Book 1: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Ever wonder what the best night to order fish at a restaurant is? Or where the chefs at your favorite restaurant dine? Or whether the kitchen in your favorite Chinese restaurant is as clean as you'd like to it be? Anthony Bourdain, formerly the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in NYC and currently host of the Travel Channel's No Reservations, writes an autobiography/expose of the restaurant industry with Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. In addition to tales of how he got his start -- from dropping out of Vassar to dishwashing in Provincetown to attending CIA and eventually cooking and/or cheffing at several major NYC restaurants -- Bourdain gives us an inside look at the dirty little secrets of the restaurant industry. We see who's sleeping with whom (hint: everyone, with everyone), why you shouldn't order fish on a Monday (it was delivered Thursday), and a quick way to gauge the cleanliness of a kitchen (see if the restroom is clean; it's WAY easier to keep clean than a kitchen).

Bourdain doesn't seem to pull any punches or sugar-coat anything along the way; he has a very what-you-see-is-what-you-get writing style, and the book reads as though he's sitting across from you, telling his tales over a cold one, or several.  He drops some helpful hints for the would-be chefs also: why you shouldn't quit your day job and go to culinary school, how to make your own dishes look as beautiful as some of the food you see in high-end restaurants (hint: small metal rings), and what tools are essential for your home kitchen (it's fewer than you might think). 

If you have strong objections to tales of sex in the storage closet or gratuitous heroin/cocaine use and the selling of your LPs on the streets of NYC to fund your next score, or if you don't want to hear that the bread on your table might have been on another table previously, this might not be the book for you. But I chuckled lots throughout, and I truly enjoyed this peek -- through Bourdain's eyes -- into the crazy world of the restaurant workers.