Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly FROM OUR EDITORS
If you've ever been curious about just what goes on in the kitchen of your favorite eatery, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly is just the book you've been waiting for. Anthony Bourdain, acclaimed executive chef of Les Halles restaurants in New York, Washington, D.C., Miami, and Tokyo, spills the beans, so to speak, on "what it feels like, looks like, and smells like in the clutter and hiss of a big-city restaurant kitchen."
ANNOTATION
New York Chef Tony Bourdain gives away secrets of the trade in his wickedly funny, inspiring memoir/expose. Kitchen Confidential reveals what Bourdain calls "twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine."
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Last summer, The New Yorker published Chef Bourdain's shocking, "Don't Eat Before Reading This". Bourdain spared 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.
SYNOPSIS
When Chef Anthony Bourdain wrote "Don't Eat Before You Read This" in The New Yorker, he spared no one's appetite, revealing what goes on behind the kitchen door. In Kitchen Confidential, he expanded that appetizer into a deliciously funny, delectable shocking banquet that lays out his 25 years of sex, drugs, and haute cuisine.
From his first oyster in the Gironde to the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, from the restaurants of Tokyo to the drug dealers of the East Village, from the mobsters to the rats, Bourdain's brilliantly written, wild-but-true tales make the belly ache with laughter.
FROM THE CRITICS
Joseph Klein - Onion A.V. Club
Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential has already turned a few stomachs with its frank discussions of what goes on in the kitchens of America's favorite restaurants. He revels in anecdotes that would make an Ozzy Osbourne roadie question the catered stuff on his plate. Sex, drugs, sex near food while on drugs: Bourdain gleefully dishes the dirt on some of his former haunts, from the fish houses of New England to the elegant-on-the-outside eateries of New York. Yet the tone he takes with his joyously muckraking expose/memoir follows a distinctive rhythm, a blunt, boastful swagger that recalls some accounts of organized crime. Bourdain is just as likely to tantalize with his descriptions of food as disgust with his descriptions of the people and actions swirling around it, the activities disgusting yet somehow funny at the same time. It's an exhilarating combination often invoked in mobster tell-alls, but while there's more than a little goodfella in Bourdain -- he dices, dresses, and dishes with trash-talking braggadocio -- he clearly loves what he does. While he admits early on that the call of the kitchen often comes only after every other option has failed, he clearly enjoys working in such terrible conditions. It's like he has the key to the ultimate backroom club, a place of privilege where everyone operates with a different set of rules and gets off on a different set of thrills. Eat to live, don't live to eat, the saying goes, and for Bourdain, life is never better than when he's the one doing the cooking.
Restaurant Business
With equal parts wit and wickedness, Bourdain [does] the unthinkable by revealing trade secrest that chefs and restauranteers cringe to read.
USA Today
...the kind of book you read in one sitting, then rush about annoying your coworkers by declaiming whole passages.
Denver Post
You'll laugh, you'll cry...you're gonna love it.
New York Magazine
Utterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and precise ear for kitchen patois.
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