‘Kitchen Confidential’ at 25: Anthony Bourdain revealed high-end chefs as rock-star pirates

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 hijinks 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 AA 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.

A kitchen fever dream

By the time he published Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain was contentedly installed as executive chef of the Manhattan branch of Brasserie Les Halles, the culmination of years of experience in the professional kitchen.

The catalyst for his love of food, we’re told, was an oyster, shucked fresh from the bed by a French oyster-fisher, sampled in...

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