Bourdain knows the adrenalin that gets you through an eighteen hour day and leaves you sleepless thinking of what next, or still arguing about food in some scruffy bar when the sun comes up, just a eye blink before you have to start work again. It is for the chef with the dream of the most fabulous restaurant with the most fabulous food and the dream that tumbles with their money or someone elses into the ashes of their ambitions. It is about mystical synergy of the culinary magician who makes the perfect bread, can trick and cajole the perfect souffle from the humble egg it is about the chef who will work for days for the great dinner for hundreds without ever questioning why. It is the book for every chef who has worked sixteen hour days plus for most of their lives, had good employers, bad employers, gone broke, made fortunes, worked with good people, bad people and marvelled at sheer driven genius that can put magic on a plate. It is the book for the good domestic cook who believes in near death experiences and wants to open their own restaurant.
It is the book for the chef who has forgiven and forgiven his most loved and most talented staff for every misdemeanour from coming to work stoned to going missing for a couple of days and much worse. Forgiven just about every anti social behaviour because the hours are inhumane and it takes more stamina than most normal people naturally have to be good at. This is the book for the chef, who has tied his drunk dishy to the sink in the hope he’ll make it through service, or bailed out their second chef so they could come to work. Not since Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris has there been such a frank look at the artists of the kitchen. As Bourdain reminds us, “good food, good eating is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay”. Chefs may know everything about the contents of this book, but few would have dared write it down so frankly.
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