Skip Tony and Listen to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential Audiobook Instead

4 min readOne of my favorite moments in Anthony Bourdain’s celebrated 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, is when the late chef compares the way in which his rough-and-tumble kitchen crew slings expletives at each other to the language of cooking itself:Just like all the other sounds in my life: the hiss and clatter and spray of the dishwasher, the sizzle as a fillet of fish hits a hot pan, the loud, yelping noise—almost a shriek—as a glowing sizzleplatter is dropped into a full pot sink, the pounding of the meat mallet on a côte du boeuf, the smack as finished plates hit the “window.” The goads, curses, insults, and taunts of my wildly profane crew are like poetry to me, beautiful at times, each tiny variation on a classic theme like some Beat era jazz riff: Coltrane doing “My Favorite Things” over and over again, but making it new and different each time. There are, itturns out, a million ways to say “suck my d**k.” Most of the people in my kitchen can do it in Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, Bengali andEnglish. Like all great performances, it’s about timing, tone, and delivery—kind of like cooking.Despite what Tony—the new film by Matt Johnson starring Dominic Sessa as a teenage Bourdain—might fabricate about the man himself, this paragraph about cursing in the kitchen is the real Bourdain. Even as Bourdain describes his 19-year-old self, he might’ve needed “a good ass-kicking,” but he already loved cooking. He never burned down a restaurant, and he certainly didn’t make every decision in his life just to chase a girl. How do I know this? Well, in a way, he told me himself.Shortly after Kitchen Confidential’s print run proved to be a massive success, Bourdain recorded an audiobook version in which he reads the entire book in his own brutally honest, explicit, and poetically descriptive way. It’s the only account of Bourdain’s life that you’ll ever need.To preface this endorsement: I’m not a huge audiobook guy. I read—and I wish I read more—but as an entertainment writer who mostly covers TV and movies, I’m mostly consuming ... TV and movies. It’s not ideal, but there’s only so much time in a day.Something felt different about listening to Kitchen Confidential, and not just because it’s a breezy eight-hour listen that only costs $18. Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and many other major figures have received the biopic treatment lately—and I left each of them wanting more. I never felt like I learned anything, really, about the person onscreen. I find myself saying to myself, Wow, Michael’s nephew really sounds like him! Or pointing at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood and remarking, “Ha! Look! Bourdain’s nunchucks are hanging out of his pants just like they were on the cover of the book.”But Bourdain was more than a book jacket, and a lot more than a 19-year-old who just needed a good ass-kicking. He meant a great deal to a lot of people for his honest rhetoric, no-bullshit attitude, and pure love of food. Plus, he wrote amazing prose about life in the kitchen—and, trust me, it’s even better when you hear him read it aloud:At the end of the night’s work, I took home a 35-pound monster, still twisted with rigor. My room-mates were smoking weed when I got back to our little place on the beach and, as often happens on such occasions, were hungry. We had only the bass, some butter and a lemon to work with, but we cooked that sucker up under the tiny home broiler and served it on aluminum foil, tearing at it with our fingers. It was a bright, moonlit sky now, a mean high tide was lapping at the edges of our house, and as the windows began to shake in their frames, a smell of white spindrift and salt saturated the air as we ate. It was the freshest piece of fish I’d ever eaten, and I don’t know if it was due to the dramatic quality the weather was beginning to take on, but it hit me right in the brainpan, a meal that made me feel better about things, made me better for eating it, somehow even smarter, somehow. ... It was a protein rush to the cortex, a clean, three-ingredient high, eaten with the hands. Could anything be better than that?“Hit me right in the brainpan.” I love that part.It’s not just that Tony got it wrong in my eyes—which is a whole different piece from the one you’re reading right now. For a legendary figure who was all about experiencing the culinary world for yourself—which Bourdain documented across his long-running TV shows No Reservations and Parts Unknown—it just felt wrong to hear the man’s story any other way than from his own mouth. Since you can, why wouldn’t you?