A couple of weeks later, there were TV trucks parked outside his restaurant. I called Bourdain that day and said that I hoped we could publish the piece right away. The essay took us behind the scenes of a restaurant kitchen, and did so with a cool eye and warm sense of the absurd. I read Bourdain’s piece and started laughing almost immediately. Like any editor, I receive many unsolicited manuscripts, and each one carries a message: ignore this at your peril brilliance could await. The piece quickly became a phenomenon, launching the chef’s writing career and shaking up the global culinary industry it was later expanded into his best-selling memoir “ Kitchen Confidential.”īourdain began his ascent as a writer and public personality when his mother sent a manuscript to me more than twenty years ago. “Good food, good eating,” he observes, “is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay.” Bourdain writes as if he were seated right next to you, about to dig into a delicious plate of Vietnamese bún chả or Jamaican jerk chicken in other words, his essays are truly great jaunts. With crackling precision, Bourdain gave us a peek behind the curtain at the high-energy yet opaque world of professional cooking. The piece, his first for The New Yorker, heralded the arrival of a singular new voice in food writing. In 1999, Anthony Bourdain, then a chef at Les Halles brasserie, published “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” an essay that chronicled his days and nights as a Manhattan cook.
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