Kitchen Confidential: 25th Anniversary Edition (Anthony Bourdain)

2025 softcover edition with foreword by Irvine Welsh

In the now-classic memoir that launched Anthony Bourdain's long career, the globally beloved chef took us through the swinging kitchen doors and turned the culinary trade on its head. The result was a deliciously funny, shocking banquet of wild tales that drew from "twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine.”

Sure to delight gourmands and philistines alike, Bourdain recounts everything from his first oyster in the Gironde to his lowly position as dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown (where he became hooked on chef work for life); from the stovetops of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center to drug dealers in the East Village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again.

In the twenty-five years since it was first published, Kitchen Confidential has become a modern classic for its uncensored, razor-sharp insight into the restaurant kitchen at boiling point.