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Anthony Bourdain’s memoir-in-essays, “Kitchen Confidential,” was first published in the year 2000, when the domestic economy was roaring, and with it the restaurant and travel industries.
There had once been a wide gulf between the upscale Le Cirque and downscale Papaya King crowds, but “Kitchen Confidential” helped bring the hungry middle populace to the table with the promise that food, and food writing, could be entertaining and fun.
The book, which went on to sell more than a million copies and be translated into 28 languages, rocketed Bourdain from an anonymous Manhattan chef with a druggy past and a checkered career to a celebrated raconteur — and into a nearly two-decade career as an Emmy-winning TV travel host, on the Food Network (“A Cook’s Tour”), Travel Channel (“No Reservations” and “The Layover”), and CNN (“Parts Unknown”).
Before his death by suicide in 2018 while shooting an episode of television in France, Bourdain wrote many more books, but none of them would unseat “Kitchen Confidential” as the one that defined his legacy as a hilariously gifted truth-teller who dared to show the world the mayhem and debauchery to be found behind the swinging doors that once obscured New York’s restaurant secrets.
Ecco, his longtime publisher, released an annotated version of the book in 2012, with the addition of Bourdain’s hand-written margin notes that exhort readers to “eat the f–king fish on Monday already!” and insist that “many of the best meals are in places with filthy bathrooms” — reversals of his famed positions in the first edition.
In 2024, Ecco published yet another edition of the classic. It features 16 pages of personal photos, which I was hired to select and caption, having been Bourdain’s assistant from 2009 to his death, and in possession of a trove of photos.
That version of “Kitchen Confidential” also features a new foreword from chef Eric Ripert, Bourdain’s longtime friend, who made a brief cameo appearance in the recent biopic “Tony,” starring Dominic Sessa as a young, aimless Bourdain.
Now, coasting on a wave of positive reviews for the film and a general renewed interest in the chef-author, Bourdain’s most celebrated work has once again been re-packaged, this time by UK-based art publisher Folio Society. The latest edition features new, color portraits of the chef, a gilded edge and a breathtaking $130 price tag.
It also contains a new foreword, written by Joel Rose. Tony’s longtime friend, mentor and occasional co-author, the two men collaborated on the “Get Jiro!” series of graphic novels which have been adapted into an animated TV series that premiered earlier this month on Adult Swim. Rose was the first to publish Bourdain’s writing, in “Between C&D,” a lit mag that he published out of his Alphabet City home in the 1980s.
“He confided in me how precarious things were in his life,” writes Rose in the foreword, describing his initial encounter with Bourdain, in 1984, when he was an active heroin user and journeyman chef who rarely stayed in one job for more than a year. “Financially, professionally, emotionally … He spoke of his confusion, his need to do something, his desire to accomplish something, write something, get s–t out.”
(About 15 years later, Rose’s then-wife Karen Rinaldi would commission “Kitchen Confidential” from Bourdain for Bloomsbury USA, where she was at the time editor-in-chief and publisher.)
In “Kitchen Confidential,” Bourdain’s stories are laced with hedonism and excess, glorifying the particular satisfactions of a chef’s difficult job well done. Although the specific ingredients (veal demi-glace, chive sticks) may have gone out of fashion, the spirit of kitchen life is immediately legible to anyone working in restaurants today.
From re-combining leftovers into buffet items or dubious specials, to after-work debauchery and the age-old rivalry between cooks and servers, the industry as Bourdain described it more than a quarter-century ago is much the same.
Of course, many once-lawless restaurants have now imposed stricter standards of conduct than were in place in the 1980s, doing away with obligatory shift drinks for employees and combatting the once-normalized sexual harassment that was so common as to be room tone.
In late 2017, amidst the height of the #MeToo movement, with his former friends Mario Batali and Ken Friedman facing allegations of sexual misconduct, Bourdain published an open letter, disavowing the lightness with which he had treated handsy hijinks among cooks.
“To the extent which my work in ‘Kitchen Confidential’ celebrated or prolonged a culture that allowed the kind of grotesque behaviors we’re hearing about all too frequently is something I think about daily, with real remorse,” he wrote.
Eight years after Bourdain’s death, re-visiting his life and work has become a cottage industry. His TV shows are widely available on streaming platforms. His likeness graces T-shirts, hats, prayer candles, urban murals, memes and endless acres of tattooed flesh. In “Roadrunner,” a 2021 documentary, director Morgan Neville sought to understand Bourdain’s path to suicide; in “Down and Out In Paradise” unauthorized biographer Charles Leerhsen also sought answers.
I myself am part of this so-called Bourdain Industrial Complex, having conducted interviews with dozens of his associates for “Bourdain,” an oral history of his life, while my own 2025 memoir, “Care and Feeding,” includes stories about working for him and co-authoring two books (“Appetites,” a 2016 cookbook, and “World Travel: An Irreverent Guide,” published posthumously in 2021) with him.
There is clearly a market for new Bourdain products.
“I think people underestimated his reach when he was still here,” Caroline O’Kane, a self-professed Bourdain fan who lives in Westfield, NJ, where she works as a financial counselor, told me. “In a time when influencers get to endlessly travel, we now glorify the guy who worked hard in a hot kitchen and seemingly could not be bought. It’s no wonder his legacy is idealized now more than ever.”
Jeremy Solly, former head of marketing for Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., (and a Bourdain fan) doesn’t think the new edition and its three-digit price-tag will struggle to find an audience.
“I don’t think it’s unreasonable; new books today start around $40. For those who aren’t sensitive to price or are willing to invest in something they love, there is a market for it,” he said. “I own a first-printing hardback of ‘Kitchen Confidential,’ and I wouldn’t hesitate to get a beautiful new, limited edition.”
Yet, with each new film, book, essay or consumer good that evokes him, a cry of “Tony would have hated this” inevitably rises from a disgruntled section of his vast fan base for whom he has become an avatar of anti-capitalist purity, some sort of punk freegan communist, as opposed to a man who understood how the world works, that commodities are bought and sold, a man who suggested in an episode of his own TV show that his remains be fed into a wood-chipper and sprayed into Harrods department store at high noon.
I have no financial stake in the success of any edition of “Kitchen Confidential,” but neither do I have any patience for those who presume to know what he would have made of the posthumous Bourdain economy. He was a complicated person with sometimes contradictory impulses; he took pride in personally beheading chickens for dinner on a Congo riverboat, and he loved KFC and Popeye’s, the multi-national chicken chains.
He loved both a tattered paperback book and a high-priced piece of art, and his fans can now choose how to continue enjoying the work he left behind.
Laurie Woolever is the author of “Care and Feeding: A Memoir,” and recently co-authored “Essentially Basque,“ a cookbook, with chef Ryan Bartlow.
