Few memoirs can lay claim to the same cultural capital as Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Its raw, real, and gritty storytelling captured readers globally, revealing not just Bourdain’s often tumultuous relationship with his craft, but offering a broader reflection on food culture and the world it exists in.
Now, 25 years on, Kitchen Confidential remains as relevant as ever, and somewhere along the way that signature Bourdain storytelling captured one particular reader – Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh – who was so compelled by the book that he has written its new foreword.
Here’s Welsh now with the Australian exclusive of the new foreword in the 25th anniversary edition of Kitchen Confidential.
I never knew Anthony Bourdain. I never met him. But he, and Kitchen Confidential, were very important to me. This is why.
As a young man, I went to London from my native Edinburgh, drawn not so much by bright lights as punk rock. I lived for gigs, clubs and festivals. As a result, I was always pretty much unemployable, but could feign interest in a job, figuring out the angles to enable me to do as little substantive graft as possible. I was a solidly working-class, council-estate kid, but blessed with a massive sense of entitlement, believing that the world owed me a living. All I wanted to do was music and writing. Not a lot has changed.
To finance the purchase of the guitars, amps and recording equipment required to mess around pretending you were in bands, and in between the time spent filling up notepads with my endless musings, I generally worked on building sites, occasionally landing a cushy office gig. But I often wound up in the kitchens of various London hotels, the cross-Channel ferries, and mass-catering events like the Horse of the Year Show at Wembley, or Silverstone, or assorted racetracks — anywhere that would hire my ragged, transient punk-rock arse. In such spots I generally operated as a kitchen porter, and once – with deep unsuitability – as a short order cook.
Building-site work was tough. Labouring for a brickie is one of the most difficult things you can do if, like me, you are basically averse to physical work. Hotel and restaurant kitchens, though, possess their own unique drawbacks: every time you walk into one, you are literally blown away by baking, unrelenting heat. This is compounded by the untrammelled hedonist’s bitter resentment of working in such stifling conditions during unsocial hours, while others play. Then there is the tyranny of the extreme line-management set-up if – when – you, at the bottom of the pile, fucked up, and had to answer to the chef.
The chef wasn’t like the rest of us transients, looking for a better life, who saw this as a stepping stone; one day we would go to college, train in something else, form a band, have a hit record, meet a rich lover, win the football pools (no lottery back then), and fashion some kind of escape from this hell. But not the chef. The chef was going nowhere, except maybe to another kitchen identical to this one, usually after insulting or assaulting the owner, or GM, or some obnoxious unappreciative customer in a variety of creative ways, occasionally – and devastatingly – involving sharp kitchen implements or hot food. The chef was a volatile alcoholic. The chef had the power. My strategy for survival in such environments was always: befriend the chef, unless they were so hated by your coworkers that they, instead of him, would make your life a misery. In which case you had to find ways of avoiding or ousting him – it was always a ‘him’ then.
Kitchen Confidential fabulously shines a light on what Anthony Bourdain accurately refers to as the pirate culture. The late-night bars after your shift, where you’re all drawn to each other, those fellow fugitives, and the heavy drinking and reckless drug-taking, the hasty affairs and bitter fall-outs that go along with it. When you end up drunkenly snogging someone who you half-realise is seeing someone else. And you need to work alongside that someone else later; hungover, paranoid and in an airless, white-hot kitchen, a place of well-honed knives and burning fat. Then the inevitable explosion, where you walk out, announcing that you are done with kitchen work, only to be found banging on the door of an identical place a few weeks later, as the red bills stacked up.
Many years after, when I became known as a novelist, the New York Times did a feature on the eruption of edgy Scottish fiction writing in the 1990s. Author Gordon Legge generously claimed on my behalf: ‘Irvine was a star before he was a star.’ I’m far from convinced that’s true, but one thing I do know is that I never felt more rock ’n’ roll than when I swaggered out of a hot kitchen into a club or pub lock-in with a group of like minds. More than when I was in shit bands, or dealing drugs or hustling for them, or even feted as an internationally published, bestselling author. This was partly the product of youth, but it was also about being surrounded by other outlaws, many of whom had dark pasts, some with even bleaker futures, and most of whom had stories to tell.
