“I want to try everything once,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in his 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential. “But there are some general principles I adhere to, things I’ve seen over the years that remain in mind and have altered my eating habits.” So, as he traveled through Parts Unknown, he cultivated tips for how to leave every restaurant with a full belly and a happy heart. Fortunately, he shared his sage wisdom with the rest of us. It’s easy to see how he became such a legend when you grab a fork and dig into his top 10 rules for eating out.
Skip The Fish
Bourdain was thrust into the public consciousness with a 1999 article for the New Yorker titled, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” In it, he gave some insight about ordering fish: if the restaurant’s main focus isn’t seafood, the fish has likely been refrigerated poorly, as chefs constantly open and close fridges during the weekend rush.
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Chances Are…
According to Chef Bourdain, “Chances are that the Monday-night tuna you want has been kicking around in the kitchen since Friday morning, under God knows what conditions,” he wrote in his New Yorker article.
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Don’t Kid Yourself About Butter
“In almost every restaurant worth patronizing,” Bourdain said, “sauces are enriched with mellowing, emulsifying butter.” And in the restaurants “where the chef brags about how he’s ‘getting away from butter and cream?” Well, he’s using butter, too. And a lot of it.
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At Least One Stick
Any good meal will have a stick of butter in it. “That’s why restaurant food tastes better than home food,” he said. “Of course most things have butter because butter makes things taste better… It mellows sauces, it gives it that restaurant sheen and emulsified consistency that we love, and it’s classic.”
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Go With The Pork
When diners can’t decide what to eat, they often err on the side of chicken: “It occupies its ubiquitous place on menus as an option for customers who can’t decide what they want to eat,” Bourdain said, and ” it bores the hell out of chefs.” But really, pork should be the “safety option.”
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Pork Notes
“Pork, on the other hand, is cool,” Bourdain wrote in his 1999 New Yorker piece. “Farmers stopped feeding garbage to pigs decades ago, and even if you eat pork rare you’re more likely to win the Lotto than to contract trichinosis.”
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Be Wary of Bread
Seeing a basket of hot bread get plopped on the table can take a B+ dining experience to an A+ real fast, but Anthony Bourdain warns of getting too excited: During peak hours, some of those baskets might be recycled! “The reuse of bread has been an open secret — and a fairly standard practice — in the industry for years,” he said.
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A Little Trick
All it takes to make stale bread fresh again is 20 seconds in a hot oven. Don’t be fooled! Still, Bourdain recognizes that untouched bread is untouched bread: “You might just as well avoid air travel, or subways, equally dodgy environments for airborne transmission of disease. Eat the bread.”
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Avoid Mussels
Avoid the mussels (not the kind it takes to lift your heavy plate of food, but the food itself)! “More often than not,” chef Bourdain revealed in Kitchen Confidential, “mussels are allowed to wallow in their own foul-smelling piss in the bottom of a reach-in.” He did note some exceptions.
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Wallowing About
Of course, sometimes the temptation to eat mussels is too great — and that’s okay, too. If gobbling a few down is a must, Anthony Bourdain suggests you heed some basic safety precautions. Because restaurants don’t usually check each mussel individually to see if it’s good to eat, give your plate a once over before digging in.
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Dine On Weekdays
“Chefs prefer to cook for weekday customers rather than for weekenders,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” “and they like to start the new week with their most creative dishes. In New York, locals dine during the week. Weekends are considered amateur nights — for tourists, rubes, and the well-done-ordering pretheatre hordes.”
When The Good Stuff Comes In
Anthony always taught us that it’s the weekend when “the good stuff comes in.” That’s when the kitchen staff is relaxed enough to pay attention to each plate! “The fish may be just as fresh on Friday, but it’s on Tuesday that you’ve got the good will of the kitchen on your side,” he wrote.
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Be Kind to Your Waiter
“I am not a fan of people who abuse service staff,” Bourdain said. “In fact, I find it intolerable. It’s an unpardonable sin as far as I’m concerned, taking out personal business or some other kind of dissatisfaction on a waiter or busboy.” A little kindness, he said, can save you pain in the long run.
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20% or Bust
“Look at your waiter’s face. He knows” about all about what’s going on in the kitchen behind closed doors, Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential. “If he likes you, maybe he’ll stop you from ordering a piece of fish he knows is going to hurt you.”
