It doesn’t take a savvy chef or a native New Yorker to enjoy Kitchen Confidential. While the setting and subject matter are unusual, anyone could get a kick out of this book. It is captivating and surprising with a funny-scary whiplash that has the same tasteful balance as the meals coming out of Bourdain’s kitchens. The chapters are like well-planned courses, each imparting its own flavor to the book.
Bourdain’s multifaceted approach to the culinary arts and the food business gives you a unique impression of the trade that you’d never catch a glimpse of as a simple patron of restaurants: He takes you through the trials of culinary school, the tense negotiations with food vendors, the pirate-like stealing of cooks from other restaurants, as well as a few things you probably didn’t want to know…
I will eat bread in restaurants, even if I know its been recycled off someone else’s table. The reuse of bread is an industry-wide practice… This doesn’t bother me and shouldn’t surprise you. Okay, maybe once in a while some tubercular hillbilly has been coughing and spraying in the general direction of that bread basket, or some tourist who’s just returned from a walking tour of the Wetlands of West Africa sneezes – you might find that prospect upsetting. But you might just as well avoid air travel, or subways, equally dodgy environments for airborne transmission of disease. Eat the bread.
Really? I was under the blissfully ignorant assumption that all of that delicious restaurant food was carefully made under carefully-abided health (and moral) standards.
How about hollandaise sauce? Not for me. Bacteria love hollandaise. And hollandaise, that delicate emulsion of egg yolks and clarified butter, must be held at a temperature not too hot nor too cold, lest it break when spooned over your poached eggs. Unfortunately, this lukewarm holding temperature is also the favorite environment for bacteria to copulate and reproduce in. Nobody I know has ever made hollandaise sauce to order… Equally disturbing is the likelihood that the butter used in the hollandaise is melted table butter, headed, clarified and strained to get out all the bread crumbs and cigarette butts. Butter is expensive, you know.
As alarming as these claims are, Bourdain explains them, justifies them, and even defends them. The books isn’t an exposé of the horrors of the kitchen, it’s more like a reality check. These restaurants are businesses with struggles, politics, strengths and shortcomings. I’d rather know the real story, and Bourdain is an amazingly eloquent writer for someone who’s spent decades flinging insults at degenerate line-cooks in a steamy, hectic kitchen. If his writing is this good, imagine his food…
The book was on the 2007 New York Times Bestseller list, and has earned consistently high marks from readers. Amazon gives it 5 stars.
