Kitchen Confidential

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It should be noted that I do like Rachel Ray's "Tasty Travels," but that's another story I don't want to get into. How can you not love a book in which the author says, "Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. Anthony Bourdain was the author of the novels Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo, in addition to the mega-bestsellers Kitchen Confidential and A Cook’s Tour. He was trying to tell his story and by extension reflect the realities of the world that he inhabited. The only problem from a writing point of view is that sometimes the main narrative of Bourdain's progress through the industry seems confused, missing sections, which isn’t helped by some of the aside chapters falling out of chronology with the main narrative, confusing me at points.

He doesn't skimp on his addictions to cocaine, heroin, and whatever else he could find, and he was candid about how those problems nearly ruined his life and his career. The basic character of the chef and cook hasn't wandered too far from the same recognizable personality types found in Orwell, Freleng or Bemelmans: Sensualist, often socially inept outside the kitchen, frequently dyslexic——people with appetites that go beyond food.

I'm amused by people who think he was arrogant: I mean, half French, half New Yorker is not a blueprint for humility, but I also found him to have worked his ass off and to have earned his success. Sure, chefs here in Istanbul probably have different problems, have less sex during service (maybe) and do less heroin (also maybe), I would be willing to bet that the similarities far outweigh the differences. It tasted of seawater… of brine and flesh… and somehow… of the future… I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit and everything that followed in my life – the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation – would all stem from this moment. All the neighborhood kids thought I knew Steve McQueen and John Wayne personally-as an American, it was assurned we were all pals, that we hung out together on the range, riding,horses and gunning down miscreants-so I enjoyed a certain celebrity right away. 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.

I lay in bed all day, immobilized by guilt, fear, shame and regret, my ashtrays overflowing with butts, unpaid bills stacked everywhere, dirty clothes heaped in the corners.

A Day in the Life" revealed the realities of a 16-hour day at a busy eatery that served lunch and dinners. Bourdain is the author of the New York Times bestselling Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw; A Cook’s Tour; the collection The Nasty Bits; the novels Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo; the biography Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical; two graphic novels, Get Jiro! No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American.

My picks are all over the place as of late, it feels like I’m trying things on for size again, but Eat a Peach by David Chang was already a hit with me in January and trying out Bourdain’s book this time around brought me back to a similar happy place.

Well, I’m pretty much always fantasizing about these things, but let’s just say it became a bit of an incurable obsession of late!