Inside-industry books can be very interesting, particularly if we interact with the said industry all the time. The only really funny anecdote I found was when he was in an interview for chef at a new steakhouse in New York, things were going smoothly until the owner asked him, "What do you know about me? I don't feel too bad writing this review, because Bourdain certainly never minces his words (culinary pun intended;-) I was expecting entertaining anecdotes, but frankly I was bored most of the time and started skimming two thirds of the way through. We all eat in restaurants, but we very rarely think about what goes on beyond the kitchen doors (until our steak is undercooked, then we are all opinion). The descriptions of certain food ‘encounters’ were probably some of my favorite morsels in the book.

Only a few executive chefs in high-end restaurants have a luxury of being creative with the food they make. My little French friends were, I was astonished to find, allowed to have a cigarette on Sunday, were given watered vin ordinaire at the dinner table and best of all, they owned Vélo Solex motorbikes. The beaches, while no good for swimming, were studded with old Nazi blockhouses and gun emplacements, many still bearing visible bullet scars and the scorch of flamethrowers, and there were tunnels under the dunes-all very cool for a little kid to explore.Let it suffice to say that by age eighteen I was a thoroughly undisciplined young man, blithely flunking or fading out of college (I couldn't be bothered to attend classes). The culinary-school trained cooks in the restaurant commanded me to read this book when I was still just observing and volunteering (I later worked there until I moved away), and it solidified my love for an industry that I was already excited by because of my experiences. With equal parts wit and wickedness, Bourdain [does] the unthinkable by revealing trade secrets that chefs and restuaranteurs cringe to read.

In 2017, amidst the Me Too movement, Bourdain expressed remorse that Kitchen Confidential "celebrated or prolonged a culture that allowed the kind of grotesque behaviors we're hearing about all too frequently". From his first oyster in the Gironde to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown, from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Center to drug dealers in 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, as shocking as they are funny. Despite his legions of fans, plenty of them well-read people, I hadn't expected his prose to be so sparky and propulsive.Kitchen Confidential is a fast, compelling read, and currently I don't have time (especially if I want to catch up with reading challenges) to start a bunch of big old classics. Bourdain promises to take you behind the scenes of the restaurant industry, which he certainly does - it's just that he only takes you to very specific restaurant environments that he has worked in and has directly helped shape, a revelation that he only gets to almost three-quarters of the way through the book. He often brought out death, and in one of his last interviews, he said that he was going to “die in the saddle” — a sentiment that later proved chilling. I’m not going to lie – whether this is factual or not, I’m happy to erase some of those images from my mind when sitting down to enjoy a great meal! The environment of the professional kitchen is intense, unpleasant, and oftentimes ruthless, which Bourdain demonstrates, again and again, through the narrative of memoir.