Chapter One

FOOD IS GOOD

MY FIRST INDICATION THAT food was something other than a substance one stuffed in one's face when hungry — like filling up at a gas station — came after fourth-grade elementary school. It was on a family vacation to Europe, on the Queen Mary, in the cabin-class dining room. There's a picture somewhere: my mother in her Jackie O sunglasses, my younger brother and I in our painfully cute cruisewear, boarding the big Cunard ocean liner, all of us excited about our first transatlantic voyage, our first trip to my father's ancestral homeland, France.

It was the soup.

It was cold.

This was something of a discovery for a curious fourth-grader whose entire experience of soup to this point had consisted of Campbell's cream of tomato and chicken noodle. I'd eaten in restaurants before, sure, but this was the first food I really noticed. It was the first food I enjoyed and, more important, remembered enjoying. I asked our patient British waiter what this delightfully cool, tasty liquid was.

'Vichyssoise,' came the reply, a word that to this day — even though it's now a tired old warhorse of a menu selection and one I've prepared thousands of times — still has a magical ring to it. I remember everything about the experience: the way our waiter ladled it from a silver tureen into my bowl, the crunch of tiny chopped chives he spooned on as garnish, the rich, creamy taste of leek and potato, the pleasurable shock, the surprise that it was cold.

I don't remember much else about the passage across the Atlantic. I saw Boeing Boeing with Jerry Lewis and Tony Curtis in the Queen's movie theater, and a Bardot flick. The old liner shuddered and groaned and vibrated terribly the whole way — barnacles on the hull was the official explanation — and from New York to Cherbourg, it was like riding atop a giant lawnmower. My brother and I quickly became bored, and spent much of our time in the 'Teen Lounge', listening to 'House of the Rising Sun' on the jukebox, or watching the water slosh around like a contained tidal wave in the below-deck salt-water pool.

But that cold soup stayed with me. It resonated, waking me up, making me aware of my tongue, and in some way, preparing me for future events.

My second pre-epiphany in my long climb to chefdom also came during that first trip to France. After docking, my mother, brother and I stayed with cousins in the small seaside town of Cherbourg, a bleak, chilly resort area in Normandy, on the English Channel. The sky was almost always cloudy; the water was inhospitably cold. All the neighborhood kids thought I knew Steve McQueen and John Wayne personally — as an American, it was assumed we were all pals, that we hung out together on the range, riding horses and gunning down miscreants — so I enjoyed a certain celebrity right away. The beaches, while no good for swimming, were studded with old Nazi blockhouses and gun emplacements, many still bearing visible bullet scars and the scorch of flamethrowers, and there were tunnels under the dunes — all very cool for a little kid to explore. My little French friends were, I was astonished to find, allowed to have a cigarette on Sunday, were given watered vin ordinaire at the dinner table, and best of all, they owned Velo Solex motorbikes. This was the way to raise kids, I recall thinking, unhappy that my mother did not agree.

So for my first few weeks in France, I explored underground passageways, looking for dead Nazis, played miniature golf, sneaked cigarettes, read a lot of Tintin and Asterix comics, scooted around on my friends' motorbikes and absorbed little life-lessons from observations that, for instance, the family friend Monsieur Dupont brought his mistress to some meals and his wife to others, his extended brood of children apparently indifferent to the switch.

I was largely unimpressed by the food.

The butter tasted strangely 'cheesy' to my undeveloped palate. The milk — a staple, no, a mandatory ritual in '60s American kiddie life — was undrinkable here. Lunch seemed always to consist of sandwich au jambon or croque-monsieur. Centuries of French cuisine had yet to make an impression. What I noticed about food, French style, was what they didn't have.

After a few weeks of this, we took a night train to Paris, where we met up with my father, and a spanking new Rover Sedan Mark III, our touring car. In Paris, we stayed at the Hôtel Lutétia, then a large, slightly shabby old pile on Boulevard Haussmann. The menu selections for my brother and me expanded somewhat, to include steak-frites and steak haché (hamburger). We did all the predictable touristy things: climbed the Tour Eiffel, picnicked in the Bois de Boulogne, marched past the Great Works at the Louvre, pushed toy sailboats around the fountain in the Jardin de Luxembourg — none of it much fun for a nine-year-old with an already developing criminal bent. My principal interest at this time was adding to my collection of English translations of Tintin adventures. Hergé's crisply drafted tales of drug-smuggling, ancient temples, and strange and faraway places and cultures were real exotica for me. I prevailed on my poor parents to buy hundreds of dollars-worth of these stories at W. H. Smith, the English bookstore, just to keep me from whining about the deprivations of France. With my little short-shorts a permanent affront, I was quickly becoming a sullen, moody, difficult little bastard. I fought constantly with my brother, carped about everything, and was in every possible way a drag on my mother's Glorious Expedition.

My parents did their best. They took us everywhere, from restaurant to restaurant, cringing, no doubt, every time we insisted on steak haché (with ketchup, no less) and a 'Coca.' They endured silently my gripes about cheesy butter, the seemingly endless amusement I took in advertisements for a popular soft drink of the time, Pschitt. 'I want shit! I want shit!' They managed to ignore the eye-rolling and fidgeting when they spoke French, tried to encourage me to find something, anything, to enjoy.

And there came a time when, finally, they didn't take the kids along.

I remember it well, because it was such a slap in the face. It was a wake-up call that food could be important, a challenge to my natural belligerence. By being denied, a door opened.

The town's name was Vienne. We'd driven miles and miles of road to get there. My brother and I were fresh out of Tintins and cranky as hell. The French countryside, with its graceful, tree-lined roads, hedgerows, tilled fields and picture-book villages provided little distraction. My folks had by now endured weeks of relentless complaining through many tense and increasingly unpleasant meals. They'd dutifully ordered our steak haché, crudités variées, sandwich au jambon and the like long enough. They'd put up with our grousing that the beds were too hard, the pillows too soft, the neck-rolls and toilets and plumbing too weird. They'd even allowed us a little watered wine, as it was clearly the French thing to do — but also, I think, to shut us up. They'd taken my brother and me, the two Ugliest Little Americans, everywhere.

Vienne was different.

They pulled the gleaming new Rover into the parking lot of a restaurant called, rather promisingly, La Pyramide, handed us what was apparently a hoarded stash of Tintins ... and then left us in the car!

It was a hard blow. Little brother and I were left in that car for over three hours, an eternity for two miserable kids already bored out of their minds. I had plenty of time to wonder: What could be so great inside those walls? They were eating in there. I knew that. And it was certainly a Big Deal; even at a witless age nine, I could recognize the nervous anticipation, the excitement, the near-reverence with which my beleaguered parents had approached this hour. And I had the Vichyssoise Incident still fresh in my mind. Food, it appeared, could be important. It could be an event. It had secrets.

I know now, of course, that La Pyramide, even in 1966, was the center of the culinary universe. Bocuse, Troisgros, everybody had done their time there, making their bones under the legendarily fearsome proprietor, Ferdinand Point. Point was the Grand Master of cuisine at the time, and La Pyramide was Mecca for foodies. This was a pilgrimage for my earnestly francophile parents. In some small way, I got that through my tiny, empty skull in the back of the sweltering parked car, even then.

Things changed. I changed after that.

First of all, I was furious. Spite, always a great motivating force in my life, caused me to become suddenly adventurous where food was concerned. I decided then and there to outdo my foodie parents. At the same time, I could gross out my still uninitiated little brother. I'd show them who the gourmet was!

Brains? Stinky, runny cheeses that smelled like dead man's feet? Horsemeat? Sweetbreads? Bring it on!! Whatever had the most shock value became my meal of choice. For the rest of that summer, and in the summers that followed, I ate everything. I scooped gooey Vacherin, learned to love the cheesy, rich Normandy butter, especially slathered on baguettes and dipped in bitter hot chocolate. I sneaked red wine whenever possible, tried fritures — tiny whole fish, fried and eaten with persillade — loving that I was eating heads, eyes, bones and all. I ate ray in beurre noisette, saucisson à l'ail, tripes, rognons de veau (kidneys), boudin noir that squirted blood down my chin.

And I had my first oyster.

Now, this was a truly significant event. I remember it like I remember losing my virginity — and in many ways, more fondly.

August of that first summer was spent in La Teste sur Mer, a tiny oyster village on the Bassin d'Arcachon in the Gironde (Southwest France). We stayed with my aunt, Tante Jeanne, and my uncle, Oncle Gustav, in the same red tile-roofed, white stuccoed house where my father had summered as a boy. My Tante Jeanne was a frumpy, bespectacled, slightly smelly old woman, my Oncle Gustav, a geezer in coveralls and beret who smoked hand-rolled cigarettes until they disappeared onto the tip of his tongue. Little had changed about La Teste in the years since my father had vacationed there. The neighbors were still all oyster fishermen. Their families still raised rabbits and grew tomatoes in their backyards. Houses had two kitchens, an inside one and an outdoor 'fish kitchen'. There was a hand pump for drinking water from a well, and an outhouse by the rear of the garden. Lizards and snails were everywhere. The main tourist attractions were the nearby Dune of Pyla (Europe's Largest Sand Dune!) and the nearby resort town of Arcachon, where the French flocked in unison for Les Grandes Vacances. Television was a Big Event. At seven o'clock, when the two national stations would come on the air, my Oncle Gustav would solemnly emerge from his room with a key chained to his hip and ceremoniously unlock the cabinet doors that covered the screen.

