But through the ways in which he describes the people who he worked with in the kitchen, it is clear that these people viewed the Dreadnaught’s kitchen in a completely different way. When he first started working, Bourdain viewed the eatery solely as a temporary source of money because he hated the tedious work of scraping plates, peeling potatoes, and cleaning shrimp. In order to make some money, Bourdain worked as a dishwasher at a small seafood restaurant called the Dreadnaught. In Kitchen Confidential, it is clear that Bourdain’s feeling of place for the many restaurants in which he has worked differed from his coworkers’ feeling of place of the same restaurants, but at the same time, as Bourdain’s career progressed, so did his perception of the space that is the restaurant kitchen.īourdain’s first experience in the restaurant industry came about when he followed his friends to Providence, Rhode Island one summer during college. She also describes places as processes, meaning one’s sense of a space can change over time, and this definition of place can be applied to how Bourdain views the restaurant kitchen over the course of his career (Massey, 1994). Doreen Massey describes place as a “sphere of possibility of the existence of multiplicity” meaning that people can see the same space in different ways, each person having their own feeling of place for the same physical space (Massey, 1994). At each of these eateries, Bourdain had to work with a variety of people in the same physical space, from sous-chefs to line cooks to expediters to runners to waiters to managers to owners, and each of these people viewed the same physical space as a different place, which Yi-Fu Tuan defines as “humanized space, an abstract world made real through human inhabitation” (Jackson, 2006). Throughout his career, Bourdain worked in dozens of restaurants, some for a significant amount of time and others for literally one day. He begins with stories of some of his first experiences with food as a child and then continues to guide the reader through his ascent through the restaurant industry from dishwasher at a seaside restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island to head chef at his own French bistro in New York City. Anthony Bourdain, who today is better known for his television shows, describes his life in relation to food. Kitchen Confidential is a very informative book about the restaurant industry written by a man who knows so much about it. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Critical Book Review of Kitchen Confidentialīourdain, Anthony.

Kitchen confidential chapters