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Zusammenfassung von Kitchen Confidential

Name: Kitchen Confidential
Rating: 4.3 (136 reviews)
Author: Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain

Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

4.3 (136 Bewertungen)

18 Min.

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Kitchen Confidential
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What’s in it for me? A glimpse behind the scenes of the joys of professional food preparation.

Anthony Bourdain was a classically trained chef. This was his life – the only life he knew. And he loved it. In fact, he describes it as being comfortable “like a nice warm bath.”

Bourdain wrote Kitchen Confidential with two audiences in mind. He hoped restaurant professionals would, even if they didn’t like it, recognize his descriptions of kitchen life – and know he wasn’t lying. For other readers, we mortals, he wanted us to understand the look, feel, and smell of working in a busy kitchen. He wanted us to know that it’s fun.

In this Blink, we’ll find out how Bourdain became interested in food, exactly when he decided to become a chef, and a few of his adventures in the restaurant business that led up to the publication of Kitchen Confidential.

We’ll also discover that, although we’re unlikely to ever cook like a pro, there are some things we could do to spruce up our cooking right now. Finally, we’ll also get a few words of wisdom aimed at the wannabe professionals out there.

But a quick warning before we begin. This Blink contains depictions of drug use and sexual exploits so please take care while listening/reading.

Cold Soup and Oysters

Nine-year-old Anthony Bourdain is with his family aboard the Queen Mary, a transatlantic cruise ship. They’re taking a family holiday and are on their way to visit his father’s ancestral homeland, France. Sitting together in the cabin-class dining room, the waiter approaches and ladles soup from a silver tureen into their bowls and then garnishes the soup with chopped chives. Something magical is about to happen.

Anthony experiences the richness and creaminess of the leek and potato soup and the crunch of the chives. He’s pleasantly shocked to discover that the soup is cold! It’s right at this moment that he has a sudden realization: food isn’t just fuel for hungry faces. He asks the soup’s name: Vichyssoise. Later, he’ll recall this as the first food he actually enjoyed.

During his first few weeks in France, though, the young Anthony is singularly unimpressed with French food – the butter is cheesy, the milk undrinkable, and lunch is invariably a sandwich au jambon, or croque-monsieur. His parents try to interest their two sons in other food – but to no avail.

That is, until one day in Vienne, his fed-up parents decide to leave the two boys in the car for three hours with a hoard of Tintin comics while they dine at La Pyramide. This act of denial gets Anthony thinking: What’s inside that’s such a big deal? With vichyssoise still fresh in his memory, he realizes, that food is important. Later, of course, he’d learn that La Pyramide was like “Mecca for foodies” and that everyone in the culinary world had done their time there under the chef and restaurateur Fernand Point.

He’s angry and decides to try to get one up on his parents. He begins to try everything that’s on offer – including his first oyster. Anthony will later describe that first oyster as being more significant than losing his virginity.

The family moves on to stay with his aunt and uncle in La Teste de Buch, a small village in Southwest France. Their neighbor, Monsieur Saint-Jour invites the family out on his pinasse or oyster boat. They readily agree. During the trip, Monsieur Saint-Jour invites them to try oysters from his oyster parc. Anthony is the first to volunteer. Monsieur Saint-Jour takes an oyster from the sea bed, hands it to Anthony, and instructs him how to eat it – “one bite and a slurp.” It tastes of seawater, brine, and flesh. It also tastes of the future.

The Dreadnaught

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.

Cooking like a Pro

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.

A Burned Hand, the CIA, and the Rainbow Room

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.

Work Progress

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!

Advice for Wannabe Chefs

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.

Final Summary

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.

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Worum geht es in Kitchen Confidential?

Kitchen Confidential (2000) gives us an insight into life in the restaurant business. Full of larger-than-life tales about Anthony Bourdain’s life of sex and drugs and haute cuisine, it gives us a no-holds-barred taste of what goes on behind the kitchen door.

Wer Kitchen Confidential lesen sollte

Fans of Anthony Bourdain
Wannabe pro chefs
Home cooks looking for hints and tips from a professional

Über den Autor

Anthony Bourdain was a chef, author, and TV celebrity chef. His book, Kitchen Confidential, based on an infamous article he wrote in the New Yorker went on to become a New York Times best seller. He wrote many other books including A Cook’s Tour, The Nasty Bits, and Medium Raw as well as two graphic novels Get Jiro! and Get Jiro!: Blood and Sushi. He became particularly well-known for his travel and food show Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. Sadly, in 2018, he died from suicide in France while working on an episode for the show.

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