The break-out after the shift was not just about lotus-eating individuals, but being free from an oppressive working environment. A kitchen operates on militaristic line-management structures and can only function effectively when everyone knows their place and adheres to those designated roles. It is decidedly not a democracy. In a situation where anarchists by temperament are compelled to operate in such a controlled environment, no matter how bonded the team are, something, at some point, has to give. When it does, the only head guy you respect is the one who is genuinely passionate about what he’s doing. Who takes time to explain and to show. Who doesn’t see you as just another replaceable cog in the machine.
Anthony Bourdain was cut from that cloth, becoming a huge success by respecting the dynamic of getting the job done, but without ever losing his appreciation for all the round pegs pushed into those square hospitality industry holes. His passion for food and the good things in life was inspiring and his tragic death felt like retribution by the icy-hearted, soul-dead, money-bags on the very spirit of rock ’n’ roll.
The British came late to a mass appreciation of the great importance of food in our cultural lives. If you grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, you know there was nothing that couldn’t be rendered inedible in a British kitchen. Especially in Scotland, where we defined ourselves by the existential declaration: if you can’t drink it, fuck it or deep-fry it, it probably doesn’t exist. I remember my mum and dad taking me to a Wimpy Bar as a kid. In 1969, apart from a couple of Chinese places and a steakhouse serving cuts of meat like burnt toast, it was practically the only restaurant in the city. I thought we’d joined the ranks of the haute bourgeoise.
At my housing scheme comprehensive school, boys who took cookery classes were considered homosexual, back when this term unjustly had the derogatory connotations that paedophile (deservedly) has now. Then came the great food revolution, which happened roughly around the same time as women started to shave their vaginas.
Whether this was pure coincidence or not is one for the social anthropologists, but suffice to say the sensory oral experience instantly became much more important. Suddenly, real men both cooked and went downstairs. The Olivers and the Ramsays, the UK media’s favoured kitchen good and bad cops, moved the British perception of cheffing from a low-status joke into something quite cool. But the good and bad cops were still, ultimately, cops. It was Anthony Bourdain and Kitchen Confidential who made not just chefs and cooking, but kitchens and all their denizens, interesting territory for the clued-up. Bourdain was the villain’s chef, the outlaw’s chef, the rebel’s chef.
He was perhaps always an innate literary stylist. His journalist mother was a copy-editor at the New York Times and young Anthony grew up in a house stuffed with books. Even when seemingly entrenched as food-obsessed executive chef (and great front-of-house raconteur) at the unpretentious steak-frites spot Les Halles on Manhattan’s Park Avenue, Bourdain had, in true punk renaissance man style, explored other directions. His culinary crime potboiler Bone in the Throat was published in 1995, though there was no chance he’d be turning his back on his calling. Having lived the full hard-drinking, drugging life through various eateries, Les Halles was his harbour, seeming to offer a semblance of stability.
Then, in 2000, Kitchen Confidential was published and his writing suddenly and spectacularly took over from his cooking. The book was confessional and disruptive, delivering the publisher’s wet dream of combining cult and bestseller status. If the humour was irreverent, the respect for his chosen vocation never wavered. Anthony Bourdain’s own world suddenly opened up. A handsome, witty storyteller, he was made for broadcasting, oven-ready for screentime. Few other voices have made the transition so completely from book to screen.
The inevitable reaction to this success manifested in Bourdain’s bourgeois critics attacking his Kitchen Confidential persona, often carping that transparent vulgarity and bad-boy posturing undermined the sharp intelligence of his contentions. But I think this is a misunderstanding of his radical spirit. When you are the outsider, the new guy on the block, you’re either kicking against the existing pricks or preparing to take your place as one of them. And sometimes you need recourse to blunt instruments, like narcissistic gonzo petulance, to get people to engage with the bigger message, like genuinely jubilant and subversive politics. Kitchen Confidential often wears its literary inheritance on its sleeve. The pulse of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London is apparent, a socialist critique of the dire and brutal conditions faced by restaurant workers. But capitalism exploits all, even the billionaires, by sucking soul rather than finance from them, relegating their minds to low-frequency, childish distraction, which involves revelling in, or blithe indifference to, the suffering of others. Bourdain instinctively understanding something many bourgeois Marxist critics fail to grasp. Harping on to working-class people about how exploited they are and how wretched their lot is only denies them humanity and pushes them into the arms of the oppressors, who offer nothing but the phoney agency of racism and nationalism. Like Orwell, Bourdain clearly saw the spirit of working people, as well as their oppression.
