He offers advice on when to order seafood-never on Mondays, when it is likely left over. He tells the reader that owning professional-grade chef’s knives will make a huge difference. At The Dreadnaught, learning the basics of how a kitchen works, Bourdain is exposed to the male-dominated “macho” tone of the cooking culture.īourdain offers a crash-course on how anyone can improve his or her cooking with a little expert advice, suggesting there is no difference between ingredients people have at home and what a restaurant works with. For the first time, he sees the incredible power of the chefs in the kitchen, the excitement and energy of professional cookery.

Back home, Bourdain, eventually, gets a job as a busboy in a restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts while attending college. He begins to enjoy the hearty country staples of French provincial cooking. When they arrive in France, Bourdain is initially unimpressed with French food until his parents, tired of his complaining, leave him and his brother in the car while they enjoy a sumptuous meal at the famous La Pyramide, leading Bourdain to think that food could be important as well as enjoyable. This is the first food he remembers actually enjoying. As a child, he was served Vichyssoise, a cold soup, while traveling on the Queen Mary with his family heading for a vacation in France. After a brief introduction in which he asserts his memoir is not intended as revenge, as he loves cooking and working as a chef, Bourdain reflects on his introduction to cooking as opposed to simply eating. Celebrated as a bracingly honest and well-written exposé of how the New York restaurant industry operates, it offers both salacious gossip about the lifestyles of professional chefs and practical advice for diners concerning the manipulative tactics restaurants often use.

Kitchen Confidential (2000), a memoir by chef Anthony Bourdain, is based on the essay Don’t Eat Before Reading This published in The New Yorker in 1999.

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