Apart from being a highly-regarded chef with excellent knife skills, the late Anthony Bourdain was also a master of putting pen to paper. He authored more than 10 books, mostly novels with food as the central theme.
The most famous of these is the best-selling Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. This tell-all should be compulsory reading for anyone who so much as hints that they’d like to pursue a career in the hospitality industry.
In it, Bourdain shares tales of his depraved life as a chef and in doing so exposes the darkness of a tough industry. It certainly made its readers think twice about sending a plate of food back to the kitchen in a restaurant.
Bourdain was also a TV celeb — though he’d squirm to be called that — and presented several popular food-based travel shows. His fans were devastated when he sadly took his own life in 2018.
At the time, he was planning a new book, which has recently been published posthumously. Called World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, it was co-authored by his assistant and close friend Laurie Woolever.
Woolever completed what Bourdain set out to do: create a road map to being happy, mindful, curious and well-fed as you travel and eat your way about the globe.
The book is described as “a celebration of the life and legacy of one of the most important food writers of all time” and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. It'll be released in SA on June 30.
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