Tony Bourdain, the Keith Richards of the culinary world, has written an entertaining and shocking "dish" book in "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly." With the advent of armchair adventures of food television, Americans are glamourising the chef as cult hero. Bourdain takes the reader behind "the line" to show that cooking is not pretty. While this book will not scandalise the New York restaurant business as did Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" for the Chicago meatpacking industry, it will give pause to those who are willing to look past his "raw" presentation to discover his satiric "bite."
As a longtime pesco-vegetarian, I am a member of one of Bourdain's "hate groups,"but, oddly enough, his "forking" did not offend me. As he says himself, this book is a "rant," which I hope is a but a preface for a second book in which he will find further courage to fling open the back doors of more hot kitchens.