Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

by Anthony Bourdain

In the small, incestuous community of chefs and cooks in New York City, I know the people, and in my kitchen, I know how to behave (as opposed to in real life, where I'm on shakier ground).

My little French friends were, I was astonished to find, allowed to have a cigarette on Sunday, were given watered vin ordinaire at the dinner table, and best of all, they owned Velo Solex motorbikes. This was the way to raise kids, I recall thinking, unhappy that my mother did not agree.

I was quickly becoming a sullen, moody, difficult little bastard.

Spite, always a great motivating force in my life, caused me to become suddenly adventurous where food was concerned. I decided then and there to outdo my foodie parents. At the same time, I could gross out my still uninitiated little brother. I'd show them who the gourmet was! Brains? Stinky, runny cheeses that smelled like dead man's feet? Horsemeat? Sweetbreads? Bring it on!! Whatever had the most shock value became my meal of choice.

I had my first oyster. Now, this was a truly significant event. I remember it like I remember losing my virginity — and in many ways, more fondly.

With all the rock and roll, good stuff to eat and high-explosives at hand, I was reasonably happy.

I would let sadistic, bucket-headed French sous-chefs work me like a Sherpa

I found for the first time that constant proximity to meat seems to inspire black humor in humans. My meat instructor would make hand puppets out of veal breast and his lamb demo/sexual puppet show was legendary. I have since found that almost everybody in the meat business is funny — just as almost everyone in the fish business is not.

They'd let us practice our knife work on whole legs of beef, my novice butcher classmates and I absolutely destroying thousands of pounds of meat; we were the culinary version of the Manson Family.

No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American. The Ecuadorian, Mexican, Dominican and Salvadorian cooks I've worked with over the years make most CIA-educated white boys look like clumsy, sniveling little punks.

Chances are they've worked their way up from the bottom rung; they remember well what it was like to empty out grease traps, scrape plates, haul leaking bags of garbage out to the curb at four o' clock in the morning. A guy who's come up through the ranks, who knows every station, every recipe, every corner of the restaurant and who has learned, first and foremost, your system above all others is likely to be more valuable and long-term than some bed-wetting white boy whose mom brought him up thinking the world owed him a living, and who thinks he actually knows a few things.

One sorry Moroccan cook who pinched her ass found himself suddenly bent over a cutting board with Beth dry-humping him from behind, saying, 'How do you like it, bitch?' The guy almost died of shame — and never repeated that mistake again.

I have had, at a very good Paris brasserie, the misfortune to eat a single bad mussel, one treacherous little guy hidden among an otherwise impeccable group. It slammed me shut like a book, sent me crawling to the bathroom shitting like a mink, clutching my stomach and projectile vomiting. I prayed that night. For many hours. And, as you might assume, I'm the worst kind of atheist.

I will eat bread in restaurants. Even if I know it's probably been recycled off someone else's table. The reuse of bread is an industry-wide practice. I saw a recent news expose, hidden camera and all, where the anchor was shocked . . . shocked to see unused bread returned to the kitchen and then sent right back onto the floor. Bullshit. I'm sure that some restaurants explicitly instruct their Bengali busboys to throw out all that unused bread — which amounts to about 50 percent — and maybe some places actually do it. But when it's busy, and the busboy is crumbing tables, emptying ashtrays, refilling water glasses, making espresso and cappuccino, hustling dirty dishes to the dishwasher — and he sees a basket full of untouched bread — most times he's going to use it. This is a fact of life. This doesn't bother me, and shouldn't surprise you. Okay, maybe once in a while some tubercular hillbilly has been coughing and spraying in the general direction of that bread basket, or some tourist who's just returned from a walking tour of the wetlands of West Africa sneezes — you might find that prospect upsetting. But you might just as well avoid air travel, or subways, equally dodgy environments for airborne transmission of disease. Eat the bread.

I won't eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. This isn't a hard call. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can't be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like. Bathrooms are relatively easy to clean. Kitchens are not.

the whole Fulton Street market is not an inspiring sight. Fish is left to sit, un-iced, in leaking crates, in the middle of August, right out in the open. What isn't bought early is sold for cheap later. At 7 A.M. the Korean and Chinese buyers, who've been sitting in local bars waiting for the market to be near closing, swoop down on the over-extended fishmonger and buy up what's left at rock-bottom prices. The next folks to arrive will be the cat-food people. Think about that when you see the 'Discount Sushi' sign.

Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride. Sure, it's a 'play you pay' sort of an adventure, but you knew that already, every time you ever ordered a taco or a dirty-water hot dog.

We are, after all, citizens of the world — a world filled with bacteria, some friendly, some not so friendly. Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald's? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.

