Kitchen Confidential

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bordain

This auto-biography tracks the first half of Tony Bourdain's career in a rowdy, "no holds barred" conversational style. It reminded me a bit of the movie, Dinner Rush. I love eating out and certainly found aspects of the book highly entertaining and interesting.

I particularly enjoyed Bourdain's description of the best baker in New York - who happens to be addicted to drugs, constantly in legal trouble, unpredictable, and a thorn in the side. Bourdain describes how he has hired and fired this baker more than four times.

While portions of the book made me laugh out loud, I found other parts of the book quite boring. He was addicted to drugs and jumping around from job to job for the first 20 years of his life (and approximately 130 pages of the book.)

By the end of the book, I simply became bored of his profane, explicit, raunchy tell-all biography. It all got old fairly quickly.

But this book definitely exposes some very important secrets that I am sure the restaurant industry would have preferred to keep under warps.

Rating: 2/5

Date read: 8/7/2010