Food Geographies Robbie Faselt
Critical Book Review 11/17/14
Critical Book Review of Kitchen Confidential
Bourdain, Anthony. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2000. Print.
Kitchen Confidential is a very informative book about the restaurant industry written by a man who knows so much about it. Anthony Bourdain, who today is better known for his television shows, describes his life in relation to food. He begins with stories of some of his first experiences with food as a child and then continues to guide the reader through his ascent through the restaurant industry from dishwasher at a seaside restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island to head chef at his own French bistro in New York City. Throughout his career, Bourdain worked in dozens of restaurants, some for a significant amount of time and others for literally one day. At each of these eateries, Bourdain had to work with a variety of people in the same physical space, from sous-chefs to line cooks to expediters to runners to waiters to managers to owners, and each of these people viewed the same physical space as a different place, which Yi-Fu Tuan defines as “humanized space, an abstract world made real through human inhabitation” (Jackson, 2006). Doreen Massey describes place as a “sphere of possibility of the existence of multiplicity” meaning that people can see the same space in different ways, each person having their own feeling of place for the same physical space (Massey, 1994). She also describes places as processes, meaning one’s sense of a space can change over time, and this definition of place can be applied to how Bourdain views the restaurant kitchen over the course of his career (Massey, 1994). In Kitchen Confidential, it is clear that Bourdain’s feeling of place for the many restaurants in which he has worked differed from his coworkers’ feeling of place of the same restaurants, but at the same time, as Bourdain’s career progressed, so did his perception of the space that is the restaurant kitchen.
Bourdain’s first experience in the restaurant industry came about when he followed his friends to Providence, Rhode Island one summer during college. In order to make some money, Bourdain worked as a dishwasher at a small seafood restaurant called the Dreadnaught. When he first started working, Bourdain viewed the eatery solely as a temporary source of money because he hated the tedious work of scraping plates, peeling potatoes, and cleaning shrimp. But through the ways in which he describes the people who he worked with in the kitchen, it is clear that these people viewed the Dreadnaught’s kitchen in a completely different way. To these cooks, working at the Dreadnaught was their year-round job and although they took their jobs seriously, they also had a lot of fun, joking with each other as they worked and drinking with each other during breaks and after their shifts. Whereas Bourdain saw the Dreadnaught kitchen as a mandatory space where he had to go to make money, his coworkers viewed the same space as a place where they could spend time with each other working hard and having fun, which also gets at Massey’s idea that space is constituted by interactions between people (Massey, 1994).
Bourdain’s view of the Dreadnaught’s kitchen differed from his coworkers’ view, but as time progressed, his feeling of place for the kitchen changed as well. The next summer in Providence, the Dreadnaught was bought by the restaurant down the road and turned into a larger, more upscale eatery. It was also staffed with cooks with a lot more experience than the previous ones, so when Bourdain returned to try to get his job from the previous summer, he had to shadow one of the cooks to see if he was up to the task. During this shadowing, the Dreadnaught kitchen became a completely new place for him. Now it was a place for learning. While shadowing a broiler cook named Tyrone, Bourdain was amazed by the atmosphere in the kitchen. He describes the atmosphere as, “…hulking giants [dancing] wordlessly around each other in the cramped, heavily manned space behind the line without ever colliding or wasting a moment” (Bourdain, 2000, 32). Now the space that Bourdain originally associated with tedious work was a place where he could learn from some of the best in the business. When he did not get his job back, the space also became the place that cemented his passion for cooking and inspired him to continue his culinary education by applying to the Culinary Institute of America. But, for the cooks like Tyrone, the Dreadnaught kitchen was seen as a place where they had to get their work done by collaborating in order to “satisfy customers, alleviate tension in each other’s jobs, and make a profit” (Fine, 2009).