My brother and I were happier here. There was more to do. The beaches were warm, and closer in climate to what we knew back home, with the added attraction of the ubiquitous Nazi blockhouses. There were lizards to hunt down and exterminate with readily available pétards, firecrackers which one could buy legally (!) over-the-counter. There was a forest within walking distance where an actual hermit lived, and my brother and I spent hours there, spying on him from the underbrush. By now I could read and enjoy comic books in French and of course I was eating — really eating. Murky brown soupe de poisson, tomato salad, moules marinières, poulet basquaise (we were only a few miles from the Basque country). We made day trips to Cap Ferret, a wild, deserted and breathtakingly magnificent Atlantic beach with big rolling waves, taking along baguettes and saucissons and wheels of cheese, wine and Evian (bottled water was at that time unheard of back home). A few miles west was Lac Cazeaux, a fresh-water lake where my brother and I could rent pédalo watercraft and pedal our way around the deep. We ate gaufres, delicious hot waffles, covered in whipped cream and powdered sugar. The two hot songs of that summer on the Cazeaux jukebox were 'Whiter Shade of Pale' by Procol Harum, and 'These Boots Were Made for Walkin' by Nancy Sinatra. The French played those two songs over and over again, the music punctuated by the sonic booms from French air force jets which would swoop over the lake on their way to a nearby bombing range. With all the rock and roll, good stuff to eat and high-explosives at hand, I was reasonably happy.

So, when our neighbor, Monsieur Saint-Jour, the oyster fisherman, invited my family out on his penas (oyster boat), I was enthusiastic.

At six in the morning, we boarded Monsieur Saint-Jour's small wooden vessel with our picnic baskets and our sensible footwear. He was a crusty old bastard, dressed like my uncle in ancient denim coveralls, espadrilles and beret. He had a leathery, tanned and windblown face, hollow cheeks, and the tiny broken blood vessels on nose and cheeks that everyone seemed to have from drinking so much of the local Bordeaux. He hadn't fully briefed his guests on what was involved in these daily travails. We put-putted out to a buoy marking his underwater oyster parc, a fenced-off section of bay bottom, and we sat ... and sat ... and sat, in the roaring August sun, waiting for the tide to go out. The idea was to float the boat over the stockaded fence walls, then sit there until the boat slowly sank with the water level, until it rested on the bassin floor. At this point, Monsieur Saint-Jour, and his guests presumably, would rake the oysters, collect a few good specimens for sale in port, and remove any parasites that might be endangering his crop.

There was, I recall, still about two feet of water left to go before the hull of the boat settled on dry ground and we could walk about the parc. We'd already polished off the Brie and baguettes and downed the Evian, but I was still hungry, and characteristically said so.

Monsieur Saint-Jour, on hearing this — as if challenging his American passengers — inquired in his thick Girondais accent, if any of us would care to try an oyster.

My parents hesitated. I doubt they'd realized they might have actually to eat one of the raw, slimy things we were currently floating over. My little brother recoiled in horror.

But I, in the proudest moment of my young life, stood up smartly, grinning with defiance, and volunteered to be the first.

And in that unforgettably sweet moment in my personal history, that one moment still more alive for me than so many of the other 'firsts' which followed — first pussy, first joint, first day in high school, first published book, or any other thing — I attained glory. Monsieur Saint-Jour beckoned me over to the gunwale, where he leaned over, reached down until his head nearly disappeared underwater, and emerged holding a single silt-encrusted oyster, huge and irregularly shaped, in his rough, clawlike fist. With a snubby, rust-covered oyster knife, he popped the thing open and handed it to me, everyone watching now, my little brother shrinking away from this glistening, vaguely sexual-looking object, still dripping and nearly alive.

I took it in my hand, tilted the shell back into my mouth as instructed by the by now beaming Monsieur Saint-Jour, and with one bite and a slurp, wolfed it down. It tasted of seawater ... of brine and flesh ... and somehow ... of the future.

Everything was different now. Everything.

I'd not only survived — I'd enjoyed.

This, I knew, was the magic I had until now been only dimly and spitefully aware of. I was hooked. My parents' shudders, my little brother's expression of unrestrained revulsion and amazement only reinforced the sense that I had, somehow, become a man. I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life — the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation — would all stem from this moment.

I'd learned something. Viscerally, instinctively, spiritually — even in some small, precursive way, sexually — and there was no turning back. The genie was out of the bottle. My life as a cook, and as a chef, had begun.

Food had power.

It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me ... and others. This was valuable information.

For the rest of that summer, and in later summers, I'd often slip off by myself to the little stands by the port, where one could buy brown paper bags of unwashed, black-covered oysters by the dozen. After a few lessons from my new soul-mate, blood brother and bestest buddy, Monsieur Saint-Jour — who was now sharing his after-work bowls of sugared vin ordinaire with me too — I could easily open the oysters by myself, coming in from behind with the knife and popping the hinge like it was Aladdin's cave.

I'd sit in the garden among the tomatoes and the lizards and eat my oysters and drink Kronenbourgs (France was a wonderland for under-age drinkers), happily reading Modesty Blaise and the Katzenjammer Kids and the lovely hard-bound bandes dessinées in French, until the pictures swam in front of my eyes, smoking the occasional pilfered Gitane. And I still associate the taste of oysters with those heady, wonderful days of illicit late-afternoon buzzes. The smell of French cigarettes, the taste of beer, that unforgettable feeling of doing something I shouldn't be doing.

I had, as yet, no plans to cook professionally. But I frequently look back at my life, searching for that fork in the road, trying to figure out where, exactly, I went bad and became a thrill-seeking, pleasure-hungry sensualist, always looking to shock, amuse, terrify and manipulate, seeking to fill that empty spot in my soul with something new.

I like to think it was Monsieur Saint-Jour's fault. But of course, it was me all along.
\"},{\"id\":\"2204605T\",\"type\":\"Excerpt\",\"linkText\":\"Read an Excerpt\",\"typeId\":\"1005\",\"abbr\":\"EXC\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"displayOrder\":\"2\",\"text\":\"\\\"In that unforgettably sweet moment of my youth, that one moment still more alive for me than so many of the other 'firsts' that followed, I attained glory. Monsieur Saint Jour beckoned me over to the gunwale where he leaned over, reached down until his head nearly disappeared underwater, and emerged, holding a single silt-encrusted oyster. It was huge and irregularly shaped in his rough fist. With a snubby, rusted oyster knife, he popped the thing open and handed it to me, everyone watching now, my little brother shrinking away from this glistening, dripping, vaguely sexual-looking object. I took it in my hand, tilted the shell back into my mouth as instructed by Monsieur Saint Jour and, with one bite and a slurp, wolfed it down. It tasted of seawater, of brine and flesh, and somehow . . . of the future.\\\" —from Kitchen Confidential \"},{\"id\":\"2442304T\",\"type\":\"Excerpt\",\"linkText\":\"Read an Excerpt\",\"typeId\":\"1005\",\"abbr\":\"EXC\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"displayOrder\":\"3\",\"text\":\"

Chapter One

Food is good

My first indication that food was something other than a substance one stuffed in one's face when hungry-like filling up at a gas station-came after fourth grade in elementary school. It was on a family vacation to Europe, on the Queen Mary, in the cabin-class dining room. There's a picture somewhere: my mother in her Jackie O sunglasses, my younger brother and I in our painfully cute cruisewear, boarding the big Cunard ocean liner, all of us excited about our first transatlantic voyage, our first trip to my father's ancestral homeland, France.

It was the soup.

It was cold.

\\\"Vichyssoise,\\\" came the reply, a word that to this day-even though it's now a tired old warhorse of a menu selection and one I've prepared thousands of times -- still has a magical ring to it. I remember everything about the experience: the way our waiter ladled it from a silver tureen into my bowl; the crunch of tiny chopped chives he spooned on as garnish; the rich, creamy taste of leek and potato; the pleasurable shock, the surprise that it was cold.

I don't remember much else about the passage across the Atlantic. I saw Boeing Boeing with Jerry Lewis and Tony Curtis in the Queen's movie theater, anda Bardot flick. The old liner shuddered and groaned and vibrated terribly the whole way -- barnactes on the hull was the official explanation-and from New York to Cherbourg, it was like riding atop a giant lawnmower. My brother and I quickly became bored and spent much of our time in the \\\"Teen Lounge, ' listening to \\\"House of the Rising Sun\\\" on the jukebox, or watching the water slosh around like a contained tidal wave in the below-deck saltwater pool.

But that cold soup stayed with me. It resonated, waking me up, making me aware of my tongue and, in some way, preparing me for future events.

