Product Description

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly After twenty-five years of 'sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine', chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain has decided to tell all. From his first oyster in the Gironde to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown; from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Center to drug dealers in the East Village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain's tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable, as shocking as they are funny. A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal Bourdain sets off to eat his way around the world. But this was never going to be a conventional culinary tour. He heads to Saigon where he eats the still-beating heart of a live cobra, and travels into Khmer Rouge territory to find the rumoured Wild West of Cambodia. He also dines with gangsters in Russia, finds a medieval pig slaughter and feast in Portugal, and returns to the fishing village where he first ate oysters as a child. Written with his inimitable machismo and humour, this is an adventure story sure to give you indigestion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14465 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

Review
Kitchen Confidential: 'Fantastic: as lip-smackingly seductive as a bowl of fat chips and pungent aioli' Daily Telegraph 'Extraordinary written with a clarity and a clear-eyed wit to put the professional food-writing fraternity to shame' Observer A Cook's Tour: 'Colonel Kurtz Bourdain goes deep into the heart of darkness and returns sole survivor of the culinary bloodbath' Guardian 'Brilliantly written in a raw, stylish gonzo prose, with pitch-black humour and a devilish turn of phrase' Evening Standard

Observer
‘Extraordinary … written with a clarity and a clear-eyed wit to put the professional food-writing fraternity to shame’

Evening Standard
‘Brilliantly written in a raw, stylish gonzo prose, with pitch-black humour and a devilish turn of phrase’

Customer Reviews

What a book, a must, a must i say
This is a must read to all chefs and non chefs, give it to someone after you read it just for the hell of it. I read it from introduction to the last page, including the cook tour. wow. this guy is a god, gordon ramsay seems so little compared to him. u must say that this is one of the best books i have read and being a chef it changed my way of thinking in the kitchen, and has turned me into a head chef just by stealing a few words and tips.
I expect to see some of the cooks tour out on dvd for sale soon, just to get the feel of the real life experience.

Why Cambodia?
The Kitchen Confidential part of the book was by far the best part for me; fresh, hilarious, useful and about the stuff Tony clearly knows best. The travels roud the world, tho still funny and well-written, got slightly tired and tick-boxy by the end, but I would still recommend this as a good read - especially the bit about returning to France. Just one question, what food was it in Cambodia that made Tony or the TV company wanna go there? hehe

What an eye opener!
I had seen a couple of episodes of A Cook's Tour and by the time I realised that there was, indeed, a book of the same title, there was an omnibus.

Both books make for incredibly enjoyable reading. The writing style is very relaxed and chatty, to the point where at times it's almost like reading a transcript. It's blunt, holds no prisoners, and can be profane.

Kitchen Confidential will change the way you look at the restaurant business. While it's primarily based on experiences in the U.S., European readers should still find it an educational experience. I went from laughing to feeling rather ill in record time, and while it has in no way killed the experience of dining out for me, I do remember certain things when I walk past the kitchen.
Never eat fish on a Monday. Don't order your steak well done. Try not to dine out on Saturdays.

A Cook's Tour is a quest for the perfect meal, and takes him all over the world, from the incredibly formal Japanese meals with geishas, to eating whole sheep roasted in a clay oven in the middle of the desert.
It's a book for people who love to travel and people who love food. It makes me want to travel far more than I have already, just to experience some of the things he writes of.