Another restaurant in which Bourdain worked and the first place where he was the head chef was a small boutique restaurant in New York City’s theater district called Tom H. Bourdain viewed the restaurant as a great opportunity to try his hand at being a head chef so early on in his career (he was only 22). The restaurant was owned by an old couple who had many connections in the entertainment industry, so the eatery got a lot of press at first due to its famous customers, but the restaurant never became the hip pre and post-theater place that the owners, Tom and Fred, wanted it to be. Instead, business was almost always very slow and everyone who worked there including Bourdain could see the restaurant’s demise coming, so Bourdain decided to jump ship at the first possible opportunity. But, Bourdain does not look back at his time at Tom H. with regret. Even though it was not as successful as he hoped, Bourdain views the space of the Tom H. kitchen as the place where he got his first experience as a chef. He got to be in control of the kitchen and the cooks that worked in it, which is something he had previously never done. His sense of place for the space of the restaurant kitchen changed since his time at the Dreadnaught, which coincides with how Massey describes place, which is that it is a process, and not something that is frozen in time (Massey, 1994).
On the other hand, the owners of Tom H., Tom and Fred, viewed the same space completely differently. As owners, the success of the establishment mattered a lot more for them than it did for Bourdain. In fact, Prole writes that restaurant owners’ main responsibility is to make sure that the establishment is making money (Prole, 2010). According to Bourdain, Tom and Fred hoped that Tom H. would be a huge success so that the couple could retire with a comfortable amount of money. Tom and Fred viewed Tom H. as a way to make money so that they could end their careers, whereas Bourdain looks back at his time at Tom H. as just one of many stepping stones in his career path. This is another example of inhabitants of the same space creating different places out of said space.
A last space in which Bourdain works that demonstrates his changing view of the restaurant kitchen and how his view differs from his coworkers’ views is Les Halles, a French bistro in New York City. At the time of publication of Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain was the head chef of Les Halles, which was a very successful, upscale establishment. From reading his “Day in the Life” chapter, it is clear that Bourdain views the Les Halles kitchen as his own place. No more is the restaurant kitchen a place to make money, a place to learn, or a place to gain experience. It is now a place where Bourdain can be in control of many workers and machines and all of the interactions that happen between them. Anything that happens in the kitchen reflects his leadership so that means all food that leaves the kitchen is a reflection on him, even if he had no part in making it (Fine, 2009). In this chapter, Bourdain has to deal with everything from ordering food from various companies, to cooks’ requests for higher wages, to expediting finished orders, to actually cooking. He has many responsibilities that he has to be concerned about at all times.
Although Bourdain, the head chef, sees the Les Halles kitchen as a place he has to keep under control, each of the individual workers in the kitchen views the same space differently. For example, Miguel is the French fry cook at Les Halles, so he views the kitchen as a place where he has to do everything in the process of making French fries (Prole, 2010). This includes cutting, peeling, and blanching potatoes, dropping the fries into oil, and then seasoning and plating them. Even though there are many other cooks doing different things all around him, to Miguel, the space that is the Les Halles kitchen is a place where he makes French fries. But because space is constituted through interactions, his view of the kitchen is also a result of the ways in which he interacts with his fellow cooks. The combination of Miguel’s interactions with machinery and with other people makes his Les Halles kitchen a different place then Mohammed, the food runner’s Les Halles kitchen, because Mohammed has a completely different set of interactions. Workers’ interactions with each other and with machinery create different visions of place in the same space.
Geographers can learn a lot about Doreen Massey’s definitions of space and place by reading Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Her idea that the same space can be viewed in a variety of ways to create different places is demonstrated throughout the book with Bourdain and his coworkers viewing the same space as completely different places. Massey’s other idea that people’s conception of place is always in the process of being made is demonstrated perfectly by Bourdain’s view of the restaurant kitchen. At first the kitchen is a mandatory place to go and perform tedious tasks for a little money, but by the end of the book, Bourdain comes to love the restaurant kitchen and now sees it as a place in which he has complete control. Not only is Kitchen Confidential a very informative book about the restaurant industry in general, but there is also much to analyze about the book geographically, particularly in looking at the restaurant kitchen as both a space and a place.
I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this assignment.
Robbie Faselt
Works Cited
Bourdain, Anthony. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2000. Print.
Fine, Gary Alan. “The Kitchen as a Space and Place.” In: The Culture of Restaurant Work. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Jackson, Peter. “Thinking Geographically.” In: Geography (9)13:199-204, 2006.
Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Prole. Abolish Restaurants: Worker’s Critique of the Food Service Industry. Oakland: PM Press, 2010.