A real page (and stomach) turner

Eat out much? You'll enjoy - and be alarmed by - Kitchen Confidential, in which one outspoken chef dishes about what goes on in restaurant kitchens.

By PAMELA DAVIS

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 6, 2000

Talk about good timing: Not that long ago, a book about the inner workings of restaurants would have quickly found a home on the bargain-basement sale rack.

Now that the TV Food Network and the morning news shows have turned chefs into celebrities, a book written by a chef about what really goes on behind those swinging doors is a juicy find.

And this is pretty juicy stuff. With Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (Bloomsbury USA, $24.95), author Anthony Bourdain has opened the restaurant industry's Pandora's box.

Bourdain, the 43-year-old executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York City, has been in the business 28 years and has tales to tell.

The people cooking your food?

"Fringe elements, people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong," Bourdain writes.

The real definition of en vinaigrette? It means "preserved" or "disguised," according to Bourdain.

How about brunch?

"Translation? Old, nasty odds and ends," he writes. "Most chefs are off on Sundays, too, so supervision is at a minimum. Consider that before ordering the seafood frittata."

There are lots of folks in the kitchen, and Bourdain's book clues you in on who does what. There are sous-chefs, fry cooks, line cooks, sauciers, grillardins and others. And, according to Bourdain, they're almost all Hispanic. Learning Spanish is No. 2 on his list of 14 suggestions for those who want to be a chef. Not stealing is No. 3.

When Bourdain focuses on restaurant tales and advice, the book succeeds. When he gets off track and blathers on about his extensive drug abuse and other personal downfalls, it fails.

With its frank and sometimes funny discourse on the industry, Kitchen Confidential has gotten a lot of media attention. Bourdain was recently on the Today show, and there was a mention in Esquire magazine in which Bourdain calls restaurateur and TV chef Emeril Lagasse the anti-Christ.

"I'm consumed with fantasies of causing him harm," Bourdain told the magazine. "His food is crap. His act is crap. It's painful to watch such a low level of performance being received as authority. Most TV chefs make the rest of us look like boobs."

Some of Bourdain's revelations in Kitchen Confidential are probably things many of us assumed or wondered about, but, for the sake of the $30 dinner on our plate, we pushed the thoughts aside.

Bourdain says he won't eat in a restaurant that has dirty restrooms. "Bathrooms are relatively easy to clean. Kitchens are not," he writes. "I'm not even going to talk about blood. Let's just say that we cut ourselves in the kitchen and leave it at that."

Still feel like keeping that reservation?

Bourdain's seafood purveyor won't eat swordfish at a restaurant.

"He's seen too many of those 3-foot-long parasitic worms that riddle the fish's flesh," the author writes. "You see a few of these babies -- and we all do -- and you won't be tucking into swordfish anytime soon."

When he's not divulging kitchen secrets, Bourdain offers some solid advice for novice cooks.

In the chapter "How to Cook Like the Pros," Bourdain writes: "No con foisted on the general public is so atrocious, so wrongheaded, or so widely believed as the one that tells you you need a full set of specialized cutlery in various sizes."

Toss out all those knives resting in wood blocks (they harbor bacteria anyway), he writes. All one really needs is a decent chef's knife, he advises.

And "numero uno" in a chef's bag of tricks, he says, is the plastic squeeze bottle. That's how chefs such as Bobby Flay give their dishes that artistic touch.

"Mask a bottom of a plate with, say, an emulsified butter sauce, then run a couple of concentric rings of darker sauce -- like demiglace, or roast pepper puree -- around the plate," Bourdain writes, "and pay attention here, folks, now drag a toothpick through the rings or lines, and you'll see that all the fuss is about nothing."

And in the end, all the fuss over revelations in Kitchen Confidential is about nothing, according to its author.

"Do all these horrifying assertions frighten you? Should you stop eating out? Wipe yourself down with antiseptic towelettes every time you pass a restaurant?" Bourdain asks. "No way . . . Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride."

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