Kitchen Confidential

I read Kitchen Confidential a while ago. It's by Anthony Bourdain, a pretty high-powered chef in New York. It doesn't have a consistent narrative, but instead is kind of an anthology of Bourdain's stories, insights and thoughts about the restaurant business. He describes how he got started as a vegetable chopper or something like that at a restaurant in Providencetown, Massachusetts, I think, and how he basically got humiliated out of the joint the first time he burned himself and was yelping and asking for Band-Aids and the big, old, mean cooks started showing him their nearly disfigured hands and calling him profane names.

He also describes how he liked some of the local cooking that was done there because the cooks incorporated influences from the local "Portagees." As a half-Portuguese guy, I found this use of "Portagee" striking. I don't think that I have ever seen the word in print in any sort of non-fiction. I think that Steinbeck used it some, maybe in Tortilla Flat, but it was interesting to see it used loosely in something about the present. The word, like many ethnic generalities, inspires disparate reactions. I have never had a problem with it or with being called a "Portagee," or at least a "half-Portagee." My family used and uses the term frequently. Some Portuguese kids with whom I went to school for a long time -- mostly ones whose families had come to the US more recently -- really disliked it and did not want people using it to refer to them. Accordingly, I was surprised to see it used pretty loosely and somewhat admiringly in print. I wonder if Bourdain called the cooks "Portagees" to their faces. I guess that I would be surprised if he did.

Kitchen Confidential sold pretty well, so quite a bit of it is pretty well-known. For instance, I had already heard about how it explains why you shouldn't order certain foods on certain days of the week. Apparently, you shouldn't eat seafood at Sunday brunches or order seafood specials Sunday or Monday nights. Basically, the chefs order seafood for the weekend on Friday. If they haven't sold it by Sunday morning, they incorporate into brunch. If they haven't gotten rid of it during brunch, then they concoct something to get it sold before they have to throw it out and before they buy more seafood on Tuesday. There's other stuff like that in the book, like how chefs think that people who order chicken basically think those people don't know what they want. I was kind of offended by that. I usually order a BBQ chicken sandwich within the first couple of trips to a restaurant that has them (although obviously not at Thai places, or Morton's, or someplace where ordering a BBQ chicken sandwich would be stupid). I figure that I can compare restaurants by ordering that at different places. It's a test, not an indication that I'm lame (I think).

The other thing that struck me about the book was how brutal cook culture is. I cooked pizzas for a couple of summers and can attest that a kitchen pretty much turns into a locker room if populated by a bunch of guys. Of course, that's probably true of almost any place where you get late teenage guys together (like the pizza kitchen where I worked). Apparently, at least as described by the book, things just devolve when you're talking about long-time cooks. The story that really got me was the one about how Boudrain was working in a kitchen where some higher-up -- the supply guy, the expediter (who reads the orders as they come in), someone like that -- was constantly grabbing Boudrain's butt. Boudrain had enough of this one day and, as the higher-up approached to grab his butt, he grabbed a knife, arranged it so it was immediately available and, as the guy came to grab his butt, held out so that the guy would jam his hand into it. When that happened, he then pushed it into the guy's hand further. The guy was howling and spurting blood all over. He went off to the hospital and came back to work within a couple of days. Apparently, this incident earned Boudrain major props in the kitchen. Yikes! Good thing I got out of the restaurant business. Did pick up how to toss pizza dough, though.