Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45464 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-01
• Released on: 2007-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this typically bold effort, Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential), like the fine chef he is, pulls together an entertaining feast from the detritus of his years of cooking and traveling. Arranged around the basic tastes: salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami (a Japanese term for a taste the defies description), this scattershot collection of anecdotes puts Bourdain's brave palate, notorious sense of adventure and fine writing on display. From the horrifying opening passages, where he joins an Arctic family in devouring a freshly slaughtered seal, to a final work of fiction, the text may disappoint those who've come to expect more honed kitchen insights from the chef. Surprisingly, though, the less substantive kitchen material Bourdain has to work from only showcases his talent for observation. This book isn't for the effete foodies Bourdain clearly despises (though they'd do well to read it). He criticizes celebrity chefs, using Rocco DiSpirito as a "cautionary tale," and commends restaurants that still serve stomach-turning if palate-pleasing dishes, such as New York's Pierre au Tunnel (now closed), which offered tête de veau, essentially "calf's face, rolled up and tied with its tongue and thymus gland." Fans of Bourdain's hunger for the edge will gleefully consume this never-boring book.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Deriving in large part from his popular series of television travelogues, Bourdain's new collection of essays breezes along. Bourdain writes as he talks--irreverently, earthily, and determinedly free of euphemism. The reader can almost hear him dragging on his cigarette between sentences. In just a few pages he lays bare the gritty, fill-those-tables economics that govern a restaurant's success without respect to the competence of its cooks. He surveys the current crop of overpublicized chefs in their trendy Las Vegas digs and finds their eateries flourishing if soulless. He fears that celebrity (and vast riches) will undo many potentially great chefs, but exceptions such as Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse confirm his faith in the higher side of his profession. Anyone who's ever dined in one of the thousands of undistinguished and indistinguishable "family" restaurants clogging the nation's highways will appreciate Bourdain's take on "Restaurant Hell." His lusty paean to the old, freewheeling Times Square of drugs, sex, and crime offers a contrarian, in-your-face riposte to New York City's touristy gentrification. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Praise for The Nasty Bits:
A New York Times bestseller - Book Sense bestseller
“High- and low-lights from the culinary world by the delightfully jaded chef.”—People
“His writing is at its most savory in passages about the joys of sharing food with people who love it. His words are not always gentlemanly, but they vividly convey how, say, sitting on the plastic-covered kitchen floor of an Inuit family's house and joining in as they eagerly tear into the raw liver, brain and blubber of a freshly killed seal can be, as Mr. Bourdain says, a moment of rare intimacy, pleasure and indeed beauty.”—Wall Street Journal
“Lovable rogue chef and author of Kitchen Confidential describes stomach-roiling feasts in exotic lands and snipes at celebrity chefs in this entertaining tome.”—Chicago Tribune
“A vivid and witty writer…[Bourdain’s] greatest gift is his ability to convey his passion for professional cooking...In Bourdain's telling this is inspiring, band-of-brothers stuff, a tale of the trenches where ends almost always justify means.”—New York Times Book Review
“[An] informed and unvarnished view from the kitchen...[Bourdain’s] best writing can make food lovers quiver like raw fish.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer

Customer Reviews

Not My Favorite
I love Anthony Bourdain. There. I said it. I would love to hang out with him, cook with him, and well, let's just say, do other things with him. Except read this book.

Bourdain is a genuinely talented writer, as he proved in Kitchen Confidential. He is a charismatic raconteur as he proves each week on his television show. But this book is a compilation of many divergent pieces, thrown together to attain maximum fiscal return. Because the tales vary so greatly, the reader is forced to jump from concept to concept without anything binding the pieces together properly. Don't get me wrong, each piece is well crafted, but just because they're all published together doesn't make for a cohesive book.

If you must read Bourdain, re-read Kitchen Confidential. It will leave you more satisfied than this book.

Love it!
This book was great. I love reading everything Anthony writes because you can hear him speak as you read it.

Great and all TRUE
Loved this, bought it's the second one of Anthony's I have ordered. I am a Chef myself and it brings tears to my eyes knowing someone else is being tormented by patrons and the front of the house. Very good reading even if you never have cooked a meal his humor and honesty makes this book GREAT.