Butter. I don't care what they tell you they're putting or not putting in your food at your favorite restaurant, chances are, you're eating a ton of butter. In a professional kitchen, it's almost always the first and last thing in the pan. We saute in a mixture of butter and oil for that nice brown, caramelized color, and we finish nearly every sauce with it (we call this monter au beurre); that's why my sauce tastes richer and creamier and mellower than yours,

Margarine? That's not food. I Can't Believe It's Not Butter? I can. If you're planning on using margarine in anything, you can stop reading now, because I won't be able to help you.

To want to own a restaurant can be a strange and terrible affliction. What causes such a destructive urge in so many otherwise sensible people? Why would anyone who has worked hard, saved money, often been successful in other fields, want to pump their hard-earned cash down a hole that statistically, at least, will almost surely prove dry? Why venture into an industry with enormous fixed expenses (rent, electricity, gas, water, linen, maintenance, insurance, license fees, trash removal, etc.), with a notoriously transient and unstable workforce, and highly perishable inventory of assets? The chances of ever seeing a return on your investment are about one in five. What insidious spongiform bacteria so riddles the brains of men and women that they stand there on the tracks, watching the lights of the oncoming locomotive, knowing full well it will eventually run them over? After all these years in the business, I still don't know.

In Bigfootland you showed up for work fifteen minutes before your shift. Period. Two minutes late? You lose the shift and are sent home. If you're on the train and it looks like it's running late? You get off the train at the next stop, inform Bigfoot of your pending lateness, and then get back on the next train. It's okay to call Bigfoot and say, 'Bigfoot, I was up all night smoking crack, sticking up liquor stores, drinking blood and worshipping Satan . . . I'm going to be a little late.' That's acceptable — once in a very great while. But after showing up late, try saying (even if true), 'Uh . . . Bigfoot, I was on the way to work and the President's limo crashed right next to me . . . and I had to pull him out of the car, give him mouth-to-mouth . . . and like I saved the leader of the free world, man!' You, my friend, are fired.

Skills can be taught. Character you either have or don't have. Bigfoot understood that there are two types of people in the world: those who do what they say they're going to do — and everyone else.

I was still young, so I could comfortably blame other factors on my unhappy success rate: bad owners, bad location, ugly clientele, crappy decor . . .

My problem was the money. I was making too much of it.

I was hooked on a chef-sized paycheck — and increasing dosages of heroin. I was condemned to become Mr Travelling Fixit, always arriving after a first chef had screwed things up horribly, the wolves already at the door.

They were assembling machine-guns for sale in the employee bathroom when I arrived.

Baltimore sucks. If you haven't been there, it's a fairly quaint excuse for a city. (At the time I was there it was undergoing massive rehabilitation; an entire neighborhood by the waterfront was being 'restored' into a sort of red-brick and cobblestone theme park.) Bars close at 1 A.M. They start flashing the lights for last call at twelve-thirty. The permanent residents speak of New York and DC with strangely wistful expressions on their faces, as if they can't understand how they ended up here, rather than a few miles north or south, where there's a real city. There's an element of the South, an almost rural quality to Baltimore, an Ozark fatalism that's amusing in John Water's films but not so much fun to live with.

The crew, not uncommonly for most far-flung outposts in a restaurant empire, were already used to being the neglected bastard offspring, largely ignored by their leader. Supplies, which were supposed to arrive from New York, were sporadic. Guidance, such as it was, was erratic in the extreme.

The only other sign that anyone had ever lived there was a lone chef's jacket on a hanger in one of the closets — like an artifact, evidence of an ancient astronaut who'd been here before me.

And you could see, in the cooks' faces, that they knew - as sure as they knew that they lived in a second-class city — that they'd be out of work soon. The body was dying; only the brain had yet to receive the message.

The GM, a jangly, untrustworthy character, who seemed to be high on quaaludes most of the time, would disappear on benders for days at a time. This was problematic, as he had the only keys to the office. When the local wise guys showed up — as they did every Tuesday — looking for protection money (this kept our delivery trucks from having their tires slashed), we had to jimmy the office door to get at the safe.

But I was off dope now . . . and comfortably sedated by methadone, I felt free to visit the service bar numerous times a night, so that I could pack my nose with cocaine. This gave me that lovably psychotic edge so useful for mood swings, erratic bursts of rage, and the serious business of canning people, thus saving my master money.

It is one of the central ironies of my career that as soon as I got off heroin, things started getting really bad.

