How Anthony Bourdains Kitchen Confidential changed the food world

Anthony Bourdain’s memoir-in-essays, “Kitchen Confidential,” was first published in the year 2000, when the domestic economy was roaring, and with it the restaurant and travel industries.There had once been a wide gulf between the upscale Le Cirque and downscale Papaya King crowds, but “Kitchen Confidential” helped bring the hungry middle populace to the table with the promise that food, and food writing, could be entertaining and fun.  The book, which went on to sell more than a million copies and be translated into 28 languages, rocketed Bourdain from an anonymous Manhattan chef with a druggy past and a checkered career to a celebrated raconteur — and into a nearly two-decade career as an Emmy-winning TV travel host, on the Food Network (“A Cook’s Tour”), Travel Channel (“No Reservations” and “The Layover”), and CNN (“Parts Unknown”). Before his death by suicide in 2018 while shooting an episode of television in France, Bourdain wrote many more books, but none of them would unseat “Kitchen Confidential” as the one that defined his legacy as a hilariously gifted truth-teller who dared to show the world the mayhem and debauchery to be found behind the swinging doors that once obscured New York’s restaurant secrets. Ecco, his longtime publisher, released an annotated version of the book in 2012, with the addition of Bourdain’s hand-written margin notes that exhort readers to “eat the f–king fish on Monday already!” and insist that “many of the best meals are in places with filthy bathrooms” — reversals of his famed positions in the first edition.In 2024, Ecco published yet another edition of the classic.It features 16 pages of personal photos, which I was hired to select and caption, having been Bourdain’s assistant from 2009 to his death, and in possession of a trove of photos.That version of “Kitchen Confidential” also features a new foreword from chef Eric Ripert, Bourdain’s longtime friend, who made a...