Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain ft. Rafa, a real-life NYC cook

Kitchen Confidential, the revolutionary memoir that changed Anthony Bourdain's life, is an exquisitely and vividly written ode to food and those who cook it.

In this episode:

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• Rafa's Instagram 

• Kwanzaa cake

• caesar salad

• Magic whisk

• Sandra Lee "and I still love it to his day"

Show notes:

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• Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child

• Fish Talking by Pino Longo

• Creole Gumbo and All That Jazz by Howard Mitcham

• How To Eat by Nigella Lawson

• Notes from the Larder by Nigel Slater

• Gastronomy of Italy by Anna del Conte

• Rafa's job working on the food for Network

• Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain

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The episode

05:25: Anthony Bourdain and Sandra Lee

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08:55: Raw dairy is legal for sale in Pennsylvania

11:00: Chef Bill Yosses's company

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12:19: Hunt & Fish Club

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23:55: Monter au beurre

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29:30: Anthony Bourdain on cooks as outcasts

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32:41: "Stock. You need it. You don’t have it."

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34:10: Chef Scott Bryan 

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36:25: Anthony's life before he writes Kitchen Confidential 

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37:10: Won’t let his daughter eat McDonald's

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37:15: Anthony on Alice Waters

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50:55: Adam Real-last-name-unknown

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55:45: Anthony's first food was vichyssoise and raw oysters

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57:17: Why Rafa started loving food and cooking

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01:04:00: Coco Pazzo Teatro

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01:09:55: What the home cook should have in her home

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01:13:12: Rafa's and Sasha's favorite kitchen gadgets

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01:20:05: People felt the loss of Anthony personally 

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01:20:50: Anthony in Istanbul in 2015

This might be Julia's all-time favorite book about food. It is certainly in her top 5 favorite books ever. Our favorite kind of writing happens in this book. Absolutes, rich, indulgent descriptions, extreme stories and details, and a wildly romantic take on life spent working in restaurants and flouting normal socially acceptable behavior. This book might make you want to drop everything, take out a large loan, buy up a closed restaurant, and start an authentic taco restaurant or bakery. (Hello, Sasha's and Julia's dreams.)

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At the very least, you'll want to escape to the countryside of France, drinking wine and shucking oysters on a warm summer afternoon. Or stick your head into a Soba joint in an alley of Tokyo and treat your headache with a hearty, soul-warming bowl of noodles and bone broth. In fact, Anthony's true magic was not his writing or his cooking or his wit—it was in bringing people from around the world and fantastically different cultures together over a common thing: food.