Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

  Picking the first book to read in a new year is a big deal for me. I tell myself that the first read of the year sets the tone for the rest of the year. That's crap of course and yet I still spend the last days of December contemplating what book I'm going to open on January 1st. This year for reasons I can't recall I chose Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. I can't remember the last time I started off the year with nonfiction.

Of course, I had heard of Anthony Bourdain but I didn't know much about him beyond that he had shows on television about traveling the world and the food he found there. I have never seen any of Bourdain's shows but his legend looms large. I didn't quite know what to expect from this book which was good because this book wasn't one thing. It is partly a memoir, partly a peek into one corner of the professional cooking world, and partly something else that I can't quite put my finger on yet.

The cooking part of the book was interesting but not surprising but that may be because his book has infiltrated the culture to such an extent that I had absorbed his stories and advice (no fish on Mondays) without realizing it. I did come to appreciate just how hard kitchen staffs work. The hours, the speed at which one must work - I sure couldn't do it. I also appreciated how much he credits the people that one doesn't usually see when dining at a restaurant.

Usually by the end of a memoir I have a sense of who the author is. I can't say that after reading Kitchen Confidential. Bourdain's love of food comes through, especially in the beginning but beyond that he is a mystery. Although he walks the reader through how he got into cooking, he doesn't reveal too much about the rest of his life. I kept wondering how his admitted drug and alcohol abuse affected his cooking, or how he met his wife, or how he shifted into television and writing. Maybe another one of his books has those stories.

As a first book of the year, this was a solid choice.