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Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Anthony Bourdain

Last accessed on Wednesday January 21, 2015

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One sorry Moroccan cook who pinched her ass found himself suddenly bent over a cutting board with Beth dry-humping him from behind, saying, 'How do you like it, bitch?' The guy almost died of shame — and never

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repeated that mistake again.

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'Saving for well-done' is a time-honored tradition dating back to cuisine's earliest days: meat and fish cost money. Every piece of cut, fabricated food must, ideally, be sold for three or even four times its cost in order for the chef to make his 'food cost percent'. So what happens when the chef finds a tough, slightly skanky end-cut of sirloin, that's been pushed repeatedly to the back of the pile? He can throw it out, but that's a total loss, representing a three-fold loss of what it cost him per pound. He can feed it to the family, which is the same as throwing it out. Or he can 'save for well-done' — serve it to some rube who prefers to eat his meat or fish incinerated into a flavorless, leathery hunk of carbon, who won't be able to tell if what he's eating is food or flotsam. Ordinarily, a proud chef would hate this customer, hold him in contempt for destroying his fine food. But not in this case. The dumb bastard is paying for the privilege of eating his garbage! What's not to like?

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Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best nights to order fish in New York. The food that comes in Tuesday is fresh, the station prep is new, and the chef is well rested after a Sunday or a Monday off. It's the real start of the new week, when you've got the goodwill of the kitchen on your side. Fridays and Saturdays, the food is fresh, but it's busy, so the chef and cooks can't pay as much attention to your food as they — and you — might like.

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Like I said before, your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.

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Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald's? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.

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Or if you have a few extra bucks, read the back of the paper for notices of restaurant auctions. As you've probably gathered by now, restaurants go out of business all the time, and have to sell off their equipment quickly and cheaply before the marshals do it for them. I know people who buy whole restaurants this way, in what's called a turnkey operation, and in a business with a failure rate of over 60 percent they often do very well.

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Nothing will permeate your food more irrevocably and irreparably than burnt or rancid garlic.

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Nothing made him happier than discovering fraud or deception or even a simple white lie. Once, after years of ordering frozen Bee Gee shrimp from a reputable seafood purveyor, Bigfoot discovered a hastily applied label indicating net weight. When it peeled off, he realized the company had, for years, been printing their own fake labels, heat-sealing them over the actual weight printed on the box, and cheating him out of a few ounces of shrimp every 5 pounds. Next time the company sent Bigfoot a bill, he simply sent them a Polaroid photo of the incriminating box, label peeling off to reveal actual weight. And the next time too. And for almost a year after, Bigfoot didn't pay for fish. He never discussed it with the company — and they never said a word. They just kept sending him free fish until they figured all that retroactive skim was paid back. When Bigfoot finally

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stopped ordering altogether they didn't wonder why.

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I worked hard for Jimmy, and after knocking out a few thousand meals, going skiing together a few times, we'd become pals, and we determined that when Jimmy and Bigfoot's relationship came to an end, as it inevitably would, I'd keep an eye on the talented Mr Sears, maybe come along for the ride when he made his next move.

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of people

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