Kitchen Confidential
The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef
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“There hasn’t been a food memoir this deliciously wicked since Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential.â€â€"Portland OregonianThe Devil in the Kitchen is legendary chef Marco Pierre White’s memoir of growing up working-class in Leeds and going on to become a king in the culinary worldâ€"the original celebrity chef. The first British chef (and the youngest chef anywhere) to win three Michelin starsâ€"and also the only one to ever give them all backâ€"is known equally for his astonishing talent and for being a chain-smoking, pot-throwing enfant terrible of the kitchen. In The Devil in the Kitchen he takes readers on a revealing and raucous ride, featuring some of the biggest names in the food world and beyond. It’s truly a decadent feast for anyone who loves food or just a great story.Amazon Significant Seven, May 2007: Marco Pierre White made history as the most decorated chef in the UK and still holds the honor as the youngest chef ever to win three Michelin stars. Bille
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Customer Reviews
| 83 of 98 people found the following review helpful  Interesting story told in uninteresting fashion, By Moira (Detroit, Michigan) - See all my reviews This review is from: The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness and the Making of a Great Chef (Hardcover) There is a fascinating story in this book, but unfortunately it never emerges. Marco White has all the elements - talent, glamour, flamboyance, brilliant chef and restauranteur, and a real flair for drama and theatrics. In telling his own story, however, he settles for a recitation of all the bad-boy behavior told with a tedious lack of insight and an unattractively smug tone. How long can you go on tossing people out of your restaurant (customers, employees and business partners alike) and your life (friends, colleagues, mentors and wives) before it occurs to you that the problem isn't other people, but you? For White, it seems that the answer is "Forever."White's personal story is compelling - up from a working class background, raised by an emotionally distant father after his mother's early death, inspired by food and cooking to reach the pinnacle of British cuisine (stop snickering - it does exist and he did it) at a very young age and thereby gaining entry into the glitzy jet set that he both loves and is uncomfortable with. The problem is that he lists the facts ("This is how I got this job; this is where I worked under brutal conditions that would fell a lesser man and where I loved it until I hated it and was fired or quit; this was a cooking genius I deeply admired and learned enormously from until I stopped admiring and now we don't speak; and I did this all because I am driven by an unslakeable thirst to brag about what a pain-junkie I am") without conveying any of the excitement and enthusiasm that must have fueled this. Other than being self-congratulatory ad nauseum about what a tough bastard he is, White has nothing to offer a reader trying to understand how he became the culinary rock-star that he is - a phrase he cannot get enough of. And that is a pity, because a book by a chef should at least be able to convey his knowledge of and passion for food. Three Michelin stars are not just handed out like Halloween candy, and a chef with his talent, knowledge and experience - aaah, it's just plain frustrating that the food part of this takes a distant second place to Big Bad Bullying Chef stories. Where is all the sublime food that he must have cooked? The hunt for superb ingrdients? The remarkable techniques that transformed a simple rice dish into "the best risotto he ever ate"? Missing, that's where. Foodies everywhere will be disappointed. Oh, yeah - if you are going to list sex first in your subtitle, there should be more of it in the book other than an acknowledgment that you are shy with the birds and that you preferred cooking to sex. Especially when you are also saying that you routinely shagged customers in your office during dinner service. One chapter of the book relates his law suit against the NY Times for publishing a mildly defamatory profile of him, where one of his successful claims was that the piece damaged his reputation among American diners who might now avoid his restaurants. Considering what he has done to himself with this book, White should return the money. 21 of 25 people found the following review helpful Marco Hates You, By This review is from: The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness and the Making of a Great Chef (Hardcover) Marco Pierre White is the original rock and roll chef and the first person I'm aware of to consistently go into the dining room and tell people to shove off.When I was on an ACF Jr. Culinary Olympic Team in the late 90s, this was not a fact we overlooked, and for it White was instantly a hero of ours. I grabbed up all his cookbooks; the best of which was the tough to find White Heat. Through it, we discovered strange foods like caul fat, that we, as young cooks, had never seen, had, or even heard of. Needless to say, when I saw he was writing a biography, my interest was peaked. There's a funny story in the book that sums it up for me. A Michelin 3 star chef dined at White's restaurant, and afterwards, came into the kitchen to say everything was great except the fish -- which was salty. White told the cook who prepared it to tell the chef to "F off". White seems to tell everyone to "F" Off, and as interesting as this book was to me, a fan, I'm sad to say, overall, it is pretty poor. White has a tremendous ego, and comes off sounding like a real jerk that ruins every meaningful relationship he's ever been apart of both personally and in business. 6 of 8 people found the following review helpful More a love story than an autiobiography, By KEM44 (Michigan) - See all my reviews This review is from: The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef (Paperback) A touching and enduring love story between Mr. White and his temper tantrums, most of which happen to take place in a kitchen, which is as close as this book comes to being about food. Mr. White's father was mean to him as a child, and Mr. White as a supposed grown up is mean to others, told 100 times over. Insanely boring. Kitchen Confidential was infinitely better although yes, Mr. White was quite the hottie back in the day and looks great on the cover. |
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The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef
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