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Kitchen ConfidentialAdventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Anthony Bourdain

Rate It! Avg: 4.5 (51 ratings)

Summary

Kitchen Confidential

By: Anthony Bourdain

Narrarated by: Anthony Bourdain

When Chef Anthony Bourdain wrote "Don't Eat Before You Read This" in The New Yorker, he spared no one's appetite, revealing what goes on behind the kitchen door. In Kitchen Confidential, he expanded the appetizer into a deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet that lays out his twenty-five years of sex, drugs, and haute cuisine.

From his first oyster in Gironda to the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, from the restaurants of Tokyo to the drug dealers of the East Village, from the mobsters to the rats, Bourdain's brilliantly written and wonderfully read, wild-but-true tales make the belly ache with laughter.

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Audiobook Information
EDITOR'S PICK // New York Times Best Seller

Total File Size: 228 MB (7 files) Total Length: 8 Hours, 19 Minutes

eMusic Pick

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Elisa Ludwig

eMusic Contributor

09.17.07
Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential
2007 | Label: Random House Audio

Adventures in the culinary underbelly.
There are no easy miracles in professional cooking. Gruff, growling, misanthropic Anthony Bourdain, the antithesis of Rachael Ray and her chipper Food Network colleagues, reveals that restaurant work is hard, dirty and performed by sordid characters who can barely talk, let alone flash toothy grins as they plate steak au poivre. A supreme storyteller, Bourdain recounts his own early discoveries in a Provincetown kitchen during a college summer, and the career passion that led him to his post as executive chef at Les Halles in New York City. Along the way he shares his own adventures in the back of restaurants, his tussles with drug abuse and some of the naughtier goings-on between kitchen staff, plus some grim facts about food handling. Now a television personality, Bourdain has built a following on his caustic wit and searing judgments — all evidenced here in this early memoir.

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Fantastic Audiobook

Drew3D

This is one of the best audiobooks out there. Very entertaining. The only parts that aren't so great are when he's listing French ingredients so fast that it's hard to keep up. Don't worry about the CD skipping glitches mentioned in another review, I listened to the whole thing and there are only a few tracks with some clicks here and there, and no words are garbled.

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Better read

kd60115

I absolutely could not listen to this. It's too wordy. What may be amusing when read just didn't translate and didn't care for the narrator. Which may have been the problme...

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listen to it!

gingergirl

Very funny, ironical, sometimes cynical and most probably also very realistic. I agree with what's mentioned before - Mr. Bourdain does not seem to be the nicest (or as Jane Austen would say - amiable) character (and he most surely does not care about it) but the book is a great laugh and I thank him for that.

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What a Storyteller!

abra_kalola

You know, I just can't like the guy, because he's so radically different in what he values than me. He loathes vegetarians, eats fois gras in spite of the horrendous cruelty to ducks and geese in the production of the stuff. However, this book is definitely worth a listen as Bourdain is an outstanding storyteller. He has a witty style and an articulate talent for description which is highly entertaining. His organization of the book is excellent; he builds on everything so well that you come away feeling you know the people he has described. I laughed more listening to this book than I have in a long time. I also learned some ideas about cooking from some of his blunt, but frank remarks. But...I still don't like the jerk.

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Great book, needs re-digitising

Rocco6025

Excellent book - the reviewers have said it all. Only reason this doesn't get full marks is because emusic have failed to digitize this properly. Some of the tracks have skipping on them possibly originating from when the files were first uploaded from CD. This needs to be fixed as it does ruin some passages. That said - about 95% of the tracks are unaffected.

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