Dubbed “the bad boy of cuisine” for his rock star look and blunt observations about the world of restaurants, chefs and cooking, Anthony Bourdain is not your typical celebrity chef.

The executive chef at New York’s famed bistro, Les Halles, and host of the popular travel and food series, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, on The Travel Channel, Bourdain also is the author of three crime novels and the bestseller, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. He even has shared his insights about team-building and crisis management with the Harvard Business Review.
 
Kitchen Confidential is Bourdain’s candid, hysterical and sometimes shocking portrait of life in restaurant kitchens, from the joys of making good food and running one’s “own rowdy pirate crew” to the perils of mussels, hollandaise sauce and fish on Mondays. “I wanted to give people a feel for the sound and flavor of kitchen culture,” says Bourdain, of the memoir that traces his career from dishwasher to culinary celebrityhood.

Kitchen Confidential, now translated into 23 languages, quickly became a worldwide bestseller. “Loud, brash, in-your-face, it pulls you into the steamy kitchen of a man who has given his life for his craft,” said The Times of London.

A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal, published in conjunction with his 22-part series on the Food Network, was a bestseller in the U.S and the U.K.. In the book, like the show, Bourdain crisscrosses the globe sampling local delicacies and “extreme cuisine,” from roasted sheep testicles in Morocco to cobra’s heart in Saigon. “Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in ways that are charming and intoxicating to me,” says Bourdain. “The best meals often occur in a context that has little to do with the food itself.”
 

A sold-out crowd... [He] conveyed his remarks in an entertaining way but never lost sight that he was there to educate and inform.

Smithsonian Institution

Bourdain entertains and educates with his exotic tales of travel and lessons learned from the kitchen trenches. He shares his passion on topics ranging from “Great Cuisines: The Common Thread” to the celebrity chef phenomenon and the culture of cooking. He also imparts his drill sergeant approach to running a kitchen, which he shared with the Harvard Business Review in “Management by Fire: A Conversation with Chef Anthony Bourdain.” “The fantastic mix of order and chaos,” he says, “demands a rigid hierarchy and a sacrosanct code of conduct, where punctuality, loyalty, team work and discipline are key to producing consistently good food.”

Bourdain is a contributing authority for Food Arts magazine. His novels include The Bobby Gold Stories and Bone in the Throat. His work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Gourmet and The New York Times. He describes his recent book, Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook, as “Julia Child meets Full Metal Jacket.”

His latest book, The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Useable Trim, Scraps, and Bones, is a well-seasoned hellbroth of candid, often outrageous stories from his worldwide misadventures.

In October 2007, Bloomsbury will release No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach, a fully illustrated journal of Bourdain’s far-flung travels for the show.