Calvin Sears’s Reviews > Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly > Status Update

What’s becoming increasingly clear to me is that you have to be a complete nut job to want to work in this industry.

This chapter is maybe my favorite so far — all the granular details will wash out, but what remains is just how fucking HECTIC everything in a kitchen is, and just how much shit goes on behind the scenes. This is a very well-written and excellently-paced bit of writing.

Like it or not, the phrase “cheese-eating, surrender-specialist Froggie” is going to bubble up in my subconscious quite a bit when I go to France in a couple weeks.

“…eating garbage on top of the world”. That’s a good turn of phrase — I might have to steal that.

I do begin to wonder, as I often do with colorful pieces of nonfiction like this, how many of Bourdain’s raconteurisms are embellished or straight-up untrue. I guess it’s not inconceivable, but I do not believe he was coworkers with an ex-Wehrmacht corporal in the 80s. I just don’t.

Sort of interesting that Bourdain denounces the very notion of eating fish on Monday — which he concedes is almost certainly good, just old — but insists that we not whine about recycled bread which may very well have been touched by unwashed hands and coughed on by, well. People who cough without covering. Just some food for thought.

I appreciate the self-flagellating disdain with which Bourdain addresses whiny affluent white guys who think they’ve got a clue.

I always relish in the opportunity to learn a few new words or terms of art when reading — today’s selections: “rondelay”, ginblossoms”, “potatoes dauphinoise”.

Bourdain’s voice is so unique and refreshing. Sardonic and cutting while still managing to put forth an earnest zest for life and a love of his craft. His penchant for em dashes does not go unnoticed.