Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Anthony Bourdain: Man You Should Know
Posted by Josh in A Cook's Tour, Anthoney Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential, Man You Should Know, No Reservations
Editors Note: This new weekly feature will profile men who are shaping the world, are at the top of their fields, or are just all around awesome. Our hope is that if these names pop up in conversation, your eyes won’t gloss over and you will have something to add. In short, these are Men You Should Know.
Executive Summary: Hard-drinking, chain-smoking chef who turned the restaurant industry upside down with his book “Kitchen Confidential.” He now hosts a show on the Travel Channel.
Why Know Him: He kicks more ass than anyone you will ever see on the Food Network (and mocks them all openly).
Bourdain is currently a chef, author, and television personality, though for most of his life, he only went by the first title. After attending the Culinary Institute of America and working at seafood restaurants in Provincetown, Bourdain came back to his native New York. He was a journeyman chef there for years, moving from restaurant to restaurant until he eventually ended up in Les Halles, a French Brasserie. During his years as a chef, he was an on-again, off-again writer, publishing two fictional novels set in the food world and the occasional article in magazines and newspapers. He gained notoriety for an exposé of the restaurant industry that was published in The New Yorker in 1999. The essay, Don’t Eat Before Reading This, documented the variety of ways in which expensive restaurants cut corners and took risks with customer’s health and was the base for his 2001 book, “Kitchen Confidential,” a memoir that gave a startlingly realistic portrait of the food industry (and later, a terrible sitcom on Fox that we will make no further mention of).
The book shocked people by detailing the way restaurants cut corners, abuse staff, and hold customers in contempt — and why everyone involved in it loved every second of it. “Confidential” also documented the various ways that Bourdain’s own career (and the career of many other famous chefs) had been fueled by drugs, women, and punk rock.
What followed was fame, fortune, and after the jump.