident.
Book Review: "Rock 'n' Roll" Autobiography
Summary: 5 Stars
Kitchen Confidential is Rock 'n' Roll. Set mainly in the New York, Bourdain's life story gives a compelling inside track into that cities restaurant business - a story that manages to be at times personal, at times practical, and at times shocking.Part of the power of this book is the contrast - between the sophisticated, expensive and respectful dining on the outside, and the tough, base and desperate backdrop in the kitchen.
Bourdain skilfully introduces misfits, subcultures, norms, observances and rituals in a personal, narrative style. This book is so appealling and memorable because the central character - the author - is an engaging, honest and distinctive storyteller, and it's tale is one of real human interest.
The writer and his characters will remain with you after the book; expect to find yourself considering a trip to Les Halles Brassiere on your next trip to New York. Well Worth Buying.
Book Review: Well written but patronising
Summary: 2 Stars
This book set off a whole range of emotions in me as I trundled through it. The author has an agreeable writing style; he writes about a subject that many people are deeply interested in; and he probably undersells himself.As a book that is sold as being "more gripping than a Stephen King novel" it fails. As a set of stories wrapped around a central culinary theme it's good enough to read all of the way through.
What Bourdain has done is to map out his quarter century or so in the kitchens of the good and the bad, the large and the small, the famous and the infamous. A whole panoply of anecdotes cascade off each page; and he drops names and recipes and kitchenspeak like many people drop names. I imagine many of the terms he assails us with will pass happily by without being recognised by the majority of his readers... The problem here is that Bourdain has tried to regale us with stories of good food well prepared but the jargon got in the way: too much dressing, over egging the pudding ...
Not surprisingly, he mentions knives a lot: after all, it must be difficult to create the kind of food Bourdain discusses without decent tools mustn't it? I'm nowhere near being a chef but I have learned the value of a good knife or two in the kitchen: blunt knives are more dangerous than sharp ones; and cheap unbalanced knives are downright difficult to work with.
Bourdain's main characters are presented as if they could all have been the main in M*A*S*H in an Accident and Emergency Ward of a hospital or even in Bomber Command. Gallant heroes all with bodily capacities that Rambo would be jealous of. Sleep deprived, highly stressed, debauched, suffering awful bosses and customers and suppliers alike. Bourdain tells tales involving Americans, Ecuadorians, Mexicans and others and manages to weave an intriguing pattern of how cultures merge, mingle and divide all at the same time...
As far as food is concerned, we get snippets as I've already mentioned. Bourdain tells of bottles of wine selling in restaurants at $25,000 each: well, completely warped values if you ask me. He mentions truffles a lot, perhaps too much: truffles here, there and everywhere; and where there are no truffles, he takes truffle oil. He sometimes dismisses food that can sell for, say, $35 a dish but which cost around $1 to make: good business no doubt, but Bourdain appears to disdain it and/or the people who buy it.
Finally, Bourdain is totally dismissive of vegetarians. He gives a reason and I assume he genuinely believes it. Well, as a veggie of some 12 years' standing I can't agree with him. I find that veggie food can be far richer than many meat based dishes and seem to survive quite well, thank you!
There are some good stories in this book, there are chapters devoted to people he admires a lot and they are worth a read. Bourdain's most worrying story to some extent is the one in which an apparently attractive bride, still wearing her wedding dress and in the middle of her reception/wedding breakfast, takes a chef outside the hotel and in a most unceremonious and tacky way, gives herself to him, a total stranger, whilst Bourdain and his colleagues watch on.
That's it, not a hot read for me and I wouldn't want you to dash off to the bookshop thinking I was doing you a massive favour by advising you should!
Book Review: Pallet Pleasingly Perfect
Summary: 5 Stars
Kitchen Confidential is a delightful read. The balance provided by Bourdain between gritty realism and anecdotal humour is fantastically enjoyable and fresh perspective of the culinary underbelly. Bourdain takes you on an extraordinary journey through his life, and, through world that is located behind the double doors of restaurants. Though be warned some of the information given may cause you to shun the catering business for all eternity. Not only is the subject matter unbeknown to many folk, thus making it fascinating, but also the way in which Bourdain transmits his thoughts and experiences to the reader is utterly gleeful. His style makes the pages flow giving the read a very personal and stylised experience.
Recommended to me by relatives this book turned out to be a blinder. Sleep was lost; meals were left cold and work undone. The pages contained within the card cover are so easily readable, you will lose track of time.
The world of "Chefs", "Waiters", "Line Cooks" and "Runners" is not glamorised nor is it berated. It is simply presented for what it is. Myself having no prior knowledge as to the true nature of the backrooms in restaurants was surprised, amused and shocked at what goes on out of the publics view. Some of Bourdain's stories are truly horrific but at the same time strangely comforting. It is nice to know that the inhuman hours taken on by chefs are actually real people.
Aside from the realistic, humorous and eye-opening truths revealed in Kitchen Confidential, there are also some bits of highly useful information. Such as, one should not eat fish on a Tuesday, because the delivery was made six days ago, and has been left in a "stinking reach in." Also no customer should have the special on the Saturday, as it will contain the leftover scraps, which have been left to accumulate colonies of bacteria.
I can only urge you to buy this book, if you are looking for a brilliantly enjoyable light read then this is the book to buy.
Book Review: Essential reading for those in the trade.
Summary: 5 Stars
Not only essential reading for those who are already in the trade as well as those thinking about entering the trade, this book is an excellent read for all. A very honest account of what happens and what can happen "in the culinary underbelly" it is both hillarious and shocking at times but you soon find out what it takes to become such a fantastic chef as Bourdain.