My second pre-epiphany in my long climb to chefdom also came during that first trip to France. After docking, my mother, brother and I stayed with cousins in a small seaside town near La Cabourg, a bleak, chilly resort area in Normandy, on the English Channel. The sky was almost always cloudy; the water was inhospitably cold. All the neighborhood kids thought I knew Steve McQueen and John Wayne personally-as an American, it was assurned we were all pals, that we hung out together on the range, riding,horses and gunning down miscreants-so I enjoyed a certain celebrity right away. The beaches, while no good for swimming, were studded with old Nazi blockhouses and gun emplacements, many still bearing visible bullet scars and the scorch of flamethrowers, and there were tunnels under the dunes-all very cool for a little kid to explore. My little French friends were, I was astonished to find, allowed to have a cigarette on Sunday, were given watered vin ordinaire at the dinner table and best of all, they owned Vélo Solex motorbikes. This was the way to raise kids, I recall thinking, unhappy that my mother did not agree.

So for my first few weeks in France, I explored underground passageways, looking for dead Nazis, played miniature golf, sneaked cigarettes, read a lot of Tintin and Astérix comics, scooted around on my friends' motorbikes and absorbed little life-lessons from observations that, for instance, the family friend Monsieur Dupont brought his mistress to some meals and his wife to others, his extended brood of children apparently indifferent to the switch.

I was largely unimpressed by the food.

The butter tasted strangely \\\"cheesy\\\" to my undeveloped palate. The milk -- a staple, no, a mandatory ritual in '6os American kiddie life-was undrinkable here. Lunch seemed always to consist of sandwich au jambon or croque-monsieur. Centuries of French cuisine had yet to make an impression. What I noticed about food, French style, was what they didn't have.

After a few weeks of this, we took a night train to Paris, where we met up with my father and a spanking new Rover Sedan Mark III, our touring car. In Paris, we stayed at the Hôtel Lutétia, then a large, slightly shabby old pile on Boulevard Haussmann. The menu selections for my brother and me expanded somewhat, to include steak-frites and steak haché (hamburger). We did all the predictable touristy things: climbed the Tour Eiffel, picnicked in the Bois de Boulogne, marched past the Great Works at the Louvre, pushed toy sailboats around the fountain in the jardin de Luxembourg-none of it much fun for a nine-year-old with an already developing criminal bent. My principal interest at this time was adding to my collection of English translations of Tintin adventures. Hergés crisply drafted tales of drug smuggling, ancient temples and strange and faraway places and cultures were real exotica for me. I prevailed on my poor parents to buy hundreds of dollars' worth of these stories at W. H. Smith, the English bookstore, just to keep me from whining about the deprivations of France. With my little short-shorts a permanent affront, I was quickly becoming a sullen, moody, difficult little bastard. I fought constantly with my brother, carped about everything and was in every possible way a drag on my mother's Glorious Expedition.

My parents did their best. They took us everywhere, from restaurant to restaurant, cringing, no doubt, every time we insisted on steak haché (with ketchup, no less) and a \\\"Coca.\\\" They endured silently my gripes about cheesy butter and the seemingly endless amusement I took in advertisements for a popular soft drink of the time, Pschitt (\\\"I want shit! I want shit!\\\") They managed... Kitchen Confidential. Copyright © by Anthony Bourdain. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. \"},{\"id\":\"1442323T\",\"type\":\"Short Editorial\",\"linkText\":\"From Barnes & Noble\",\"typeId\":\"1008\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"1\",\"text\":\"If you've ever been curious about just what goes on in the kitchen of your favorite eatery, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly is just the book you've been waiting for. Anthony Bourdain, acclaimed executive chef of Les Halles restaurants in New York, Washington, D.C., Miami, and Tokyo, spills the beans, so to speak, on \\\"what it feels like, looks like, and smells like in the clutter and hiss of a big-city restaurant kitchen.\\\"\"},{\"id\":\"1146367T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"10\",\"text\":\"Unique…mesmerizing.\"},{\"id\":\"1146377T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"11\",\"text\":\"Funny, irreverent, scandalous. \"},{\"id\":\"1146384T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"12\",\"text\":\"You'll laugh, you'll cry…you're gonna love it. \"},{\"id\":\"1146397T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"13\",\"text\":\"Bourdain clearly operates with all six burners on scorch, and the result keeps the reader excited.\"},{\"id\":\"1146405T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"14\",\"text\":\"The guy is hysterical…in a style partaking of Hunter S. Thompson, Iggy Pop and a little Jonathan Swift, Bourdain gleefully rips through the scenery to reveal private backstage horrors. \"},{\"id\":\"1276334T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"15\",\"text\":\"...the best book I have ever read about the nuts and bolts mechanics of running serious restaurant kitchens...brilliant on the tumult of running a kitchen that might turn out anywhere from two hundred to four hundred serious meals a night...Bourdain is a wild old boy and a bit of a lost soul, and, being strongly anti-malarkey, utterly believable.
—The Weekly Standard\"},{\"id\":\"1024572T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"16\",\"text\":\"From that magical boyhood visit, when he became a \\\"foodie\\\" in France, to today, when he is executive chef of the chic New York bistro, Les Halles, Tony Bourdain has experienced it all. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, he learned his trade, as he puts it, \\\"knocking around\\\" Europe and toiling in some famous multi-starred restaurants in New York and cities north, west, east, and south. He has served as dishwasher, prep-drone, fry-cook, grillardin, saucier, and sous-chef along the way, and the strange and exotic and horrendous subculture of the professional kitchen is as familiar to him as the meals he and his fellow \\\"lifers\\\" turn out, noon and night, in the great -- and sometimes not so great -- restaurants of our world.

Now, in this astonishingly frank, often outrageous, more-often hilarious romp of a book, Bourdain opens up the swinging, clattering kitchen doors to show vividly, pungently, \\\"what it feels like, looks like, and smells like in the clutter and hiss of a big-city restaurant kitchen.\\\"

Woven in are the stories of some of the great and less than great characters he has known--Howard, the \\\"revered elder statesman of Cape Cod cookery,\\\" with wild, unruly white hair and a gin-blossomed face, who had a lifelong love affair with seafood and wrote two books about it; Tyrone, the broilerman, \\\"big, black, hugely muscled, with a prominent silver-capped front tooth, a fist-sized gold-hooped earring, and a size 56 chef's coat stretched across his back like a drumhead;\\\" \\\"Bigfoot,\\\" the giant Jewish restaurateur of Greenwich Village who remains beloved and/or despised by generations of waiters, bartenders, cooks and chefs but who taught Bourdain how to wring the last penny from this hugely difficult business; Nando, the famous pastry chef of the Rainbow Room, who found time to hurl profiteroles at the skaters in the Rockefeller Center rink, sixty-four floors down; Pino Luongo, the \\\"Prince of Restaurant Darkness,\\\" who ran a string of Tuscan restaurants in high-priced New York venues; and all the zany, beleaguered, unpredictable talents, many of them immigrants and the self-styled marginals, who have worked for and with Bourdain in his 25 years in the business.

Woven in too are the secrets of the trade and their consequences, sometimes nefarious, for diners: Why Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the only truly good nights to eat in a restaurant, why chefs rub their hands over customers who want their beef well-done; why seafood frittata is a definite no-no at a weekend brunch.

And with no nonsense clarity, Bourdain spells out in a few pages what it takes to bring your kitchen up to par with the pros. It is not as difficult as you might think. It may take as little as a new Global chef's knife and the right kind of bottle to spritz your serving plates like a pro…

Tony Bourdain may be a master chef by profession, but he is also a born raconteur. A portion of his book, in a somewhat different form, ran in The New Yorker and his portrayal of the \\\"underbelly\\\" of the contemporary big-city restaurant can only be compared to George Orwell's in DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. The great difference between Orwell's hellish vision and Bourdain's is that Bourdain is enormously proud of his profession, and trumpets its \\\"grandeurs\\\" as well as he bemoans its \\\"miseries.\\\" As he puts it, \\\"For me, the cooking life has been a long love affair, with moments both sublime and ridiculous. But like a love affair, looking back you remember the happy times best, the things that drew you in in the first place, the things that kept you coming back for more.\\\"

KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL is that kind of meal. \"},{\"id\":\"1336181T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"2\",\"text\":\"Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential has already turned a few stomachs with its frank discussions of what goes on in the kitchens of America's favorite restaurants. He revels in anecdotes that would make an Ozzy Osbourne roadie question the catered stuff on his plate. Sex, drugs, sex near food while on drugs: Bourdain gleefully dishes the dirt on some of his former haunts, from the fish houses of New England to the elegant-on-the-outside eateries of New York. Yet the tone he takes with his joyously muckraking expose/memoir follows a distinctive rhythm, a blunt, boastful swagger that recalls some accounts of organized crime. Bourdain is just as likely to tantalize with his descriptions of food as disgust with his descriptions of the people and actions swirling around it, the activities disgusting yet somehow funny at the same time. It's an exhilarating combination often invoked in mobster tell-alls, but while there's more than a little goodfella in Bourdain -- he dices, dresses, and dishes with trash-talking braggadocio -- he clearly loves what he does. While he admits early on that the call of the kitchen often comes only after every other option has failed, he clearly enjoys working in such terrible conditions. It's like he has the key to the ultimate backroom club, a place of privilege where everyone operates with a different set of rules and gets off on a different set of thrills. Eat to live, don't live to eat, the saying goes, and for Bourdain, life is never better than when he's the one doing the cooking.
—Onion A.V. Club\"},{\"id\":\"2232875T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"3\",\"text\":\" ...the kind of book you read in one sitting, then rush about annoying your coworkers by declaiming whole passages. \"},{\"id\":\"2232880T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"4\",\"text\":\" Utterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and precise ear for kitchen patois. \"},{\"id\":\"2232895T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"5\",\"text\":\" You'll laugh, you'll cry...you're gonna love it. \"},{\"id\":\"5362832T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"6\",\"text\":\"With equal parts wit and wickedness, Bourdain [does] the unthinkable by revealing trade secrest that chefs and restauranteers cringe to read.\"},{\"id\":\"1062461T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"7\",\"text\":\"Chef at New York's Les Halles and author of Bone in the Throat, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business. His fast-lane personality and glee in recounting sophomoric kitchen pranks might be unbearable were it not for two things: Bourdain is as unsparingly acerbic with himself as he is with others, and he exhibits a sincere and profound love of good food. The latter was born on a family trip to France when young Bourdain tasted his first oyster, and his love has only grown since. He has attended culinary school, fallen prey to a drug habit and even established a restaurant in Tokyo, discovering along the way that the crazy, dirty, sometimes frightening world of the restaurant kitchen sustains him. Bourdain is no presentable TV version of a chef; he talks tough and dirty. His advice to aspiring chefs: \\\"Show up at work on time six months in a row and we'll talk about red curry paste and lemon grass. Until then, I have four words for you: `Shut the fuck up.' \\\" He disdains vegetarians, warns against ordering food well done and cautions that restaurant brunches are a crapshoot. Gossipy chapters discuss the many restaurants where Bourdain has worked, while a single chapter on how to cook like a professional at home exhorts readers to buy a few simple gadgets, such as a metal ring for tall food. Most of the book, however, deals with Bourdain's own maturation as a chef, and the culmination, a litany describing the many scars and oddities that he has developed on his hands, is surprisingly beautiful. He'd probably hate to hear it, but Bourdain has a tender side, and when it peeks through his rough exterior and the wall of four-letter words he constructs, it elevates this book to something more than blustery memoir. \"},{\"id\":\"1146343T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"8\",\"text\":\"Utterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and a precise ear for kitchen patois.\"},{\"id\":\"1146358T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"9\",\"text\":\"[A] literary chef, as appreciated for quips as for steak frites. \"},{\"id\":\"3107909T\",\"type\":\"Reading Group Guide\",\"linkText\":\"Reading Group Guide\",\"typeId\":\"1021\",\"abbr\":\"RGG\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"displayOrder\":\"1\",\"text\":\"

\\\"Hysterical…Bourdain gleefully rips through the scenery to reveal private backstage horrors.\\\" -- New York Times Book Review

Summary

From appetizer to main course to dessert, bestselling author and world renowned chef Anthony Bourdain takes you behind the swinging doors and into the bustling core of the nation's restaurants, exposing as never before the shocking, hilarious, untold world of cooks and chefs. Bourdain's honest and entertaining account of the many successes and failures he has experienced throughout his career is as engrossing as it is eye-opening. His beautiful \\\"elegy\\\" to his body -- the many scars, aches, and pains, the abused hands he longed for -- in the closing chapter is a true testament to a life well spent in the trenches of cooking.

Topics for Discussion

What was your first instinct after finishing Kitchen Confidential? Did you want to run out and eat at Les Halles, never eat at another restaurant again, throw out all of your knives?

Throughout Bourdain's memoir, he attempts to impart to the reader his adventurous spirit when it comes to trying different types of food. Did he inspire you to try something new? What is the most daring food you have ever eaten?

How do you think Bourdain defines a \\\"foodie\\\"? Do you agree?

How have American attitudes toward food changed in the past decade? How are these changes chronicled throughout Kitchen Confidential?

Bourdain introduces the reader to many of the more elaborate and extreme characters of the cooking world -- Tyrone, the broilerman; \\\"Bigfoot\\\"; Nando, the Rainbow Room's famous pastry chef.... Which are yourfavorites? Who do you hope never touched your food?

Despite his machismo and unstoppable four-letter language, Bourdain becomes an endearing character himself throughout the course of his memoir. How did you feel as you witnessed his growth throughout Kitchen Confidential? In the end, he claims he is an \\\"asshole.\\\" What do you think?

Bourdain talks about when he first realized \\\"that food was something other than a substance one stuffed in one's face when hungry.\\\" What role has food played in your life -- while growing up and today -- beyond simple sustenance? Why are food and psychology so inextricably linked in our lives?

Despite the celebrity chefs that abound today, do you think that Bourdain typifies the lifestyle of the normal chef?

Are you -- or have you ever been -- in the food industry? If so, how apt are Bourdain's descriptions of the life?

What was Bourdain's most helpful piece of advice for you as a home cook? About the Author: Anthony Bourdain is the author of the novels Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo. He is currently the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York and can be seen on the Food Network. \"},{\"id\":\"1888794T\",\"type\":\"Fatbrain Author Description\",\"linkText\":\"Author Description\",\"typeId\":\"1102\",\"abbr\":\"FBA\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"displayOrder\":\"1\",\"text\":\"Anthony Bourdain is the author of Bone in the Throat. This is his first work of non-fiction. He is the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York City. \"},{\"id\":\"5856345T\",\"type\":\"Fatbrain Author Description\",\"linkText\":\"Author Description\",\"typeId\":\"1102\",\"abbr\":\"FBA\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"displayOrder\":\"2\",\"text\":\"

Anthony Bourdain is the author of Bone in the Throat. This is his first work of non-fiction. He is the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York City.\"},{\"id\":\"\",\"type\":\"Commentary\",\"linkText\":\"Commentary\",\"typeId\":\"gid://shopify/Article/594601574640\",\"abbr\":\"BSC\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"displayOrder\":\"1\",\"text\":\"

Anthony Bourdain first fell in love with food when he had his first oyster during a family trip to France as a child. And the famed chef and TV personality reveals himself to be quite a bit like that oceanic delicacy—rough on the outside, raw and unexpected on the inside. His memoir of the wild tales of his life working in restaurant kitchens is a funny, provocative, and frank must-read.

\"}]",{"_41":1216,"_1192":1193,"_1194":1217,"_1180":1218},"gid://shopify/Metafield/37856072892656","seoKeywords","Kitchen-Confidential/Anthony-Bourdain",{"_41":1220,"_1192":1193,"_1194":1221,"_1180":1222},"gid://shopify/Metafield/29681976639728","workId","1100390361",{"_41":1224,"_1192":1193,"_1194":1225,"_1180":1226},"gid://shopify/Metafield/29681978310896","skuType","book",{"_41":1228,"_1192":1193,"_1194":1067,"_1180":1185},"gid://shopify/Metafield/29681979588848",{"_41":1230,"_1192":1193,"_1194":1186,"_1180":1138},"gid://shopify/Metafield/29681975034096","productHighlightTitle","Kitchen Confidential","260115 Cookbooks - Kitchen Confidential",{"_30":1235,"_25":1236,"_33":1237,"_35":1238,"_37":1239,"_26":1242,"_46":1243,"_1081":-5,"_1082":-5,"_1020":-5,"_1083":-5,"_1244":1245,"_1253":1254,"_1255":10,"_1256":10,"_1257":10,"_1258":1259,"_1311":1312,"_1002":-5,"_59":60,"_1084":-5,"_73":1313},"2026-01-15T03:15:33Z","c1110e83-0a56-45c0-8f0a-870e64141949","86045a63ab7e","S77P04hfV3buCblGuPqmsj",{"_39":1240},{"_41":1236,"_43":1241},"S77P04hfV3buCblGuPnizy","dealOfTheDay","2026-04-03T11:59:25Z","dealofDayCopy",[1246],{"_33":1247,"_26":640,"_641":1248,"_658":1252,"_662":663},"a7e2627d33fb",[1249],{"_33":1250,"_26":645,"_646":1251,"_439":1125},"ba6b7a808d34",[],[],"dealofDayCtaText","Shop Now","dealofDayHideCTA","dealofDayHidePriceBadge","dealofDayOpenInNewTab","dealofDayProduct",{"_1132":1133,"_41":1260,"_73":1261,"_1136":1137,"_909":1262,"_1002":1263,"_1140":1264,"_1142":1265,"_1149":1269,"_1157":60,"_1158":1272,"_1164":1275,"_1067":1284,"_1186":1285,"_1188":1286},"gid://shopify/Product/9182032953584","Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef","9780812980882","NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Miami Herald • Newsday • The Huffington Post • Financial Times • GQ • Slate • Men’s Journal • Washington Examiner • Publishers Weekly • Kirkus Reviews • National Post • The Toronto Star • BookPage • Bookreporter“I wanted the lettuce and eggs at room temperature . . . the butter-and-sugar sandwiches we ate after school for snack . . . the marrow bones my mother made us eat as kids that I grew to crave as an adult. . . . There would be no ‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ food, just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry. In ecstatic farewell to my years of corporate catering, we would never serve anything but a martini in a martini glass. Preferably gin.” Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty fierce, hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. Above all she sought family, particularly the thrill and the magnificence of the one from her childhood that, in her adult years, eluded her. Hamilton’s ease and comfort in a kitchen were instilled in her at an early age when her parents hosted grand parties, often for more than one hundred friends and neighbors. The smells of spit-roasted lamb, apple wood smoke, and rosemary garlic marinade became as necessary to her as her own skin.Blood, Bones & Butter follows an unconventional journey through the many kitchens Hamilton has inhabited through the years: the rural kitchen of her childhood, where her adored mother stood over the six-burner with an oily wooden spoon in hand; the kitchens of France, Greece, and Turkey, where she was often fed by complete strangers and learned the essence of hospitality; the soulless catering factories that helped pay the rent; Hamilton’s own kitchen at Prune, with its many unexpected challenges; and the kitchen of her Italian mother-in-law, who serves as the link between Hamilton’s idyllic past and her own future family—the result of a difficult and prickly marriage that nonetheless yields rich and lasting dividends.Blood, Bones & Butter is an unflinching and lyrical work. Gabrielle Hamilton’s story is told with uncommon honesty, grit, humor, and passion. By turns epic and intimate, it marks the debut of a tremendous literary talent.","