My boss was an older Jewish guy, fresh out of prison, who'd named the place after his youngest son, Billy, a feckless ne'er-do-well. He had been, in an earlier life, the head of the counting room at a Las Vegas casino, and after being caught skimming off millions for the 'boys back in New York and Cincinnati', had been offered a friendly deal should he cooperate with the prosecutors. He had, admirably, declined, and as a result spent the last five years eating prison chow. When he got out, a near-broken man, his old buddies in New York, being Men of Honor, set him up with this restaurant

I'd seen mobsters around before, of course, but I'd never worked in a place that was out-and-out mobbed up, where I came to know on a personal basis real wise guys, whose names I recognized from the papers. Everyone was astonishingly up front about their connections. My boss was fond of yelling into the phone when discussing prices with a purveyor: 'You know who I am? You know who I'm with?!'

at Billy's, every single one of my cooks was still basically a convict. I can't say that it was an unhappy arrangement, either; for once I knew my cooks were going to show up at work every day, if they didn't, they went back to prison.

But when my boss, inexplicably, showed up one day and told me to fire everyone with a tattoo on my staff, I was faced with a dilemma. Every one of my cooks was festooned with prison tats: screaming skulls, Jesus on hypodermic crosses, bound in barbed wire, gang tats, flaming dice, swastikas, SS flashes, Born to Lose, Born Dead, Born to Raise Hell, Love Hate, Mom, portraits of the Madonna, wives, girlfriends, Ozzy Osbourne.

I sought counsel with one of the silent partners who, as my boss had become increasingly distracted and unpredictable, had grown noticeably less silent. He and his associates had started to attend management meetings. 'You hear what he wants me to do?' I asked. The man just nodded and rolled his eyes, sympathetically, I thought. 'Do nothing', he said, and then, with truly dangerous intonation, added, 'Aspeta,' meaning 'Wait' in Italian. I didn't like the sound of that at all. He smiled at me, and I couldn't help picturing my boss, slumped over a dashboard after one of those meetings in a car they were all so fond of.

I worked at a Mexican restaurant on upper Second Avenue for a while, one of those places on the frat-boy strip with the obligatory margarita snowcone machine grinding away all night and vomit running ankle-deep in the gutters outside. The place was owned by a very aggressive rat population, fattened up and emboldened by the easily obtained stacks of avocados left to ripen outside the walk-in each night. They ran over our feet in the kitchen, hopped out of the garbage when you approached and, worst of all, stashed their leavings in the walls and ceilings. Every once in a while, the soggy, acoustic tile ceilings would crumble, and moist avalanches of avocado pits, chewed chicken bones and half-eaten potatoes would come tumbling out on our heads.

James carried a mysterious stainless-steel attache case with him wherever he went, hinting that it contained the Great American Novel, the Nuclear Codes, Unlimited Firepower. I suspected it was a few tattered copies of Penthouse and maybe a change of socks — but smelling James, I was less sure about the socks.

In the opening weeks at Coco Pazzo Teatro, I lost 11 pounds. These were not pounds I had to spare, I'm a bony, whippet-thin, gristly, tendony strip of humanity, and after two weeks running up and down the steps at Teatro from prep kitchen to a la carte kitchen — like some hyperactive forest ranger, always trying to put out brush fires in order to avoid actual conflagrations — I looked as if I'd been breathing pure crack in some VC tiger cage for the last ten years.

I was appalled at this ultimate betrayal and reluctantly reinstated him, swallowing a poison pill I knew in the end would help kill me.

The currents could change at any time, without warning. One day, I attended a chefs' committee meeting on the East Side and returned to find that the whole menu had been changed back into Italian! This included the listings on the computer, so that when I expedited that evening, I found myself in the unenviable position of having to read off items in Italian, translate them into English in my head, and call them out to my Ecuadorian crew in Spanish.

I was just too tired and too confused and too spiritually empty to move this way or that. There was always something that needed doing, and none of it pleasant.

As much as I'd like to push my snout into every fish gill and fondle every vegetable that comes in the door, I can't — there's just not enough time. Fortunately, my purveyors know me as a dangerously unstable and profane rat-bastard, so if I don't like what I receive, they know I'll be on the phone later, screaming at them to come and 'pick this shit up!'

The other Mexicans claim he carries a gun, insist that he sniffs 'thinner' and 'pintura', that he's done a lot of prison time. I don't care if he killed Kennedy, the man is the greatest prep cook I've ever had.

I run down the specials, speaking slowly and enunciating each syllable as best I can for the slower, stupider ones.

I like to hear different accounts of the same incident from different sources. It adds perspective and reveals, sometimes, what a particular source is leaving out, or skewing to leave a particular impression, making me wonder: Why? I like to tell selected people things in supposed confidence a few times a week, for fun. Later, when it comes back to me it provides an interesting road map of data transfer, a barium meal, revealing who squeals and to whom. There are a number of interesting variations on this practice — feeding false information to a known loudmouth, for instance, with a particular target in mind. A lot of what I hear is utterly useless, untrue and uninteresting. But I like to keep myself informed. You never know what might prove useful later.