Why you should read Anthony Bourdain's 'Kitchen Confidential' to your children
When chef James Mark, former head chef of Providence's North and Big King restaurants, told his parents he wanted to be a chef, his father was dismayed. Having grown up in the restaurant industry, he wanted a different life for his son.
“I’m half Chinese, half Polish, and half Irish. My family owned four restaurants in New York’s Chinatown when I was little, and we’d go there on weekends for dim sum. But I didn’t really understand it. I was very picky about food. I was 10 years old. I wanted hamburgers! They’d sit me down and give me a fork and a plate of sticky rice, which they knew I liked.”
When I turned 12, I expressed my interest in working in the food industry. My father hated restaurants because he'd been forced to work in one as a child, and he wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer. To steer me away from that lifestyle, he gave me a copy of Kitchen Confidential. I read it and fell completely in love with it—the exact opposite of what my father wanted.
I remember reading Anthony Bourdain's story as a child in France, and how his parents made him wait in the car because they didn't want to take him to a fancy restaurant. I saw a parallel in my own life: I realized that people around me would ignore me, hand me a fork and a plate of sticky rice, and then leave me alone for the rest of the day while they ate loads of delicious food. My family considered me culturally backward because I didn't appreciate my own people's food.
The first time we went out for dim sum after reading the book, I sat down and asked for chopsticks. My family wasn't used to me ordering for myself, but when the dim sum carts started passing by, I began pointing at things. I picked out the strangest things, things even my father didn't eat. And as I did, I realized how much I loved that food and those flavors, and that I'd been missing out on them all this time. It changed my perspective on food and solidified what I wanted to do with my life.