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Miami Herald • Newsday • The Huffington Post • Financial Times • GQ • Slate • Men’s Journal • Washington Examiner • Publishers Weekly • Kirkus Reviews • National Post • The Toronto Star • BookPage • Bookreporter

“I wanted the lettuce and eggs at room temperature . . . the butter-and-sugar sandwiches we ate after school for snack . . . the marrow bones my mother made us eat as kids that I grew to crave as an adult. . . . There would be no ‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ food, just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry. In ecstatic farewell to my years of corporate catering, we would never serve anything but a martini in a martini glass. Preferably gin.”

Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty fierce, hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. Above all she sought family, particularly the thrill and the magnificence of the one from her childhood that, in her adult years, eluded her. Hamilton’s ease and comfort in a kitchen were instilled in her at an early age when her parents hosted grand parties, often for more than one hundred friends and neighbors. The smells of spit-roasted lamb, apple wood smoke, and rosemary garlic marinade became as necessary to her as her own skin.

Blood, Bones & Butter follows an unconventional journey through the many kitchens Hamilton has inhabited through the years: the rural kitchen of her childhood, where her adored mother stood over the six-burner with an oily wooden spoon in hand; the kitchens of France, Greece, and Turkey, where she was often fed by complete strangers and learned the essence of hospitality; the soulless catering factories that helped pay the rent; Hamilton’s own kitchen at Prune, with its many unexpected challenges; and the kitchen of her Italian mother-in-law, who serves as the link between Hamilton’s idyllic past and her own future family—the result of a difficult and prickly marriage that nonetheless yields rich and lasting dividends.

Blood, Bones & Butter is an unflinching and lyrical work. Gabrielle Hamilton’s story is told with uncommon honesty, grit, humor, and passion. By turns epic and intimate, it marks the debut of a tremendous literary talent.

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Chapter 1

We threw a party. The same party, every year, when I was a kid. It was a spring lamb roast, and we roasted four or five whole little guys who each weighed only about forty pounds over an open fire and invited more than a hundred people. Our house was in a rural part of Pennsylvania and was not really a house at all but a wild castle built into the burnt-out ruins of a nineteenth-century silk mill, and our backyard was not a regular yard but a meandering meadow, with a creek running through it and wild geese living in it and a Death Slide cable that ran from high on an oak to the bank of the stream and deposited you, shrieking, into the shallow water. Our town shared a border so closely with New Jersey that we could and did walk back and forth between the two states several times in a day by crossing the Delaware River. On weekend mornings we had breakfast at Smutzie's in Lambertville, on the Jersey side, but then we got gas for the car at Sam Williams's Mobil on the New Hope side. In the afternoons after school on the Pennsylvania side, I walked over to the Jersey side and got guitar lessons at Les Parson's guitar shop.

That part of the world, heavily touristed as it was, was an important location of many events in the American Revolutionary War. George Washington crossed the Delaware here, to victory at the Battle of Trenton, trudging through the snowy woods and surprising the British in spite of some of his troops missing proper shoes, their feet instead wrapped in newspaper and burlap. But now my hometown has become, mostly, a sprawl of developments and subdivisions, gated communities of small mansions that look somewhat like movie sets that will be taken down at the end of the shoot. Each housing development has a \\\"country\\\" name-Squirrel Valley, Pine Ridge, Eagle Crossing, Deer Path-which has an unkind way of invoking and recalling the very things demolished when building them. There is now a McDonalds and a Kmart- but when I was growing up, you had to ride your bike about a mile down a very dark country road thick with night insects stinging your face to even find a plugged-in Coke machine where you could buy a vended soda for thirty-five cents. Outside Cal's Collision Repair in the middle of the night that machine glowed like something almost religious. You can now buy a Coke twenty-four hours a day at half a dozen places.

But when I was young, where I lived was mostly farmland, rolling fields, rushing creeks when it rained, thick woods, and hundred-year- old stone barns. It was a beautiful, rough, but lush setting for the backyard party my parents threw with jug wine and spit-roasted lambs and glow-in-the-dark Frisbees. The creek dividing the meadow meandered and, at its deepest bend, was lined with small weeping willows that grew as we grew and bent their long, willowy, tearful branches down over the water. We would braid a bunch of the branches together to make a Tarzan kind of vine rope that we could swing on, out over the stream in our laceless sneakers and bathing suits, and land in the creek. That is where we chilled all of the wines and beers and sodas for the party.

We were five kids in my family, and I am the youngest. We ran in a pack-to school, home from school, and after dinner at dusk-like wild dogs. If the Mellman kids were allowed out and the Bentley boys, the Drevers, and the Shanks across the street as well, our pack numbered fifteen. We spent all of our time out of doors in mud suits, snowsuits, or bare feet, depending on the weather. Even in \\\"nature,\\\" running around in the benign woods and hedges and streams, diving in and out of tall grasses and brambles, playing a nighttime game that involved dodging the oncoming headlights of an approaching occasional car, bombing the red shale rocks down into the stream from the narrow bridge near our driveway to watch them shatter-we found rough and not innocent pastimes. We trespassed, drag raced, smoked, burgled, and vandalized. We got ringworm, broken bones, tetanus, concussions, stitches, and ivy poisoning.

My parents seemed incredibly special and outrageously handsome to me then. I could not have boasted of them more or said my name, first and last together, more proudly, to show how it directly linked me to them. I loved that our mother was French and that she had given me that heritage in my very name. I loved telling people that she had been a ballet dancer at the Met in New York City when she married my father. I loved being able to spell her long French name, M-A-D-E-L-E- I-N-E, which had exactly as many letters in it as my own. My mother wore the sexy black cat-eye eyeliner of the era, like Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren, and I remember the smell of the sulphur every morning as she lit a match to warm the tip of her black wax pencil. She pinned her dark hair back into a tight, neat twist every morning and then spent the day in a good skirt, high heels, and an apron that I have never seen her without in forty years. She lived in our kitchen, ruled the house with an oily wooden spoon in her hand, and forced us all to eat dark, briny, wrinkled olives, small birds we would have liked as pets, and cheeses that looked like they might well bear Legionnaire's Disease.

Her kitchen, over thirty years ago, long before it was common, had a two-bin stainless steel restaurant sink and a six-burner Garland stove. Her burnt orange Le Creuset pots and casseroles, scuffed and blackened, were constantly at work on the back three burners cooking things with tails, claws, and marrow-filled bones-whatever was budgeted from our dad's sporadic and mercurial artist's income-that she was stewing and braising and simmering to feed our family of seven. Our kitchen table was a big round piece of butcher block where we both ate and prepared casual meals.

My mother knew how to get everything comestible from a shin or neck of some animal; how to use a knife, how to cure a cast-iron pan. She taught us to articulate the \\\"s\\\" in salade nicoise and the soup vichyssoise, so that we wouldn't sound like other Americans who didn't know that the vowel \\\"e\\\" after the consonant \\\"s\\\" in French means that you say the \\\"s\\\" out loud.

And yet I remember the lamb roast as my father's party. I recall it was really his gig. With an art degree from Rhode Island School of Design on his office wall, two union cards-stagehands and scenic artists-in his wallet, five able-bodied children, a French wife, and a photograph torn from a magazine of two Yugoslav guys roasting a lamb over a pit, he created a legendary party-a feast that almost two hundred people came to every year from as far away as the townhouses of New York City and as near as our local elementary school.

