"The new celebrity chef culture is a remarkable and admittedly annoying phenomenon. ten o'clock on a Saturday night, after a busy dinner rush, me and a few cooks hanging around in the kitchen, knocking back a few beers and talking."īourdain said he really had no idea that anyone outside the world of chefs would even pay attention to his comments. "I wanted it to sound like me talking at say. "What I set out to do was write a book that my fellow cooks would find entertaining and true," he said. He said he never intended to write an expose or to "rip the lid off the restaurant business." He said he liked the restaurant business the way it was. to steal a couple of hours at the computer before appearing at the saute station for lunch.
In the preface to the latest edition "Kitchen Confidential," Bourdain wrote of his shock at the success of his book, which he wrote by getting up at 5 a.m. He became executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in 1998. Working in restaurants led him to the Culinary Institute of America, where he graduated in 1978, and began working in kitchens in New York City. He had written that his love of food began as a youth while on a family vacation in France, when he ate his first oyster.īourdain said his youth was punctuated by drug use and he dropped out of Vassar College after two years. The American chef, author and television personality was born in New York City and was raised in Leonia, New Jersey. If you don't make television like that, it's pandering." If it's interesting to you, hopefully it's interesting to others. "You go out there and show the best story you can as best you can. "If you think about who the audience is and what their expectations might be, I think that's the road to badness and mediocrity," he told the AP.