Kitchen Confidential

I finished the first half of this audiobook by Anthony Bourdain, a chef from NYC. Its very different from the last book I read by a chef, Jacques Pepin’s The Apprentice. Although both chefs went on in detail about their wild experiences growing up, their definitions of “wild” are quite different. Pepin’s was more along the lines of stealing fruits and vegetables from farms in the area of rural France he grew up in, while Bourdain’s involved the heavy use of drugs.

From the point of view of learning about food and cooking Pepin’s book is more thorough, however Kitchen Confidential can is more entertaining, and might be of interest for even someone who is not particularly interested in food. Also, Bourdain focuses much more on restaurants, and the business of running a restaurant. He also reveals a lot of “dirty secrets” of restaurant kitchens, hence the name, Kitchen Confidential. Some of what he shares includes:

• Never order seafood on Mondays, avoid it on Sundays as these are the times when it is least fresh. The best days, according to him, are Tuesdays and Thursdays. Fridays and Saturdays should also be quite fresh, however preparation might suffer, as a result of increased rush during these days. Intrestingly, to check this, I called up Sole Prop. and found out that they do not recieve an order of fresh fish on Sunday (so eating there on Sunday guarantees atleast day-old fish). They do recieve an order on Monday, however according to Bourdain, chefs are likely to try and use up whatever stock they have remaining from the large order they placed prior to the weekend. Seafood is expensive, and chefs hate to waste it.
• Never order seafood at non-seafood places, avoid dishes on the menu with low turnovers fairly obvious reasoning
• Never order meat or seafood well done as chefs often keep the least fresh cuts they have for customers who order well done. An even better reason is the majority of meat or seafood doesnt taste optimum “well done”, which in most cases really means overdone.
• Watch those calories most food in western style kitchens starts and finishes with generous amounts of butter. In Asian cooking the same is true of oil. Also, even in some very fancy NYC restaurants, used table butter (served with bread) is later reused in the kitchen.
• Look for clean restrooms, waiters, (and if you can) kitchen fairly obvious, if any of these are not clean, pretty likely food handling is poor

There were many more interesting revelations in his book, these are just some of those that came to mind as I was writing this.

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