My dad could not cook at all. He was then a set designer for theatrical and trade shows and he had a \\\"design and build\\\" studio in Lambertville-the town where he himself had grown up, the town where his own father had been the local country doctor. We kids were forever running into people who'd say, \\\"Your granddaddy delivered all three of my sons!\\\" Or, \\\"Your granddaddy drove a Cadillac! One of the very few cars at the time in Lambertville!\\\"

After growing up in that small rural town, my dad, the youngest son, went away to college and then to art school. He came back with a mustache, a green Mustang, and a charcoal gray suit and installed himself there, in his hometown. In 1964, he bought the old skating rink at the dead end of South Union Street with its enormous domed ceiling and colossal wooden floor. In that building he started his studio, an open work space where scenery as big as the prow of a ship could be built, erected, painted, and then broken down and shipped off to the city for load-in. Every year when he got the job to build the sets for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus there, we would go after school and zip around on the dollies, crashing into the legs of the chain-smoking union carpenters and scenic artists who were busy with band saws and canvas and paint. We would run up and down mountains of rolled black and blue velour, laid out like in a carpet store, and dip our hands into oil drums full of glitter. Prying back the lid on a fifty-gallon barrel of silver glitter-the kind of barrel that took two men and a hand truck to wheel into the paint supply room of the shop-and then shoving your hands down into it up to your elbows is an experience that will secure the idea in your heart for the rest of your life that your dad is, himself, the greatest show on earth.

We made our Halloween costumes out of lighting gels, backstage black velour curtaining, scrim, and Mylar. When we went with our father to see the actual circus at Madison Square Garden, we spent almost the whole show backstage where we met Mishu: The Smallest Man in the World, and petted the long velvety truncks of the elephants in jeweled headdresses. We met Gunther, the lion tamer, and marveled at his blond blond hair and his deep deep tan and, giggling like the children we were, his amazing ass-high and round and firm, like two Easter hams-in electric blue tights.

I associate my dad almost exclusively with that lamb roast because he could dream it up and create the scenery of it. My dad has an eye for things. He can look at the stone rubble covered in scaffolding that is the Acropolis, for example, and without effort, complete the picture in its entirety, right down to what people are wearing, doing, and saying. In his mind's eye, out of one crumbling Doric column, he can visualize the entire city, its denizens and smells, the assembly's agenda and the potted shrubs. Where the rest of us saw only the empty overgrown meadow behind our house, riddled with gopher holes, with a shallow, muddy stream running through it and a splintering wooden wagon that I had almost outgrown, he saw his friends: artists and teachers and butchers, scenic painters and Russian lighting designers, ship captains and hardware merchants all with a glass in hand, their laughter rising high above our heads and then evaporating into the canopy of maple leaves; the weeping willows shedding their leaf tears down the banks of the stream; fireflies and bagpipers arriving through the low clinging humidity of summer; a giant pit with four spring lambs roasting over apple-wood coals; the smell of wood smoke hanging in the moist summer nighttime air. I mean it. He sees it all romantic like that.

He says, about all of his work, \\\"Everybody else does the bones and makes sure the thing doesn't fall down. I do the romance.\\\"

It must have been my mother, the cook, who was in the kitchen with the six burners and the two-bin sink making the lima bean salad and the asparagus vinaigrette and the all-butter shortcakes, counting out the stacks of paper plates with the help of my older sister-the two of them doing \\\"the bones\\\" as my father called it. But it was from him- with his cool, long sideburns and aviator sunglasses, his packet of unfiltered Camels, and box of watercolor paints (and artist's paycheck)-from him we learned how to create beauty where none exists, how to be generous beyond our means, how to change a small corner of the world just by making a little dinner for a few friends. From him we learned how to make and give luminous parties.

There was a Russian Winter Ball, I remember, for which my dad got refrigerator-sized cartons of artificial snow shipped in from Texas and a dry ice machine to fog up the rooms and make the setting feel like a scene from Dr. Zhivago. And there was a Valentine's Day Lovers' Dinner, at which my father had hundreds of choux paste éclair swans with little pastry wings and necks and slivered almond beaks that, when toasted, became their signature black. He set them out swimming in pairs on a Plexiglas mirror \\\"pond\\\" the size of a king's matrimonial bed with confectioner's sugar snow drifts on the banks.

\\\"Swans,\\\" he pointed out, \\\"mate for life.\\\"

For a kind of Moroccan-themed party that my parents threw, my dad built low couches from sheets of plywood and covered them with huge fur blankets and orange velour brought home from the studio. By the time the candles were lit and the electric lights extinguished, the whole house looked like a place where the estimable harem of a great pasha might assemble to offer their man pomegranates, pistachios, and maybe more carnal treasures. There were tapestries and kilims stacked as tall as me, where adults stoned on spiced wine and pigeon pies could lounge. By the time that party really got rolling, I remember walking from room to dimly lit room feeling acutely the ethos of the era-the early 1970s-as if it, too, were sprawled out on the \\\"scene shop\\\" couch wearing long hair and a macramé dress, barely noticing how late it was and that I was still up.

But the lamb roast was not a heavily themed and elaborately staged one- off. It was, as parties in our family went, a simple party, thrown every year, produced with just a fire and a sheet of plywood set over sawhorses for the carving of the lambs. We built a fire in our shallow pit, about eight feet long and six feet wide. It's possible that my dad dug it alone, but if there was an available sixteen-year-old around, like his son, my oldest brother Jeffrey, it's very likely that they dug it together. At each end of the pit they set up a short wall of cinder blocks with a heavy wooden plank on top, looking like the head and baseboards of a giant bed, where the long wooden poles onto which the baby lambs had been lashed would rest. The baby lambs, with their little crooked sets of teeth and milky eyes, were slaughtered and dressed up at Maresca's Butchers, then tied onto ten-foot poles made of ash because the branches of an ash tree grow so straight that you can skewer a baby lamb with them easily.

Jeffrey had a driver's license and a 1957 Chevy truck with a wooden bed and a big blue mushroom painted on its heavily Bondoed cab. It had big dangling side-view mirrors and torn upholstery over which we threw a mover's blanket, but it ran. So on this bluish early summer weekend, Jeffrey drove his new jalopy out the winding country roads, past Black's Christmas tree farm, and past the Larue bottle works. I rode in the bed of the truck, in a cotton dress and boy's shoes with no socks, hanging on as tight as I could to the railings and letting the wind blast my face so hard that I could barely keep my eyes open. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell by the wind and the little patches of bracing coolness and the sudden bright sunshine and the smell of manure when we were passing a hay field, a long thick stand of trees, a stretch of clover, or a horse farm. We passed brand-new deer emerging from the woods and standing in herds of forty in the wide open cornfields. Finally we got to Johnson's Apple Orchard where we picked up our wood for the fire.\"},{\"id\":\"22182228T\",\"type\":\"Excerpt\",\"linkText\":\"Read an Excerpt\",\"typeId\":\"1005\",\"abbr\":\"EXC\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"displayOrder\":\"2\",\"text\":\"

Chapter 1

He says, about all of his work, \\\"Everybody else does the bones and makes sure the thing doesn't fall down. I do the romance.\\\"

\\\"Swans,\\\" he pointed out, \\\"mate for life.\\\"

Jeffrey had a driver's license and a 1957 Chevy truck with a wooden bed and a big blue mushroom painted on its heavily Bondoed cab. It had big dangling side-view mirrors and torn upholstery over which we threw a mover's blanket, but it ran. So on this bluish early summer weekend, Jeffrey drove his new jalopy out the winding country roads, past Black's Christmas tree farm, and past the Larue bottle works. I rode in the bed of the truck, in a cotton dress and boy's shoes with no socks, hanging on as tight as I could to the railings and letting the wind blast my face so hard that I could barely keep my eyes open. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell by the wind and the little patches of bracing coolness and the sudden bright sunshine and the smell of manure when we were passing a hay field, a long thick stand of trees, a stretch of clover, or a horse farm. We passed brand-new deer emerging from the woods and standing in herds of forty in the wide open cornfields. Finally we got to Johnson's Apple Orchard where we picked up our wood for the fire.\"},{\"id\":\"22090994T\",\"type\":\"First Chapter\",\"linkText\":\"Read a Sample Chapter\",\"typeId\":\"1010\",\"abbr\":\"EXC\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"displayOrder\":\"3\",\"text\":\"

Blood, Bones & Butter

The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

By Gabrielle Hamilton

Random House

Chapter 1

We threw a party. The same party, every year, when I was a kid. It was a spring lamb roast, and we roasted four or five whole little guys who each weighed only about forty pounds over an open fire and invited more than a hundred people. Our house was in a rural part of Pennsylvania and was not really a house at all but a wild castle built into the burnt-out ruins of a nineteenth-century silk mill, and our backyard was not a regular yard but a meandering meadow, with a creek running through it and wild geese living in it and a Death Slide cable that ran from high on an oak to the bank of the stream and deposited you, shrieking, into the shallow water. Our town shared a border so closely with New Jersey that we could and did walk back and forth between the two states several times in a day by crossing the Delaware River. On weekend mornings we had breakfast at Smutzie's in Lambertville, on the Jersey side, but then we got gas for the car at Sam Williams's Mobil on the New Hope side. In the afternoons after school on the Pennsylvania side, I walked over to the Jersey side and got guitar lessons at Les Parson's guitar shop.

