Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Author: Anthony Bourdain
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." 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.
Onion A.V. Club - Joseph Klein
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.
Publishers Weekly
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.
Morse Partners
From that magical boyhood visit, when he became a "foodie" in France, to today, when he is executive chef of the chic New York bistro, Les Halles, Tony Bourdain has experienced it all. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, he learned his trade, as he puts it, "knocking around" Europe and toiling in some famous multi-starred restaurants in New York and cities north, west, east, and south. He has served as dishwasher, prep-drone, fry-cook, grillardin, saucier, and sous-chef along the way, and the strange and exotic and horrendous subculture of the professional kitchen is as familiar to him as the meals he and his fellow "lifers" turn out, noon and night, in the great -- and sometimes not so great -- restaurants of our world.
Now, in this astonishingly frank, often outrageous, more-often hilarious romp of a book, Bourdain opens up the swinging, clattering kitchen doors to show vividly, pungently, "what it feels like, looks like, and smells like in the clutter and hiss of a big-city restaurant kitchen."
Woven in are the stories of some of the great and less than great characters he has known--Howard, the "revered elder statesman of Cape Cod cookery," with wild, unruly white hair and a gin-blossomed face, who had a lifelong love affair with seafood and wrote two books about it; Tyrone, the broilerman, "big, black, hugely muscled, with a prominent silver-capped front tooth, a fist-sized gold-hooped earring, and a size 56 chef's coat stretched across his back like a drumhead;" "Bigfoot," the giant Jewish restaurateur of Greenwich Village who remains beloved and/or despised by generations of waiters, bartenders, cooks and chefs but who taught Bourdain how to wring the last penny from this hugely difficult business; Nando, the famous pastry chef of the Rainbow Room, who found time to hurl profiteroles at the skaters in the Rockefeller Center rink, sixty-four floors down; Pino Luongo, the "Prince of Restaurant Darkness," who ran a string of Tuscan restaurants in high-priced New York venues; and all the zany, beleaguered, unpredictable talents, many of them immigrants and the self-styled marginals, who have worked for and with Bourdain in his 25 years in the business.
Woven in too are the secrets of the trade and their consequences, sometimes nefarious, for diners: Why Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the only truly good nights to eat in a restaurant, why chefs rub their hands over customers who want their beef well-done; why seafood frittata is a definite no-no at a weekend brunch.
And with no nonsense clarity, Bourdain spells out in a few pages what it takes to bring your kitchen up to par with the pros. It is not as difficult as you might think. It may take as little as a new Global chef's knife and the right kind of bottle to spritz your serving plates like a pro…
Tony Bourdain may be a master chef by profession, but he is also a born raconteur. A portion of his book, in a somewhat different form, ran in The New Yorker and his portrayal of the "underbelly" of the contemporary big-city restaurant can only be compared to George Orwell's in DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. The great difference between Orwell's hellish vision and Bourdain's is that Bourdain is enormously proud of his profession, and trumpets its "grandeurs" as well as he bemoans its "miseries." As he puts it, "For me, the cooking life has been a long love affair, with moments both sublime and ridiculous. But like a love affair, looking back you remember the happy times best, the things that drew you in in the first place, the things that kept you coming back for more."
KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL is that kind of meal.
The Weekly Standard - Joseph Epstein
...the best book I have ever read about the nuts and bolts mechanics of running serious restaurant kitchens...brilliant on the tumult of running a kitchen that might turn out anywhere from two hundred to four hundred serious meals a night...Bourdain is a wild old boy and a bit of a lost soul, and, being strongly anti-malarkey, utterly believable.
USA Today
Bourdain clearly operates with all six burners on scorch, and the result keeps the reader excited.
The New York Times
[A] literary chef, as appreciated for quips as for steak frites.
Newsweek
Unique…mesmerizing.
New York Magazine
Utterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and a precise ear for kitchen patois.
The Denver Post
You'll laugh, you'll cry…you're gonna love it.
The New York Times Book Review
The guy is hysterical…in a style partaking of Hunter S. Thompson, Iggy Pop and a little Jonathan Swift, Bourdain gleefully rips through the scenery to reveal private backstage horrors.
New York Daily News
Funny, irreverent, scandalous.
Table of Contents:
| Appetizer | ||
| A Note from the Chef | 3 | |
| First Course | ||
| Food Is Good | 9 | |
| Food Is Sex | 19 | |
| Food Is Pain | 25 | |
| Inside the CIA | 36 | |
| The Return of Mal Carne | 45 | |
| Second Course | ||
| Who Cooks? | 55 | |
| From Our Kitchen to Your Table | 64 | |
| How to Cook Like the Pros | 75 | |
| Owner's Syndrome and Other Medical Anomalies | 84 | |
| Bigfoot | 91 | |
| Third Course | ||
| I Make My Bones | 105 | |
| The Happy Time | 120 | |
| Chef of the Future! | 128 | |
| Apocalypse Now | 134 | |
| The Wilderness Years | 144 | |
| What I Know About Meat | 153 | |
| Pino Noir: Tuscan Interlude | 163 | |
| Dessert | ||
| A Day in the Life | 183 | |
| Sous-Chef | 206 | |
| The Level of Discourse | 221 | |
| Other Bodies | 229 | |
| Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown | 235 | |
| Department of Human Resources | 246 | |
| Coffee and a Cigarette | ||
| The Life of Bryan | 255 | |
| Mission to Tokyo | 272 | |
| So You Want to Be a Chef? A Commencement Address | 293 | |
| Kitchen's Closed | 300 |
Cake Bible
Author: Rose Levy Beranbaum
"If you ever bake a cake, this book will become your partner in the kitchen."-- from the foreword by Maida Heatter
This is the classic cake cookbook that enables anyone to make delicious, exquisite cakes. As a writer for food magazines, women's magazines, and newspapers, including The New York Times, Rose Levy Beranbaum's trademark is her ability to reduce the most complex techniques to easy-to-follow recipes. Rose makes baking a joy. This is the definitive work on cakes by the country's top cake baker.
The Cake Bible shows how to:
Mix a buttery, tender layer cake in under five minutes with perfect results every time
Make the most fabulous chocolate cake you ever imagined with just three ingredients
Find recipes for every major type of cake, from pancakes to four-tiered wedding cakes
Make cakes with less sugar but maximum flavor and texture
Make many low- to no- cholesterol, low-saturated-fat recipes
Library Journal
Beranbaum, a talented baker and former owner of a New York cooking school, has produced a definitive work that will excite accomplished cooks and beginners alike. She covers basic, ``foolproof'' cakes as well as showcase cakes, accompanying these with pages and pages of adornments of all types; her instructions are impressively precise but unintimidating. She also includes lengthy discussions on ingredients and equipment and concludes with a special section on the chemistry of cake baking and on making a professional wedding cakes. An essential purchase. JS
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