Kitchen Confidential

Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Type: Book

Year: 2019

Anthony Bourdain

2025-12-29

★★★★★

Notes

Kitchen Confidential's chapter 'A Day in the Life' is perhaps the most engaging prose I've read in a while. It follows Anthony Bourdain from the moment he wakes as he goes about a typical day as an executive chef of Les Halles, the French brasserie joint Bourdain worked at in New York.

He paints such a vivid picture of how a Saturday lunch and dinner service plays out. So vivid I felt like I too was in that claustrophobic kitchen with its narrow lanes, brushing up against sous-chefs, potwashers and busboy while the sweat drips from my head as I hunch over my station. My breath was anxiously held in for nearly the entirety of the chapter as I got to live as Bourdain for thirty minutes or so.

Simply wonderfully written prose.