Everybody loves Anthony Bourdain. He was electric – an uncompromising and incomparably compelling storyteller. And he was hot; he once ate the still-beating heart of a cobra. A mid-level (by his own admission) chef, Bourdain found fame as a writer and television host. My generation met his image before we met his prose. And the image is beguiling. To watch Bourdain on screen is to watch a man react with remarkable porosity to the big wide world: drunk in Thailand, disturbed in the Caribbean, homesick in LA. 

My father bought me Kitchen Confidential (2000) for my thirteenth birthday, steering me towards an inevitable future of long hours, late nights and fraught relationships with various drugs and line cooks. My relationship with Bourdain, however, was always simple. Here was a man who understood completely the grim humour of working a restaurant service, day in, day out, replete with sodden linen, stupid waiters and screaming chefs. He knew exactly the ‘hell broth of suppressed frustration, nervous energy, caffeine, and alcohol’ that roiled in our guts as we burned ourselves and our steaks, or spewed into the recycling bin. For those who wanted a peek behind the curtain, Bourdain showed them a way in. For those of us behind it, he offered a way out. 

The Anthony Bourdain Reader, edited by Bourdain’s long-time friend and agent, Kimberly Witherspoon, with a foreword by Patrick Radden Keefe, features extracts from his most famous books (Kitchen Confidential, A Cook’s Tour) and articles (‘Don’t Eat Before Reading This’), as well as many never-before-seen short stories