Medium Raw — A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

A Decade Later

When Kitchen Confidential was published in 2000, Anthony Bourdain was an executive chef at a mid-range New York restaurant with a drug habit and a cult following. By 2010 he was one of the most recognisable food personalities in the world — television shows, travel, a different kind of access to the food world he had described from the inside.

Medium Raw is written from that new position, and its dominant register is ambivalence. Bourdain is harder on himself than in Kitchen Confidential, harder on the food world that has made him famous, and more honest about the distance between the bohemian kitchen culture he romanticised in his first book and the celebrity food economy it has become.

The Essays

The book is structured as a series of essays rather than a continuous memoir — some about specific people (a devastating portrait of the food critic Alan Richman; a generous account of Fergus Henderson), some about broader topics (the industrialisation of the food supply, the specific culture of late-night restaurant workers). The essay on what he owes to the Ecuadorian and Mexican cooks who actually ran the kitchens he was nominally in charge of is as good as anything Bourdain wrote.

The self-awareness is new and earned: he knows his Kitchen Confidential persona created expectations he cannot now avoid disappointing, and he is intelligent enough to find this funny and uncomfortable in roughly equal measure.

The Man Behind the Mythology

What gives Medium Raw its charge is the gap between the two Bourdains. The author of Kitchen Confidential was a forty-four-year-old line cook who got famous almost by accident when a New Yorker essay turned into a runaway bestseller; the author of Medium Raw is a global television personality who has eaten at the world’s best tables, dined with Ferran Adrià and Eric Ripert, and earned the very access he once mocked from the outside. He is acutely, sometimes painfully aware of the contradiction. The book opens with a clandestine, almost decadent meal among chefs — an off-menu illegal ortolan-style feast that reads as both confession and indulgence — and from there Bourdain keeps circling the question of what he has become. He interrogates his own sell-outs, his comfortable life, his fatherhood (his daughter was young when he wrote it, and the chapters touching on her are some of the few in his work where he sets aside the swagger entirely). The persona that made him famous, he understands, is now a cage as much as a brand, and the honesty with which he examines that bind is what lifts the book above a victory lap.

Set Pieces, Score-Settling, and the Best Essays

Structured as discrete essays rather than continuous memoir, Medium Raw is uneven by design, swinging from tenderness to bile and back. The score-settling chapters — most notoriously a takedown of the critic Alan Richman, and broadsides against figures Bourdain regarded as frauds or sellouts — are the book’s most divisive, and some of the venom reads as petty in retrospect. But the high points are extraordinary. The profile of the offal-loving British chef Fergus Henderson is a model of generous appreciation; the meditation on the Mexican and Ecuadorian cooks who actually ran the kitchens Bourdain nominally commanded is a clear-eyed reckoning with the invisible labour of American restaurants; and the piece on heroes and villains of the food world doubles as a manifesto for what Bourdain actually valued — craft, integrity, and caring about the right things. By 2010 his prose had loosened and deepened, and at his best here he writes better sentences than he did in the book that made him.

The State of Food in 2010

Medium Raw is also a snapshot of an industry mid-transformation, and Bourdain uses his platform to argue about where food was heading. He is scornful of the rise of the celebrity-chef machine and the Food Network’s manufactured personalities, and he names names; he defends fast food’s place in poor and working lives while attacking the industrial supply chain that produces it; he champions offal, whole-animal cooking, and the unglamorous discipline of the line over the theatre of plating. There is a strain of moralism here that was new for him — Bourdain the cultural critic emerging from Bourdain the bad-boy raconteur. Some of these positions have aged into conventional wisdom, which is itself a measure of his influence: the farm-to-table ethics, the respect for immigrant kitchen labour, the suspicion of food-as-spectacle that he pushed are now mainstream. Read today, the book functions partly as a document of the moment American food culture grew self-conscious, narrated by one of the people most responsible for making it so.

Bourdain’s Place and How to Read It

Anthony Bourdain reshaped how a generation thinks about food, travel, and the dignity of kitchen labour, first through his writing and then through television — A Cook’s Tour, No Reservations, and Parts Unknown, which won multiple Emmy and Peabody awards. His death in 2018 cast a retrospective shadow over all his work, and Medium Raw, with its candour about restlessness, addiction, and the strange loneliness of fame, reads differently and more poignantly now than it did on release. It is best approached as a companion to Kitchen Confidential rather than a standalone: readers who know the first book will catch the full weight of the self-revision, while newcomers may find some of the references float free of context. Come to it for the rare spectacle of a famous man auditing his own myth in public, and for some of the finest food writing of its decade.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — More honest and more considered than Kitchen Confidential. The book of a man who has outrun his mythology and is not entirely sure whether he misses it.

Reading Guides

• Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain — Full Review
• Heat by Bill Buford — Full Review