kitchen confidential

anthony bourdain (2001)

okay, so this book isn't on my list of 50. i cheated. i had a book that i was reading (beloved) but was at powell's at the airport waiting for my flight. it's so hard to get out of there without buying a book! so this is what i picked up and read it on my 6 hour flight, only stopping for about an hour to sleep a bit. it was a great read, very interesting and exciting. it was about food, cooking, kitchens, and lots of insight into that world which i really had little idea about.

if you don't know who this guy is, he is a chef in new york and also has a tv show called "no reservations" on the travel channel. he gets to travel the world and eat, MY DREAM JOB!!! too bad that job is taken. he tries all kinds of foods from faraway places. good stuff.

in the book he talks about his workers and what he's experienced and so what he expects. different parts of the kitchen, the craziness behind it all.

send me another Mexican dishwasher anytime. i can teach him to cook. i can't teach character. show up at work on time six months in a row and we'll talk about red curry paste and lemongrass. until then, i have four words for you: "shut the fuck up."

and little tidbits about what to eat and what not to eat at restaurants. for example:

you walk into a nice two-star place in tribeca on a sleepy monday evening and you see they're running a delicious-sounding special of yellowfin tuna, braised fennel, confit tomatoes and a saffron sauce. why not go for it? here are the two words that should leap out at you when you navigate the menu: "monday" and "special."

and of course his opinions on vegetarians, which i just found hilarious, even being a former vegetarian myself.

vegetarians, and their hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. to me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all i stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

eating out is so exciting and you wonder what happens behind those doors. well what you don't know, may be better.

any magic i'd imagined about a big-time fancy new york kitchen was replaced by a grim pride in creative expediency and the technical satisfaction of being fast enough to keep up, getting away with trickery, deception and disguise. "an ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins," as we used to say.

so i finished the book in a day, it was great, kept me interested. had lots of crude humor and stories of sex and drugs. whenever i'm hungry i tend to read about and think about food. go figure.