Inside the Kitchen

Inside the Kitchen brings together memoirs, biographies, diaries and reportage written by and about the people who work in restaurant kitchens. Books without recipes, about what the profession really costs and what happens behind the swing door.

Here you'll find Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, the book that pulled back the curtain in 2000 and opened the restaurant kitchen to the wider world. Bill Buford left his desk at The New Yorker to work for free at Babbo in New York and apprentice with a butcher in Tuscany, an experience that became Heat, before later moving his family to Lyon for Dirt. In Eat a Peach, David Chang writes unflinchingly about bipolar disorder and the price of building Momofuku.

Marco Pierre White's White Heat, published in 1990, turned the chef into a rock star. René Redzepi's A Work in Progress is the diary of a year at Noma, doubts and failed dishes included. In Fäviken: 4015 Days, Magnus Nilsson explains why he closed a three Michelin starred restaurant at its peak, while Colman Andrews paints a portrait of Ferran Adrià and elBulli in Reinventing Food.

The chef memoir is the most widely read form of food literature, and the only genre in which the food world describes itself without trying to sell anything.