Back in 2000 a working chef pushed out a brutally honest behind-the-scenes account of the restaurant trade. Part confessional memoir, part industry commentary, the work was primarily aimed at the line cooks, waiters and bartenders that inhabited the writer's New York working life. The book - Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - attracted rather more interest than its author, Anthony Bourdain, could have envisaged, and propelled him down a very different professional path.
Now, 10 years later, he's back with the long-awaited sequel Medium Raw (not withstanding the various food and travel books published since) which documents his transition from chef to "traveller, writer and TV guy", heroin addict to doting father, dysfunctional misfit to food celebrity, as much as the term - and the phenomenon - probably still irritates him.
We extracted Kitchen Confidential back in 2000. This piece documents Bourdain's boyhood eureka food moment - though for a fuller flavour of the book, Bourdain's style, and its impact, have a look at some reviews, features and interviews with Bourdain at the time of its publication and since.
But back to the present work. Kathryn Hughes reviews Medium Raw here, and in this piece from the book, Bourdain describes his campaign of pyschological warfare against Ronald McDonald in his attempts to turn his own daughter against the fast food culture. Not that he's got a problem with proper burgers:
"But if you are literally serving shit to children, then I've got no problem with a jury of your peers wiring your nuts to a car battery and feeding you the accumulated sweepings of the bottom of a monkey cage. In fact, I'll hold the spoon."
In case you hadn't noticed, he's not a man to mince his words. Put your questions to him (if you dare) and he'll be here at 2.30pm BST today to answer them.
