Rating: 
Summary: Oh, Grow UP!
Review: Look, children of the vulgar language aversion, grow up! I am a Southern suburban housewife and I have to tell y'all, the language didn't offend ME. Some grown ups DO talk this way. Those of you with overly-delicate sensibilities need not apply yourselves to this book. I, however, loved it. I have been in the distant past, a waitron in an area of my state that I refer to as Le Boondocks. And even in a house that sat 80 on a packed night mostly for appetizers, you still did NOT get Sunday church social language. And I hid towels myself as I did a teeny bit of prep work in the walk-in (never behind the line..never...never) And I ask you women (and men) who have ever had to cook for more than the usual family members (Thanksgiving springs to mind) in a hurry to get it all on the table, at the same time, hot, for a special occasion if YOUR language would hold up to School Board scrutiny. I think not. The book was entertaining, the tips were informative, and those of you remarking that Tony Bourdain is saying all kitchens are like his were PAYING MORE ATTENTION TO THE TYPOS THAN THE TEXT! Recall the story re: Scott Bryan's kitchen and others? Sigh. I don't have a single problem with Tony's Popeye attitude "I am what I am and that's all that I am". Most professional cooks are craftsmen with an artistic temperment. A healthy portion of ego keeps them giving a rat's about what goes on the plate that you are paying $100.00 to eat, oui? I certainly don't want to eat food that is being prepared by someone who doesn't give a damn...
Rating: 
Summary: you gotta love the food
Review: This is a very enjoyable but not perfect book. Some of the best and funniest pages [on a day in the life of a chef] appeared earlier in "The New Yorker" but there are other wonderful chapters on such topics as how the author as a child embraced good food for the first time, and on adapting New York-based French bistro fare to the demands of the Tokyo market. The chapters on chefs the author admires are also excellent. He is very impressive when he discusses the goodness of the food that some chefs deliver on a regular basis and on the global origins of the kitchen staffs in so many eating places. On the other hand, a firm editor would have pushed for a reduction in the space given to the nefarious lifestyles of, apparently, a significant percentage of people the author has met in his years in the cooking business. And, while on the subject of editing: The copy-editing/printing glitches in this book are among the worst I have seen; not just typos but words left out and other problems. In this area, the author was not well-served by the publisher [don't leave even a 5 percent tip]. These problems notwithstanding, the overall tone of the author, a combination of confidence and self-deprecation, is enormously appealing, as appealing as some of the better dishes and cooking techniques he describes.
Rating:
Summary: A slice of life told from the pit of the stomach
Review: Although not a universally likeable book by any estimation, Bourdain's narrative voice, as crass and straightforward as one would believe the man himself to be, is definitely endearing. He makes few attempts to describe for the lay person the many digestibles he hints at in the book, relying on the wit and sheer perusability of the rest of his work to grasp the reader. And it does, for over 300 pages. Kitchen Confidential is a must read for anyone remotely affiliated with the hospitality industry and well worth reading for those with at least a passing interest in the inner-workings of the kitchen from hiring to the way to make one's purveyors arrive on time. A person with generally no knowledge of fine cuisine will find the first half of the book fine, but the second half less friendly as it delves into the more specific nuts and bolts of the restaurant business. The book is really part culinary textbook, part biography, with a few eye-catching treks into hedonism. It's uneven in parts, but this is altogether in keeping with the life of Bourdain, as the reader will come to find.
Rating:
Summary: The Hunter Thompson of the Chef Set!
