It's funny what a difference a decade makes. I first read Anthony Bourdain's memoir of life as a professional chef when it was originally released in 2000. At the time, the American public had only seen the glossy outside of restaurants. Foodies read Gourmet Magazine and watched Emeril 's show. ("Hit it with the Spice Weasel! Bam!") It's hard to rewind your mind to a time before the airwaves were flooded with a million cooking shows, each one edgier than the one before. 

 

These days, the image of the professional chef as a swaggering boor is practically cliché. Anyone who has watched five minutes of Gordon Ramsey is familiar with this trope. "I'm crude because I love you," is the schtick. "I care about food too much to pull any punches." It's the machismo-soaked credo of at least half the celebrity chefs on television.

 

 

But it all started with Anthony Bourdain. Before Kitchen Confidential, celebrity chefs were superstars. But Bourdain introduced the idea of the celebrity chef as rock star, with all the bad boy behavior that entails. His book was a revelation, a peek into a seedy, loud world that apparently ran on sexual harassment and rock music.

 

I was blown away by the book when I read it. Of course, I was younger, too. Much less experienced in the way the world works. And we were all a lot less cynical, that year before 9/11. Bourdain has softened, too - his new show relies more on his charm than on his ex-junkie bluster, and a good thing it is, too, because the junkie stuff is the part of the book I found most grating.

 

These days, reading Kitchen Confidential is an exercise in puzzled expressions. Why? Why tolerate - nay, encourage - so much bad behavior from your kitchen staff? There is nothing special about working in a kitchen, nothing sacrosanct about preparing Beef Wellington, no justification for all the hype and self-aggrandizement except that it's a bunch of guys locked up in a room together where no one can see them. In other words, it's locker room behavior at its very very worst.

 

Eleven years ago, I was amazed at a chef's memoirs that only tangentially mentioned food. These days, I'm more interested in the food than I am the scene. Bourdain drops a few tips here and there (the best advice in the book may simply be his injunction to never start a restaurant just because you love food). But for the most part, it's all bad boy parties all the time. Yikes!