Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

by Anthony Bourdain

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.