Review: I read Anthony Bourdain's hilarious article in THE NEW YORKER magazine last year and couldn't wait to read more about his years spent in the bowels of some of New York's finest restaurants. KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL did not disappoint. I laughed all the way through the book and learned a lot along the way. Think Hunter Thompson, drugs and all, writing about the restaurant business. I learned that running a restaurant is not for the faint of heart. Just hauling all the bloody meat carcasses around would be enough to turn your stomach. Learning to carve the beef, fish, poultry and lamb would put me off the job right away. The pressure of turning out 600+ dinners in an evening is daunting. Paying the bills, keeping the nut-case employees happy, knowing which Italian family currently controls disposal of waste, and trying to stay on top of the ever changing and always fickle American palette is enough to make anyone's head spin. The leveling factor, or so it seems, is chemicals -- and lots of them. I don't think Bourdain has drawn a completely sober breath since he first stepped into a commercial kitchen at the Dreadnaught in Provincetown, Cape Cod. When they weren't drinking up profits from the Dreadnaught's bar, they were high on coke, LSD, mushrooms laced with honey, and finally, heroin. As Bourdain explains: So who the hell, exactly, ARE these guys, the boys and girls in the trenches? You might get the impression from the specifics of MY less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base. After reading this riotous tale, I've made some changes in my dining out behaviors. I will not eat fish on Mondays. I won't "do brunch." I will schedule my dining excursions for weekdays, not weekends. I will never order anything well done and I won't insult the chef by asking for sauce "on the side." I will sit at the bar and watch what comes out of the kitchen before ordering. I will skip lunch and save my appetite for dinner. Also, on my next trip to New York, I will make reservations Bourdain's restaurant, Brasserie Les Halles...for Tuesday night, of course! If you want to know WHY I've changed my routines, read this book. You'll learn some interesting facts and chances are, you'll laugh a lot during the process. Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: a jolly good read, funny, informative
Review: If you caught one of Bourdain's interviews on the standard book-flogging tour, it probably emphasized the restaurateur exposé nature of this book--- how restaurants recycle old fish, old bread, etc. Kitchen Confidential is much more than that. Bourdain gives us an interesting view of what it is like to be a professional cook, from the job itself, to the working environment, to the often insane denizens of the kitchens of New York's restaurants. The narrative is loosely autobiographical, with Bourdain sharing his often screamingly hilarious experiences and telling us what he learned from them. If you enjoyed Bourdain's interviews, you are really going to enjoy this book, because he is even more likable and funny in his writings, even though he and those he was worked with are far from perfect human beings. If you like reading this kind of nuts and bolts narrative of life in a misunderstood profession, I also recommend Linda Greenlaw's book The Hungry Ocean. Same great stories, same sort of crazed non-politically correct cast, same clear and interesting writing except that it is about the commercial fishing industry.
Rating:
Summary: Knife-sharp wit in the Kitchen
Review: Having been a fan of Bourdain's books for years, I was thrilled to find Kitchen Confidential. I loved his behind-the-scenes revelations and laughed out loud more times than I can count. I found his remarks about Emeril Lagasse hilarious. I was thinking while I read this book that I felt like I was right there throughout his many restaurant jobs. His writing style is superb and loaded with caustic wit. Anthony, this book deserves an encore!
Rating:
Summary: Wiilling Suspension of Dish Belief
Review: Tony Bourdain, the Keith Richards of the culinary world, has written an entertaining and shocking "dish" book in "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly." With the advent of armchair adventures of food television, Americans are glamorizing the chef as cult hero. Bourdain takes the reader behind "the line" to show that cooking is not pretty. While this book will not scandalize the New York restaurant business as did Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" for the Chicago meatpacking industry, it will give pause to those who are willing to look past his "raw" presentation to discover his satiric "bite." As a long time vegetarian, I am a member of one of Bourdain's "hate groups," but, oddly enough, his "forking" did not offend me. As he says himself, this book is a "rant," which I hope is a but a preface for a second book in which he will find further courage to fling open the back doors of more hot kitchens. An aside for female readers: yes, this book is phallocentric, but so is the world which Chef Bourdain describes. At times, I found the language of the kitchen to be appalling, but that is the reality of what one does not hear from the "four top." Read this book and learn from him!
Rating: 
Summary: Chef with an attitude spills the beans - unevenly.
