Kitchen Confidential (book)

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly is a New York Times bestselling nonfiction book written by American chef Anthony Bourdain, first published in 2000. In 2018, following Bourdain's death, it topped the New York Times non-fiction paperback and non-fiction combined e-book and print lists.

In 1999, Bourdain's essay "Don't Eat Before Reading This" was published in The New Yorker. The essay, an unsolicited submission to the magazine, launched Bourdain's media career and served as the foundation for Kitchen Confidential. Released in 2000 to wide acclaim, the book is both a professional memoir and an unfiltered look at the less glamorous aspects of high-end restaurant kitchens, which he describes as unremittingly intense, unpleasant, hazardous, and staffed by misfits. Bourdain believes that the kitchen is no place for dilettantes or slackers and that only those with a masochistic dedication to cooking will remain undeterred.