Kitchen Confidential Returns to Bestseller Lists Following Tony Biopic

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More than 25 years after Anthony Bourdain first pulled back the curtain on restaurant kitchens, readers are going back for seconds.

Bourdain’s seminal 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,” has returned to bestseller charts following the theatrical release of “Tony,” A24’s new biographical drama about his formative years. The book is also available as an audiobook, narrated by Bourdain himself and available for free with this Audible trial.

The book that made Bourdain a household name traces his decades in professional kitchens with the wit and unsparing industry observations that would later become his trademark. “Kitchen Confidential” grew out of Bourdain’s 1999 New Yorker essay “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” and became an immediate publishing phenomenon, turning the then-executive chef of New York’s Brasserie Les Halles into an unlikely celebrity. The memoir has enjoyed several lives on the bestseller lists, including another surge following Bourdain’s death in 2018.

“Tony,” directed by Matt Johnson, centers on the summer a 19-year-old Bourdain spent in Provincetown, Mass., in the 1970s, where a restaurant job introduced him to the chaotic kitchen culture that would define the next stage of his life. The story draws loosely from the opening chapters of “Kitchen Confidential.” Dominic Sessa, the breakout star of Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, plays the young Bourdain, with Emilia Jones portraying Nancy, a character based on Bourdain’s future first wife, Nancy Putkoski.