Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use, addiction, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, racism, and antigay bias.

Although a memoir of Anthony Bourdain’s career, Kitchen Confidential is in many ways also a love letter to line cooks and other everyday back-of-the-house restaurant staff. Bourdain points out that while chefs receive much of the credit for the dishes they create, those dishes are almost entirely cooked by other people. He highlights the “street-level” cooks whose collaborative work produces the food that restaurants serve, noting that it is consistency rather than creativity that most restaurant cooking requires. He showcases how difficult the work of cooking in restaurants is, noting with pride the work ethic that unites all kitchen staff.

Bourdain clarifies in his introduction: “This book is about street-level cooking and its practitioners. Line cooks are the heroes” (5). What he means by “street-level” is the “ordinary” kitchen workers whose positions do not receive as high a salary or as much recognition as higher-ranking individuals like sous-chefs and chefs. He explains how meals are actually cooked in restaurants, taking dishes from their preparatory stages through a series of stations on the line where they are cooked and then plated.