Review: As a 9 year old Enfant Terrible at the beginning of KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL, the author, Anthony Bourdain, discovers the power of food while on a vacation in France with his brother and parents. More to the point, he discovers food's power to shock and amaze as he eats local delicacies that otherwise make the rest of his family gag. By his own admission, he enters young manhood as " a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ... kicking". Then, he got his first job as a restaurant dishwasher. By the end of the book, Bourdain is executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York City. In between, we follow his upward advancement through the culinary hierarchy: salad station, broiler station, independent caterer, line cook, sous-chef, executive chef. More often than not during the first half of his career, he admits to being stoned on one or another controlled substance. However, Bourdain also has an evident talent for cooking and organization, and by the book's second half he's sobered up and on his way to a career of distinction. Reviews of CONFIDENTIAL laud the author's wicked wit as he reveals to us the uninitiated the secrets of the kitchen behind those swinging doors. Was it witty? Not really. Was it informative? Yes, but do I really need to know that the Rainbow Room's locker-room was a "gruesome panorama of dermatological curiosities ... boils, pimples, ingrown hair, rashes, buboes, lesions and skin rot ..." Or, that the odors of the place "combined to form a noxious, penetrating cloud that followed you home, and made you smell as if you'd been rolling around in sheep guts". Hmm, local color perhaps. To be fair, there are one or two terrific chapters, particularly "How to Cook Like the Pros", in which Bourdain lists and describes what the pro absolutely needs, and "A Day In the Life", in which he describes a typical, grueling day on the job from 6:00 AM to near midnight. Clearly, it isn't a career choice for a couch potato. I guess my greatest objection, and disappointment, was that I just never liked the guy. While enormously talented, he's also way too self-absorbed. He's an Enfant Terrible grown into a Jerk. His best buddies, also in the biz, are apparently just as professionally talented and personally dysfunctional. He barely mentions Nancy, his wife, who has to put up with him, and is quite likely a saint. His disdain for the paying public is often glaring, as when he refers to weekend diners as "rubes". Well, this is one Rube who would just as soon dine on slop at the local Denny's than sit down to his finest creation END
Rating: 
Summary: Perfect Summer Reading
Review: This is a selection anyone would find compelling to read and enjoy as summer reading. Sitting on the beach you can imagine the experiences that began for the "worldly" dishwasher in a Summer job on Cape Cod. You'll laugh out loud at some of the stories, and you are likely to feel the goosebumps rise when you learn some of the battle stories from behind the kitchen doors. Everything from recycled bread to pricey butter, and shellfish I'll never order out again(Mussels) are part of this multifaceted book. When reading his prose you will likely have difficulty with the limited vocabulary and his reliance on vernacular to "beef up" (excuse the pun) the drama of already great stories. That really is the only flaw, and it doesn't detract from the expertise so much as provide a bit of an illustration. Many times I have read sections aloud to friends, watching their reactions. The language could be toned down without hurting the stories. From the Cape to Europe to the CIA (not the spies...the chefs!) this is one of those books you'll talk about over drinks while you contemplate the specials at your favorite summer dining spot. Pass the book on to a friend. Nice reading.
Rating:
Summary: Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah and she is blushing.
Review: Superlatives fail me. I usually expect to consume a book, hopefully like a wonderful multi-course meal at a fine restaurant. Not this entree. Unlike President Clinton, I inhaled it. Snorting again and again, until all the little lines of print were gone and I was desperately licking up liner notes trying to maintain a literary high. I worked prep in a restaurant in high school. Just a greasy spoon, but the experiences of Chef Bourdain are my experiences. As the author impresses, you have to be a bit deranged to work in a restaurant; the hours and pace are brutal. But, there is a strange camaraderie that spans age, gender and ethnicity for those who live on the culinary fringe, and this book captures it perfectly. My copy now sits snug on my bookshelf, nestled next to "Down and Out in Paris and London" and I know, somewhere, George Orwell is laughing.
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