Kitchen Confidential summary

It’s 1973. Bourdain is now 18 and has become thoroughly undisciplined. He’s graduated high school a year early and chased his girlfriend to Vassar College – which he promptly quits. He smokes pot, drinks, and becomes miserable, narcissistic, and self-destructive.

When the summer comes, he gladly accompanies some of his friends to Provincetown, Cape Cod. During the day, they smoke more pot, sniff coke, and drop acid on the beaches. Mostly by night, his roommates have jobs as waitstaff and dishwashers. The unemployed Bourdain becomes a drain on the household finances until he finally gets hooked up with a dishwashing job at The Dreadnaught – a ramshackle restaurant built out on stilts over the sea.

Bourdain offers us a sad truth: we’ll never cook like a professional. But there’s nothing wrong with that. He rarely wanted to eat in a restaurant when it was his day off – he preferred to eat at somebody’s house and have some home cooking. That, to him, was pure magic. But he does offer us some guidance if we want to learn from the pros.

First up are kitchen tools. The most important of those is a decent chef’s knife. Just one. One that is comfortable in your hand. It should be lightweight, easy-to-sharpen, and relatively inexpensive. He suggests a vanadium steel Japanese Global knife which is not only a great knife but also looks cool. It should cut almost everything. Use the tip for small stuff, and the part nearer the heel for the bigger stuff. You might need a couple of other knives too – a flexible boning knife, a paring knife, and an offset serrated knife. 

Toward the end of the first summer at The Dreadnaught, Bourdain moved up the food chain, working first on the fryer and then on the broiler. He was determined to work on that the following season. It didn’t happen. Another restauranter bought the place and with it, his own crew. After interviewing for a job, Bourdain was assigned to trail the broiler man, Tyrone.

One shift, Bourdain grabbed a sauté pan and burned himself. He asked Tyrone – who he remembers as being nothing under eight feet tall and weighing 400 pounds – for a Band-Aid. It went quiet in the kitchen. Tyrone showed Bourdain his blistered hands and, as he watched, Tyrone proceeded to pick up a glowing hot sizzle platter with one naked hand. This humiliation did serve one purpose, though – Bourdain decided he’d go to school at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, the CIA, and he’d become a better cook.

Skip forward to 1981. Sam G – a good friend of Bourdain’s from high school – has been made chef de cuisine at a once-trendy, fallen-on-hard-times restaurant called Work Progress. Bourdain gets on board with the project to share sous-chef responsibilities with another old friend, Dimitri.

The three round up as many potheads as they can who they’ve worked with to run the joint. They’re going to take the New York restaurant scene by storm!

So you want to be a chef? Are you really sure? Bourdain has seen many wannabe chefs come and go. They do a six-month course, find themselves in a kitchen, see what they really have to do, and run away like wildfire. But if you really really want to work in a kitchen, here’s a taste of his advice:

First, be committed and determined – no half measures. Be ready to follow orders, give orders, and live with the consequences of those orders. Never complain.

Anthony Bourdain’s rip-roaring tales of his experiences – from his realization that food is more than fuel to how he decided to become a chef to how his life unfolded in the restaurant industry – sometimes seem larger-than-life.

Kitchen Confidential was published in the year 2000. At that time Bourdain expressed his desire to remain in the business “until they drag me off the line.” He continued his association with Brasserie Les Halles even after he’d formally left their employment. In 2014, the restaurant referred to him as its chef at large.