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No Hollandaise
“While we’re on brunch, how about hollandaise sauce?” Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential. “Not for me. Bacteria love hollandaise. And hollandaise, that delicate emulsion of egg yolks and clarified butter, must be held at a temperature not too hot nor too cold, lest it break when spooned over your poached eggs.”
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Made to Order
“Nobody I know has ever made hollandaise to order,” he continued. Most likely, the stuff on your eggs was made hours ago and held on station. Equally disturbing is the likelihood that the butter used in the hollandaise is melted table butter, heated, clarified, and strained to get out all the breadcrumbs and cigarette butts.”
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Pay for Your Sushi
“I can’t imagine a better example of Things To Be Wary Of in the food department than bargain sushi,” said Chef Bourdain. He continued: “Most people don’t understand Sushi, they go to a Sushi bar and say: I had the best Sushi last night, the fish was so fresh! It was right out of the ocean.” For sushi, “it’s not about the freshness, it’s at the perfect state at its decomposition that it’s served.”
Things To Be Wary Of
Few people know sushi like Bourdain. In 2016, before his untimely demise, he admitted he would like his last meal to be sushi: “I’d crawl away to a seat in front of this beautiful hinoki wood sushi bar,” he said, “where three-Michelin starred Jiro Ono would make me a 22- or 23-course omakase tasting menu.”
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Don’t Order Food Well-Done
“People who order their meat well-done perform a valuable service for those of us in the business who are cost-conscious,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in the New Yorker. “They pay for the privilege of eating our garbage.” Though harsh, his reasoning is sound. Be warned, because the next bit of inside info he revealed is making many lose their appetites.
Anti-Well Done
He continued, “When one of the cooks finds a particularly unlovely piece of steak — tough, riddled with nerve and connective tissue, off the hip end of the loin, and maybe a little stinky from age,” it must be thrown away or cooked well-done. Guess which option most kitchens choose? Bourdain’s infinite wisdom wasn’t easily won, though. When he first started out in kitchens, he was completely shocked at what he saw.
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After School
After graduating from culinary school in 1978, Anthony Bourdain took the daring leap into the intensely chaotic world of Manhattan restaurants. Despite his budding genius and natural knack for navigating a kitchen, the young chef wasn’t prepared for the dark secrets he’d soon be introduced to.
Executive Chef
After bouncing around several establishments, he eventually worked his way up to Executive Chef at a Manhattan brasserie called Les Halles. However, Bourdain quickly learned there was way more to kitchen life than just cooking.
Vices
Drugs and booze ran rampant throughout kitchens all over New York City. People had no idea just how inebriated many of the cook and chefs were all the time, so Bourdain took advantage of an opportunity to give people an inside peek at what really went on behind the scenes.
“Don’t Read Before Eating”
He wrote a no-holds-barred essay titled “Don’t Read Before Eating” for The New York Times in 1999, and that piece of writing laid the groundwork for his award-winning full-length book, Kitchen Confidential, the very next year. His life had taken off, but his happiness increased tenfold after meeting a woman named Ottavia.
Age Gaps
Despite the 22-year age gap between Bourdain and Ottavia Busia, the two fell madly in love and wed in 2007. And Busia (Bourdain’s second wife), introduced him to a unique hobby he never thought he’d get involved in but ended up loving.
Parts Unknown
Because Busia was an Italian Mixed Martial Arts fighter, she helped spur a passion in Bourdain for the sport. At this time, Bourdain’s career was in full flight, and he also had another special reason to keep up the success.
No Reservations
He and Busia welcomed a daughter, Ariane, into the world. He finally quit smoking cigarettes and cut down on the booze. However, the hectic travel schedule of his television show, No Reservations, took a toll on his family.
No Reservations
He and Busia welcomed a daughter, Ariane, into the world. He finally quit smoking cigarettes and cut down on the booze. However, the hectic travel schedule of his television show, No Reservations, took a toll on his family.
Emmy Awards
That’s why No Reservations also received plenty of Emmy awards during its eight-season run, and Bourdain took home the Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming. Amid all the hype and accolades, Bourdain met his next girlfriend.