Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung
When Chef Anthony Bourdain wrote "Don't Eat Before You Read This" in The New Yorker, he spared no one's appetite, revealing what goes on behind the kitchen door. In Kitchen Confidential , he expanded the appetizer into a deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet that lays out his twenty-five years of sex, drugs, and haute cuisine.
From his first oyster in Gironda to the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, from the restaurants of Tokyo to the drug dealers of the East Village, from the mobsters to the rats, Bourdain's brilliantly written and wonderfully read, wild-but-true tales make the belly ache with laughter.
Rezensionen (3)
Publisher's Weekly-Rezension
Chef at New York's Les Halles and author of Bone in the Throat, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business. His fast-lane personality and glee in recounting sophomoric kitchen pranks might be unbearable were it not for two things: Bourdain is as unsparingly acerbic with himself as he is with others, and he exhibits a sincere and profound love of good food. The latter was born on a family trip to France when young Bourdain tasted his first oyster, and his love has only grown since. He has attended culinary school, fallen prey to a drug habit and even established a restaurant in Tokyo, discovering along the way that the crazy, dirty, sometimes frightening world of the restaurant kitchen sustains him. Bourdain is no presentable TV version of a chef; he talks tough and dirty. His advice to aspiring chefs: "Show up at work on time six months in a row and we'll talk about red curry paste and lemon grass. Until then, I have four words for you: `Shut the fuck up.' " He disdains vegetarians, warns against ordering food well done and cautions that restaurant brunches are a crapshoot. Gossipy chapters discuss the many restaurants where Bourdain has worked, while a single chapter on how to cook like a professional at home exhorts readers to buy a few simple gadgets, such as a metal ring for tall food. Most of the book, however, deals with Bourdain's own maturation as a chef, and the culmination, a litany describing the many scars and oddities that he has developed on his hands, is surprisingly beautiful. He'd probably hate to hear it, but Bourdain has a tender side, and when it peeks through his rough exterior and the wall of four-letter words he constructs, it elevates this book to something more than blustery memoir. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist-Rezension
When the rest of the world is leaving the day's work behind, a restaurant staff's workday is just moving into high gear. Chef Bourdain writes intensely and personally about his career in New York's restaurants, leaving little to the imagination. Drugs, crime, aggression, violence, and sex all commingle with the pots and pans. Bourdain recognized people's passion for food on a boyhood trip to France, when his parents left him in the car for three hours while they ate at Fernand Point's legendary La Pyramide. Work in a Provincetown restaurant on Cape Cod led him to enroll at the Culinary Institute of America in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he learned his craft. In restaurant kitchens, Bourdain encountered the real characters, the line cooks, who actually turn out the food, many of them addicts, struggling immigrants, loners, and misfits. Bourdain's respect for those "fringe elements" makes the narrative worthwhile. For the foodie, Bourdain's prescriptions for kitchen equipment and cooking staples offset the grungier aspects of restaurant life. --Mark Knoblauch
New York Review of Books-Rezension
Sales Spike It's probably no surprise that for the second week in a row, "Kitchen Confidential" - Anthony Bourdain's profane, raunchy, freewheeling memoir about the inner workings of a restaurant kitchen - tops two of our nonfiction best-seller lists: paperback and combined e-book & print. When "Kitchen Confidential" was first published 18 years ago, The Times gave it a rave, saying that "Bourdain gleefully rips through the scenery to reveal private backstage horrors little dreamed of by the trusting public" and describing his style as a mishmash of Hunter S. Thompson, Iggy Pop and Jonathan Swift. Bourdain explained, in frankly unappetizing detail, why diners should never order fish on Monday or ask for well-done meat, and he called the re-use of bread an "industry-wide practice," adding, "once in a while some tubercular hillbilly has been coughing and spraying in the general direction of that bread basket." Though "Kitchen Confidential" (aptly subtitled "Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly") has never gone out of print, demand for it soared after Bourdain's suicide in France on June 8; many bookstores sold out, causing Bourdain's paperback publisher, Ecco, to scramble a bit. "We actually keep quite a bit of stock of this title on hand because it's always been a consistent seller for us week in and week out," Ecco's associate publisher, Miriam Parker, says. "Our inventory team also reacted swiftly and ordered a large reprint immediately upon the unexpected and heartbreaking news." Novel Reading Given the glut of beach reads published every summer, the fiction list is usually in flux by late June. This week, though, it remains largely unchanged, with Bill Clinton and James Patterson's thriller, "The President Is Missing," still lodged at No. 1 - where Knopf and Little, Brown fervently hope it stays, given the size of the advance they shelled out. And Stephen King's "The Outsider" hasn't budged from No. 2. Further down, though, things get more interesting. Christie Golden's "Before the Storm" - a companion to the World of Warcraft videogame - debuts at No. 9. (On Twitter, Golden recently wrote, "Change happens in fandoms. You may not like it. That's your right. But others may love it. Their opinion is just as valid as yours. Let people enjoy things!") Fatima Farheen Mirza's "A Place for Us," the buzzy first novel from Sarah Jessica Parker's eponymous imprint at Hogarth, lands at No. 13; Parker has gotten behind the book in a big way on Instagram. Bourdain exposed 'private backstage horrors' of the restaurant kitchen.