So you want to be a chef?

Seeing as how I love food and cooking so much, I've often fantasized about going to culinary school and becoming a chef. One of the reasons I have never acted on this fantasy is because I know I don't want to work that hard. I know this now with even more certainty after reading Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. Bourdain's climb to the top of chefdom (well, it's not really the top since he points out that he isn't even a 3-star chef) is filled with drugs and debauchery, particularly in the early years. After going through drug rehab, he gets his act together and starts living the life he loves, which means working 16 hours a day planning, choreographing a large staff, cooking, and responding to big and small emergencies, eventually as the executive chef of Brasserie Les Halles in New York City.

There are a couple of things I really like about this book, although Boudain can at times get rather annoying, something he freely admits to (I guess that's part of his charm). First, I learned a lot about eating in restaurants. For instance, never order fish on a Monday (it isn't fresh). Tuesday is when both the food and the chef are at their freshest. And specials? I always thought they were dishes that the chef really wanted to make, but according to Bourdain, they are often a way to get rid of food that hasn't been moving. But what I liked most about this book are the life lessons it contains -- lessons about how important it is to do whatever it is you have a passion for, about the value of hard work, and about taking what may be a more difficult, and less lucrative, path if you want to reach the top.

Kitchen Confidential might make scare some people away from restaurants, but not me. It gave me a greater appreciation for the enormous amount of work that goes into producing a wonderful meal, like the ones we had last night at Mosaic. I had a delicious pork mignon with blue cheese mashed potatoes (sorry I can't give a better description, but believe me when I say it was great); Garrett had a black angus sirloin in a black & tan marinade with onion straws and roasted shallot sauce. With these dishes we enjoyed an excellent bottle of wine from our trip to California: a Warrior Fires Zinfandel from Karly Wines. Everything was fabulous.