Kitchen Confidential is a book that strikes to the soul of what it means to live within a subculture that exists upon the periphery of societal acceptability. Kitchens and those who work within it are one of these subcultures that exist skirting the edges of decent society, bartenders, bike messengers, criminals and activists are also groups who exist within these side-lined fringes of humanity. There are of course many more people who sit within these extant wings of our civilisation, but I’d rather not list every single categorisation of people as this is supposed to be a review of the book and how it affected me.
And to say it affected me would be putting it lightly. If you knew anything about me you would know that I am one of those people who despite hopping, skipping, and jumping between different ways of living my life I always find myself sitting at the edge of society. The ways the tumultuous and chaotic lifestyles of those of us who live on the edges of decent society are described within the book are in many ways holding a mirror to myself and the way I lived my life, both the glorious highs and the devastating lows.
I touched on this briefly in my Review of KAQOTL that I struggled with addiction, Bourdain spoke to that time of my life not through a vivid description of the effects of his drugs of choice, but rather he talks about his day to day struggles, such as how he was living in abject poverty whilst earning decent money as a burgeoning chef. Drawing an image of a skilful chef that is just down on his luck, but trying his best to make it in the culinary underbelly of New York City. We only really get an insight into how his life is falling apart when it falls apart in front of us. The way that Bourdain shows us his experience with addiction, is the purest concentration of how he manages to reflect the human experience within this collection of autobiomythographical essays surrounding his rise to stability as one of the most well known and venerated cooks on the planet.
Bourdain was one of those rare people whose prose is incredibly layered and complex whilst also being direct and easy to parse, with vivid imagery and a colourful language to match. Seriously, you can tell Bourdain spent 30 years in kitchens with how skilfully he slings insults and swears in one fluid motion. His prose really pushes the reader to keep reading each and every anecdote he comes with in this books, from a slightly perverted voyeuristic moment shared between the crew of the run down fish restaurant Bourdain began his career in, to the frustrations of sourcing ingredients as a chef later in his life. Kitchen Confidential is one of those books that deserves all the praise that it is give, and this is truly exemplified with the addictive nature of his prose.
If you want an insight into how one lives when scuttling across the underbelly of society read this book, it’ll give you some incredibly potent moment of intimate understanding, but unfortunately there are insights that you miss if you have not lived a life similar to Bourdain’s. If you are one of the many cockroaches that find themselves in the tumultuous fringes of society you will find within this book a deeply personal moment of recognition. I find myself returning to this book and thinking about what the effect it has had on me and the ways that it speaks to the human experience of a group of people who are incredibly undervalued in our collective culture.