Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly Tapa dura - 2000

A New York City chef who is also a novelist recounts his experiences in the restaurant business, and exposes abuses of power, sexual promiscuity, drug use, and other secrets of life behind kitchen doors. 

Published in 2000 by Bloomsbury, Kitchen Confidential was Bourdain’s memoir and behind-the-scenes look at restaurant kitchens, a follow-up to his popular and shocking article published the April 19th 1999 edition of The New Yorker titled "Don't Eat Before Reading This." 

The book is both a personal confessional, including stories of Bourdain’s misdeeds and weaknesses, including his drug use, and an industry commentary, divulging money-saving secrets of restaurants and things for consumers to avoid. Bourdain called the book "twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine."

Anthony Bourdain is the author of multiple books about cooking and food including the follow-up to Kitchen Confidential  -

Kitchen Confidential reveals what Bourdain calls “twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine.” Last summer, The New Yorker published Chef Bourdain’s shocking, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” Bourdain spared no one’s appetite when he told all about what happens behind the kitchen door. Bourdain uses the same “take-no-prisoners” attitude in his deliciously funny and shockingly delectable book, sure to delight gourmands and philistines alike. From Bourdain’s first oyster in the Gironde, to his lowly position as dishwasher in a honky tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown (where he witnesses for the first time the real delights of being a chef); from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, to drug dealers in the east village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain’s tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable. Kitchen Confidential will make your mouth water while your belly aches with laughter. You’ll beg the chef for more, please.

The first edition was published in 2000 by Bloomsbury.