That part of the world, heavily touristed as it was, was an important location of many events in the American Revolutionary War. George Washington crossed the Delaware here, to victory at the Battle of Trenton, trudging through the snowy woods and surprising the British in spite of some of his troops missing proper shoes, their feet instead wrapped in newspaper and burlap. But now my hometown has become, mostly, a sprawl of developments and subdivisions, gated communities of small mansions that look somewhat like movie sets that will be taken down at the end of the shoot. Each housing development has a \\\"country\\\" name-Squirrel Valley, Pine Ridge, Eagle Crossing, Deer Path-which has an unkind way of invoking and recalling the very things demolished when building them. There is now a McDonalds and a Kmart- but when I was growing up, you had to ride your bike about a mile down a very dark country road thick with night insects stinging your face to even find a plugged-in Coke machine where you could buy a vended soda for thirty-five cents. Outside Cal's Collision Repair in the middle of the night that machine glowed like something almost religious. You can now buy a Coke twenty-four hours a day at half a dozen places.

But when I was young, where I lived was mostly farmland, rolling fields, rushing creeks when it rained, thick woods, and hundred-year- old stone barns. It was a beautiful, rough, but lush setting for the backyard party my parents threw with jug wine and spit-roasted lambs and glow-in-the-dark Frisbees. The creek dividing the meadow meandered and, at its deepest bend, was lined with small weeping willows that grew as we grew and bent their long, willowy, tearful branches down over the water. We would braid a bunch of the branches together to make a Tarzan kind of vine rope that we could swing on, out over the stream in our laceless sneakers and bathing suits, and land in the creek. That is where we chilled all of the wines and beers and sodas for the party.

We were five kids in my family, and I am the youngest. We ran in a pack-to school, home from school, and after dinner at dusk-like wild dogs. If the Mellman kids were allowed out and the Bentley boys, the Drevers, and the Shanks across the street as well, our pack numbered fifteen. We spent all of our time out of doors in mud suits, snowsuits, or bare feet, depending on the weather. Even in \\\"nature,\\\" running around in the benign woods and hedges and streams, diving in and out of tall grasses and brambles, playing a nighttime game that involved dodging the oncoming headlights of an approaching occasional car, bombing the red shale rocks down into the stream from the narrow bridge near our driveway to watch them shatter-we found rough and not innocent pastimes. We trespassed, drag raced, smoked, burgled, and vandalized. We got ringworm, broken bones, tetanus, concussions, stitches, and ivy poisoning.

My parents seemed incredibly special and outrageously handsome to me then. I could not have boasted of them more or said my name, first and last together, more proudly, to show how it directly linked me to them. I loved that our mother was French and that she had given me that heritage in my very name. I loved telling people that she had been a ballet dancer at the Met in New York City when she married my father. I loved being able to spell her long French name, M-A-D-E-L-E- I-N-E, which had exactly as many letters in it as my own. My mother wore the sexy black cat-eye eyeliner of the era, like Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren, and I remember the smell of the sulphur every morning as she lit a match to warm the tip of her black wax pencil. She pinned her dark hair back into a tight, neat twist every morning and then spent the day in a good skirt, high heels, and an apron that I have never seen her without in forty years. She lived in our kitchen, ruled the house with an oily wooden spoon in her hand, and forced us all to eat dark, briny, wrinkled olives, small birds we would have liked as pets, and cheeses that looked like they might well bear Legionnaire's Disease.

Her kitchen, over thirty years ago, long before it was common, had a two-bin stainless steel restaurant sink and a six-burner Garland stove. Her burnt orange Le Creuset pots and casseroles, scuffed and blackened, were constantly at work on the back three burners cooking things with tails, claws, and marrow-filled bones-whatever was budgeted from our dad's sporadic and mercurial artist's income-that she was stewing and braising and simmering to feed our family of seven. Our kitchen table was a big round piece of butcher block where we both ate and prepared casual meals.

My mother knew how to get everything comestible from a shin or neck of some animal; how to use a knife, how to cure a cast-iron pan. She taught us to articulate the \\\"s\\\" in salade nicoise and the soup vichyssoise, so that we wouldn't sound like other Americans who didn't know that the vowel \\\"e\\\" after the consonant \\\"s\\\" in French means that you say the \\\"s\\\" out loud.

And yet I remember the lamb roast as my father's party. I recall it was really his gig. With an art degree from Rhode Island School of Design on his office wall, two union cards-stagehands and scenic artists-in his wallet, five able-bodied children, a French wife, and a photograph torn from a magazine of two Yugoslav guys roasting a lamb over a pit, he created a legendary party-a feast that almost two hundred people came to every year from as far away as the townhouses of New York City and as near as our local elementary school.

My dad could not cook at all. He was then a set designer for theatrical and trade shows and he had a \\\"design and build\\\" studio in Lambertville-the town where he himself had grown up, the town where his own father had been the local country doctor. We kids were forever running into people who'd say, \\\"Your granddaddy delivered all three of my sons!\\\" Or, \\\"Your granddaddy drove a Cadillac! One of the very few cars at the time in Lambertville!\\\"

After growing up in that small rural town, my dad, the youngest son, went away to college and then to art school. He came back with a mustache, a green Mustang, and a charcoal gray suit and installed himself there, in his hometown. In 1964, he bought the old skating rink at the dead end of South Union Street with its enormous domed ceiling and colossal wooden floor. In that building he started his studio, an open work space where scenery as big as the prow of a ship could be built, erected, painted, and then broken down and shipped off to the city for load-in. Every year when he got the job to build the sets for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus there, we would go after school and zip around on the dollies, crashing into the legs of the chain-smoking union carpenters and scenic artists who were busy with band saws and canvas and paint. We would run up and down mountains of rolled black and blue velour, laid out like in a carpet store, and dip our hands into oil drums full of glitter. Prying back the lid on a fifty-gallon barrel of silver glitter-the kind of barrel that took two men and a hand truck to wheel into the paint supply room of the shop-and then shoving your hands down into it up to your elbows is an experience that will secure the idea in your heart for the rest of your life that your dad is, himself, the greatest show on earth.

We made our Halloween costumes out of lighting gels, backstage black velour curtaining, scrim, and Mylar. When we went with our father to see the actual circus at Madison Square Garden, we spent almost the whole show backstage where we met Mishu: The Smallest Man in the World, and petted the long velvety truncks of the elephants in jeweled headdresses. We met Gunther, the lion tamer, and marveled at his blond blond hair and his deep deep tan and, giggling like the children we were, his amazing ass-high and round and firm, like two Easter hams-in electric blue tights.

I associate my dad almost exclusively with that lamb roast because he could dream it up and create the scenery of it. My dad has an eye for things. He can look at the stone rubble covered in scaffolding that is the Acropolis, for example, and without effort, complete the picture in its entirety, right down to what people are wearing, doing, and saying. In his mind's eye, out of one crumbling Doric column, he can visualize the entire city, its denizens and smells, the assembly's agenda and the potted shrubs. Where the rest of us saw only the empty overgrown meadow behind our house, riddled with gopher holes, with a shallow, muddy stream running through it and a splintering wooden wagon that I had almost outgrown, he saw his friends: artists and teachers and butchers, scenic painters and Russian lighting designers, ship captains and hardware merchants all with a glass in hand, their laughter rising high above our heads and then evaporating into the canopy of maple leaves; the weeping willows shedding their leaf tears down the banks of the stream; fireflies and bagpipers arriving through the low clinging humidity of summer; a giant pit with four spring lambs roasting over apple-wood coals; the smell of wood smoke hanging in the moist summer nighttime air. I mean it. He sees it all romantic like that.

He says, about all of his work, \\\"Everybody else does the bones and makes sure the thing doesn't fall down. I do the romance.\\\"

It must have been my mother, the cook, who was in the kitchen with the six burners and the two-bin sink making the lima bean salad and the asparagus vinaigrette and the all-butter shortcakes, counting out the stacks of paper plates with the help of my older sister-the two of them doing \\\"the bones\\\" as my father called it. But it was from him- with his cool, long sideburns and aviator sunglasses, his packet of unfiltered Camels, and box of watercolor paints (and artist's paycheck)-from him we learned how to create beauty where none exists, how to be generous beyond our means, how to change a small corner of the world just by making a little dinner for a few friends. From him we learned how to make and give luminous parties.

There was a Russian Winter Ball, I remember, for which my dad got refrigerator-sized cartons of artificial snow shipped in from Texas and a dry ice machine to fog up the rooms and make the setting feel like a scene from Dr. Zhivago. And there was a Valentine's Day Lovers' Dinner, at which my father had hundreds of choux paste éclair swans with little pastry wings and necks and slivered almond beaks that, when toasted, became their signature black. He set them out swimming in pairs on a Plexiglas mirror \\\"pond\\\" the size of a king's matrimonial bed with confectioner's sugar snow drifts on the banks.

