Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly was released 25 years ago into a culinary world vastly different to today’s. With his signature semi-gonzo style, all sarcasm, wit and profanity, Anthony Bourdain lifted the pot lid on the world of the professional restaurant kitchen.
That world, if we were to believe Bourdain, was full of ne’er-do-well line cooks, shady produce purveyors, drug-fuelled hi-jinks and ego. Lots of ego. It was also full of people who loved food, who recognised, as Bourdain put it, that “food had power”. Smash-hit show The Bear is set in a kitchen universe resembling this very world.
Bourdain’s book is part memoir, part journalistic tell-all. Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh has written the introduction to the anniversary edition. Food writer A.A. Gill once called the book “Elizabeth David written by Quentin Tarantino”. In its pages, Bourdain unfolds the story of a contrary young man who enters the culinary world because food made him feel something.
