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
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caesar salad
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Sandra Lee "and I still love it to his day"
Show notes:
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Rafa's job working on the food for Network
The episode
05:25: Anthony Bourdain and Sandra Lee
08:55: Raw dairy is legal for sale in Pennsylvania
11:00: Chef Bill Yosses's company
12:19: Hunt & Fish Club
23:55: Monter au beurre
29:30: Anthony Bourdain on cooks as outcasts
32:41: "Stock. You need it. You don’t have it."
34:10: Chef Scott Bryan
36:25: Anthony's life before he writes Kitchen Confidential
37:10: Won’t let his daughter eat McDonald's
37:15: Anthony on Alice Waters
50:55: Adam Real-last-name-unknown
55:45: Anthony's first food was vichyssoise and raw oysters
57:17: Why Rafa started loving food and cooking
01:04:00: Coco Pazzo Teatro
01:09:55: What the home cook should have in her home
01:13:12: Rafa's and Sasha's favorite kitchen gadgets
01:20:05: People felt the loss of Anthony personally
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.)
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.