Bourdain’s television show put his passion and humanity on full display. Those broadcast travelogues chart his evolution from (mis)adventuring vagabond to a missionary of eating and contemporary civilisation, and a commemorator of genuine cultural exchange. Demolishing ancient elitist fine dining precepts through his down-to-earth advocacy and boundless enthusiasm, his pivotal role in the democratisation of food culture cannot be overstated. Bourdain’s great legacy was instilling in our collective consciousness the idea that political and social inequality could be both informed and markedly remedied by the examination of what and how we eat. This has now become so widely accepted in our discourse through acclaimed movies like Triangle of Sadness and The Menu that we often forget how revolutionary these Kitchen Confidential ideas were, and how he was able to educate and inform a mainstream audience to this notion.
Both in Kitchen Confidential and on television, he exposes the intrinsic hypocrisy of immigrant labour in fine dining, and the ferocious sanctimony of habitually marginalised and discriminated-against sections of the community delivering Michelin star dining experiences, often so complacently enjoyed by more moneyed customers. The moral backbone of his defence of immigrant Latin employees in the food industry shames the demonisation of this demographic by the toxic political elites of the US. He knew it was always the immigrants, not the spoiled white boys, who were the living and breathing embodiment of the American dream. Bourdain never wavered in his disdain of those elites, a battle fuelled by his reaction to the sterility of his own comfortable, suburban background, weaponised into the mindset of a punk-rock anarchist and anti-authoritarian. The increasing privilege offered by his success only intensified this.
This internal conflict is writ large across the pages of this book. Bourdain often seems caught in an existential crisis, with the chef’s lot offering both everything he loves and hates, and while celebrating culinary life, he’s desperately reaching for the lifeboat of broadcasting. Untethered from his restaurant berth, however, presented similar problems, ‘I once felt “safe” and at home in the kitchen. I knew the rules – or thought I knew the rules. It was a life of absolutes – of certainties – and that comforted me in a way nothing since has.’ Again, Bourdain both appeared to embrace, and kick against, the role of the travelling Hunter S. Thompson of the culinary world. Perhaps ultimately, a man with such a huge heart would find this increasingly confining, yet chaotic world, as all too small and petty for him.
After lockdown, we accelerated head first into an era which has managed to be both scarier and considerably more boring than what preceded it. It’s one dominated by mean, petty, loud-mouthed tyrants and their apologists, desperately and relentlessly trying to reinforce the increasingly dispossessed (all of us) to buy into their shallow, dumb, self-defeating game. Anthony Bourdain’s departure was a signal that those soulless gobshites were in the ascendancy. People like myself, who never knew him, instantly had that aw fuck, no, moment: the sense that we had lost not only a kindred spirit, but an important one.
This was because Anthony Bourdain was more than a chef, writer and broadcaster; he not only made us feel good about eating food, but those of us who had been low down in the food chain – practically all of us at some point in our lives – feel pretty damn valued in preparing and serving it. He might have been an unlikely global ambassador for the magic of food and its place in our culture, but he was the greatest one we could ever have asked for.
Crucially, he was all this through being the embodiment of a spirit not just found in music, food and art, but in all the good things in life. A force of cosmic energy, raging against the ones of reaction and control, place-held by mega-rich techno stalkers and their pantomime horse media lackeys who whinny distractingly as their masters mindlessly loot. He screamed big human truths in a house full of liars. Forget all the noise, and tune into those higher frequencies: you’ll hear him. And in the pages of Kitchen Confidential, his unique voice is loud and clear.
The 25th anniversary edition of Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, RRP $24.99) is out now and yours to purchase from great Victorian booksellers such as Readings and Hill of Content.