COOKIN'! (Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain)

Member Name: tim_russell

Product:	Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain
Date:	13/08/01 (166 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Vicarious low-life thrills, fascinating insights, hilarious anecdotes

Disadvantages: None

If cooking is, to quote numerous lazy journalists, "the new rock & roll", then this is its Led Zeppelin, an awesome, eye-popping juggernaut of a book which blows the lid on what really goes on behind the scenes of the restaurant world.

The author, Anthony Bourdain, is currently executive chef at New York's exclusive Brasserie Les Halles, after a varied and frequently tempestuous career which saw him rise through the ranks to become one of the Big Apple's culinary Big Cheeses, and boy does he have some stories to tell.

Reading "Kitchen Confidential" brings you face-to-face with more reprobates, criminals, drug addicts, perverts, alcoholics, cheats, liars, psychos and general drop-outs than Hunter S Thompson's "Hell's Angels", and makes you wonder who exactly it was who prepared that delicious grilled sea bream in truffle butter you had a couple of weeks ago. Bourdain's colleagues have more in common with Keith Richards or Shaun Ryder than with Delia Smith or Jamie Oliver, and it's the amazing range of characters who populate the book that makes it such a gripping read.

The book is divided into two sorts of chapter - the autobiographical, in which Bourdain gives us an entertaining summary of his career so far, riddled with hilarious, outrageous anecdotes of behind-the-scenes drinking, drug-taking and fornicating; and the factual, in which he explains how the different parts of a kitchen work, what a typical day in a restaurant consists of, what equipment you need to cook like a professional, and even a few recipe tips here & there.

For all his punk rock outsider attitude, the man clearly loves food and his enthusiasm makes you want to get into the kitchen and get cooking, although not professionally - if you've ever considered becoming a full-time chef, read this book and then go & work in a bank - and his passion for food surpasses even his passions for drugs, drink and lou
d music. "Vegetarians are the enemy of all that is good in the human spirit" he pronounces, before reeling off a delicious list of meat dishes which had me aching with hunger before I'd got to work one morning last week. That statement should tell you that this is pretty uncompromising stuff, chock full of swearing, references to obscure 1970s New Yoik punk bands such as Television and the Dead Boys, and episodes of drug-taking and heavy drinking. Reading this makes you realise what a lily-livered fraud Jamie Oliver really is - even Gordon Ramsay looks a bit wet next to Bourdain and his streetwise crew of knife-wielding chefs-with-attitude. Just look at that picture on the cover of Bourdain & two of his colleagues - they look more like some sleazy drugged-up rock band than a trio of cooks.

It may put you off eating in a restaurant for a while, and it'll definitely put you off ever wanting to work in one, but it'll certainly increase your interest in food and how it is prepared, and it'll also give you the most thrilling no-holds-barred rock & roll read since "Hammer Of The Gods". Heartily recommended.

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