Almost two decades ago, the New Yorker published a now infamous article, “Don’t Eat before You Read This,” by then little-known chef Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain spared no one’s appetite as he revealed what happens behind the kitchen door. The article was a sensation, and the book it spawned, the now classic Kitchen Confidential, became an even bigger sensation, a megabestseller with over one million copies in print. Frankly confessional, addictively acerbic, and utterly unsparing, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business–this time with never-before-published material.

I want to tell you about the dark recesses of the restaurant underbelly – a subculture whose centuries-old militaristic hierarchy and ethos of ‘rum, buggery and the lash’ make for a mix of unwavering order and nerve-shattering chaos – because I find it all quite comfortable, like a nice warm bath. I can move around easily in this life. I speak the language. In the small, incestuous community of chefs and cooks in New York City, I know the people, and in my kitchen, I know how to behave

If you like cooking or you are a chef you must read this book it’s just amazing and really easy to read very interesting! His writing is witty, full of anecdotes – starting from eating his first oyster to the shock of finding some soups were served cold when he visited France with his parents. His climb to fame is done through different kitchens and environments and also is his fall from grace.

IT is ONE OF the central ironies of my career that as soon as I got off heroin, things started getting really bad. High on dope, I was – prior to Gino’s – at least a chef, well paid, much liked by crew and floor and owners alike. Stabilized on methadone, I became nearly unemployable by polite society: a shiftless, untrustworthy coke-sniffer, sneak thief and corner-cutting hack, toiling in obscurity in the culinary backwaters. I worked mostly as a cook, moving from place to place, often working under an alias.

I laughed when he talked about a place so dirty, Ratatouille could have been filmed there:

The place was owned by a very aggressive rat population, fattened up and emboldened by the easily obtained stacks of avocados left to ripen outside the walk-in each night. They ran over our feet in the kitchen, hopped out of the garbage when you approached and, worst of all, stashed their leavings in the walls and ceilings. 

When he finally starts pulling his shit together and get back on his feet after watching day time TV for hours on end, he goes on a recruiting spree to get some staff for his newest venture. Let’s just say I don’t think the majority of the applicant mass was that good – “hundreds of illiterate loners, glue-sniffing fry cooks, and wack-jobs who’d never cooked professionally before” but he did manage to get a few good chefs from “other chefs’ kitchens, sniffing around for the disgruntled, the underpaid, the unhappy, the susceptible and the ambitious“. The bad part was that a week on he had to fire most of these people as the budget had to be tightened and the restaurant suffered.

SO YOU WANT TO BE A CHEF?

•  Be fully committed. Don’t be a fence-sitter or a waffler. If you’re going to be a chef some day, be sure about it, single-minded in your determination to achieve victory at all costs.
• Learn Spanish! The very backbone of the industry, whether you like it or not, is inexpensive Mexican, Dominican, Salvadorian and Ecuadorian labor – most of whom could cook you under the table without breaking a sweat.
• Don’t steal. In fact, don’t do anything that you couldn’t take a polygraph test over. If you’re a chef who drinks too many freebies at the bar, takes home the occasional steak for the wife, or smokes Hawaiian bud in the off hours, be fully prepared to admit this unapologetically to any and all.
• Always be on time.
• Never make excuses or blame others.
• Never call in sick. Except in cases of dismemberment, arterial bleeding, sucking chest wounds or the death of an immediate family member. Granny died? Bury her on your day off.
• Lazy, sloppy and slow are bad. Enterprising, crafty and hyperactive are good.
• Be prepared to witness every variety of human folly and injustice. Without it screwing up your head or poisoning your attitude.
• Assume the worst. About everybody. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn’t prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining.
• Try not to lie. Remember, this is the restaurant business. No matter how bad it is, everybody probably has heard worse.
• Avoid restaurants where the owner’s name is over the door. Avoid restaurants that smell bad. Avoid restaurants with names that will look funny or pathetic on your resume.
• Think about that resume! How will it look to the chef weeding through a stack of faxes if you’ve never worked in one place longer than six months? If the years ’95 to ’97 are unaccounted for? 
• Read! Read cookbooks, trade magazines – I recommend Food Arts, Saveur, Restaurant Business magazines. They are useful for staying abreast of industry trends, and for pinching recipes and concepts.
• Have a sense of humor about things. You’ll need it.

I had to laugh at the avoid restaurants with owner’s name on the door. Anyone remember Jamie’s Italian which went bust?

Or the Gordon Ramsay ones? I think he’s still operating in London and Edinburgh but the menus are not for the faint of heart (they’ll set you back at least £125)

All in all, it’s a good book. Funny approach to life, good humour. Doggedness up until the end.

I’ll be right here. Until they drag me off the line. I’m not going anywhere. I hope. It’s been an adventure. We took some casualties over over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost.

But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.