\\\"Swans,\\\" he pointed out, \\\"mate for life.\\\"

For a kind of Moroccan-themed party that my parents threw, my dad built low couches from sheets of plywood and covered them with huge fur blankets and orange velour brought home from the studio. By the time the candles were lit and the electric lights extinguished, the whole house looked like a place where the estimable harem of a great pasha might assemble to offer their man pomegranates, pistachios, and maybe more carnal treasures. There were tapestries and kilims stacked as tall as me, where adults stoned on spiced wine and pigeon pies could lounge. By the time that party really got rolling, I remember walking from room to dimly lit room feeling acutely the ethos of the era-the early 1970s-as if it, too, were sprawled out on the \\\"scene shop\\\" couch wearing long hair and a macramé dress, barely noticing how late it was and that I was still up.

But the lamb roast was not a heavily themed and elaborately staged one- off. It was, as parties in our family went, a simple party, thrown every year, produced with just a fire and a sheet of plywood set over sawhorses for the carving of the lambs. We built a fire in our shallow pit, about eight feet long and six feet wide. It's possible that my dad dug it alone, but if there was an available sixteen-year-old around, like his son, my oldest brother Jeffrey, it's very likely that they dug it together. At each end of the pit they set up a short wall of cinder blocks with a heavy wooden plank on top, looking like the head and baseboards of a giant bed, where the long wooden poles onto which the baby lambs had been lashed would rest. The baby lambs, with their little crooked sets of teeth and milky eyes, were slaughtered and dressed up at Maresca's Butchers, then tied onto ten-foot poles made of ash because the branches of an ash tree grow so straight that you can skewer a baby lamb with them easily.

Jeffrey had a driver's license and a 1957 Chevy truck with a wooden bed and a big blue mushroom painted on its heavily Bondoed cab. It had big dangling side-view mirrors and torn upholstery over which we threw a mover's blanket, but it ran. So on this bluish early summer weekend, Jeffrey drove his new jalopy out the winding country roads, past Black's Christmas tree farm, and past the Larue bottle works. I rode in the bed of the truck, in a cotton dress and boy's shoes with no socks, hanging on as tight as I could to the railings and letting the wind blast my face so hard that I could barely keep my eyes open. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell by the wind and the little patches of bracing coolness and the sudden bright sunshine and the smell of manure when we were passing a hay field, a long thick stand of trees, a stretch of clover, or a horse farm. We passed brand-new deer emerging from the woods and standing in herds of forty in the wide open cornfields. Finally we got to Johnson's Apple Orchard where we picked up our wood for the fire.

Continues...

Excerpted from Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton Copyright © 2011 by Gabrielle Hamilton. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

\"},{\"id\":\"21457673T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"1\",\"text\":\"…luminous…Hamilton quickly proves that her decade-in-the-making work can live up to the extraordinary \\\"best memoir by a chef ever\\\" hype. That quote, by the way, is from the previous title holder, Anthony Bourdain…Hamilton…shares two of Bourdain's traits: a wicked, sometimes obscene sense of humor and a past checkered with drug use and crime. But as he admits in his jacket testimonial, she's the superior writer by a mile. To read Blood, Bones & Butter is to marvel at Hamilton's masterly facility with language.
—The Washington Post\"},{\"id\":\"21365222T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"2\",\"text\":\"Though Ms. Hamilton's brilliantly written new memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter, is rhapsodic about food…the book is hardly just for foodies. Ms. Hamilton…is as evocative writing about people and places as she is at writing about cooking, and her memoir does as dazzling a job of summoning her lost childhood as Mary Karr's Liars' Club and Andre Aciman's Out of Egypt did with theirs.
—The New York Times\"},{\"id\":\"21091570T\",\"type\":\"Review\",\"linkText\":\"From The Critics\",\"typeId\":\"1002\",\"abbr\":\"REV\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"255\",\"displayOrder\":\"3\",\"text\":\"Owner and chef of New York's Prune restaurant, Hamilton also happens to be a trained writer (M.F.A., University of Michigan) and fashions an addictive memoir of her unorthodox trajectory to becoming a chef. The youngest of five siblings born to a French mother who cooked \\\"tails, claws, and marrow-filled bones\\\" in a good skirt, high heels, and apron, and an artist father who made the sets for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus, Hamilton spent her early years in a vast old house on the rural Pennsylvania–New Jersey border. With the divorce of her parents when she was an adolescent, the author was largely left to her own devices, working at odd jobs in restaurants. Peeling potatoes and scraping plates—\\\"And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start.\\\" At age 16, in 1981, she got a job waiting tables at New York's Lone Star Cafe, and when caught stealing another waitress's check, she was nearly charged with grand larceny. After years of working as a \\\"grunt\\\" freelance caterer and going back to school to learn to write (inspired by a National Book Foundation conference she was catering), Hamilton unexpectedly started up her no-nonsense, comfort-food Prune in a charming space in the East Village in 1999. Hamilton can be refreshingly thorny (especially when it comes to her reluctance to embrace the \\\"foodie\\\" world), yet she is also as frank and unpretentious as her menu—and speaks openly about marrying an Italian man (despite being a lesbian), mostly to cook with his priceless Old World mother in Italy. (Mar.)\"},{\"id\":\"29194093T\",\"type\":\"Reading Group Guide\",\"linkText\":\"Reading Group Guide\",\"typeId\":\"1021\",\"abbr\":\"RGG\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"displayOrder\":\"1\",\"text\":\"

1. What does food mean to the author? How did your particular attitude toward food develop?

2. What challenges do writers and chefs share? Are they unique to those professions?

3. What saved the author from a life of substance abuse and crime?

4. Gabrielle Hamilton’s mother-in-law is a central figure in her book. Why did she become so important for her? Do you have someone equally important in your own life?

5. Being invited by Misty Callies to prep for a large dinner party and, later, to work at her restaurant were milestones for Gabrielle Hamilton. Why were these experiences significant for her?

6. Gabrielle Hamilton writes about her ambivalence in wedding her husband. Why do you think she married him? Have you ever felt similarly about your own relationships?

7. Getting one’s needs met is a recurring theme. How do you think Gabrielle Hamilton feels about this and how has it influenced her journey?

8. Is Blood, Bones & Butter a funny book?

9. Many have commented on the “honesty” of the book, suggesting that such candor and intimacy are uncommon. Are readers mostly responding to the way Gabrielle Hamilton writes about her own family or does that “honesty” manifest elsewhere? What is her point or objective in being so forthcoming? Do you think you would be so upfront in your own memoir?

10. Did you like/not like the ending and why?

\"},{\"id\":\"43771518T\",\"type\":\"Reading Group Guide\",\"linkText\":\"Reading Group Guide\",\"typeId\":\"1021\",\"abbr\":\"RGG\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"displayOrder\":\"2\",\"text\":\"1. What does food mean to the author? How did your particular attitude toward food develop?

2. What challenges do writers and chefs share? Are they unique to those professions?

3. What saved the author from a life of substance abuse and crime?

4. Gabrielle Hamilton’s mother-in-law is a central figure in her book. Why did she become so important for her? Do you have someone equally important in your own life?

5. Being invited by Misty Callies to prep for a large dinner party and, later, to work at her restaurant were milestones for Gabrielle Hamilton. Why were these experiences significant for her?

6. Gabrielle Hamilton writes about her ambivalence in wedding her husband. Why do you think she married him? Have you ever felt similarly about your own relationships?

7. Getting one’s needs met is a recurring theme. How do you think Gabrielle Hamilton feels about this and how has it influenced her journey?

8. Is Blood, Bones & Butter a funny book?

9. Many have commented on the “honesty” of the book, suggesting that such candor and intimacy are uncommon. Are readers mostly responding to the way Gabrielle Hamilton writes about her own family or does that “honesty” manifest elsewhere? What is her point or objective in being so forthcoming? Do you think you would be so upfront in your own memoir?

10. Did you like/not like the ending and why?

\"},{\"id\":\"20340436T\",\"type\":\"Fatbrain Author Description\",\"linkText\":\"Author Description\",\"typeId\":\"1102\",\"abbr\":\"FBA\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"displayOrder\":\"1\",\"text\":\"

Gabrielle Hamilton is the chef/owner of Prune restaurant in New York’s East Village. She received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Bon Appétit, Saveur, and Food & Wine. Hamilton has also authored the 8-week Chef Column in The New York Times, and her work has been anthologized in six volumes of Best Food Writing. She has appeared on The Martha Stewart Show and the Food Network, among other television. She lives in Manhattan with her two sons.\"},{\"id\":\"\",\"type\":\"Commentary\",\"linkText\":\"Commentary\",\"typeId\":\"gid://shopify/Article/594601574640\",\"abbr\":\"BSC\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"displayOrder\":\"1\",\"text\":\"

Gabrielle Hamilton, the owner and chef of New York’s Prune restaurant, is not only a master of cookery, but she’s also a masterful writer and storyteller as evidenced by her 2011 memoir. It was accurately dubbed by Anthony Bourdain as “simply the best memoir by a chef ever—ever.” The book follows Hamilton’s journey to where she is today, from her upbringing to the many kitchens she found herself in over the years.

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International Cooking

Kitchen Confidential

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Deal of the Month

Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

International Cooking