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In 1999 a forty-two-year-old line cook posted an unsolicited essay to The New Yorker with no agent, no contact and no reason to expect an answer. It ran in April under the title “Don't Eat Before Reading This,” told readers not to order fish on a Monday, and explained what actually happens to the bread in the basket. He was still running the kitchen at Les Halles when the book that grew out of it went to press. Sixteen books later — three crime novels, a history of Typhoid Mary, a brasserie cookbook and three graphic novels among them — the food writing is only part of what he left.
By Lisanne Swart · 16 books · New York · Non-Fiction · Emmy & Peabody winner · Updated September 2026
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Quick answer
Anthony Bourdain wrote sixteen books, published between 1995 and 2025 — nine works of non-fiction, three crime novels, three graphic novels and one posthumous collection. Almost every bibliography online counts eight or nine, which is how a novelist, a historian of Typhoid Mary and a comic-book writer go missing from a list that is otherwise correct.
Where to Start with Anthony Bourdain
If you have never read him
→ Kitchen Confidential. Nothing else is close, and it takes an evening.
If you have read that one
→ Medium Raw — him revisiting his own book and disagreeing with it.
If you want the travel writing
→ A Cook's Tour, where the whole second career starts.
If you want to cook
→ Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook for bistro classics, Appetites for what he cooked at home.
If you want the surprise
→ Typhoid Mary — a short, furious history of a cook nobody let speak.
If you want his last book
→ World Travel: An Irreverent Guide (2021), completed by Laurie Woolever after his death.
If you have read all of him already
→ The Anthony Bourdain Reader (2025) — the only book with writing of his that has never been published before.
All 16 books by Anthony Bourdain, in order
Bone in the Throat
A young sous-chef in a Little Italy restaurant discovers that the kitchen he works in is being used by his uncle's mob crew, and that the freezer is not only for food. Written while Bourdain was still cooking full-time, five years before anyone had heard of him.
Read it for the kitchen, not the plot. The mob material is competent genre work; the cooks, the prep, the hierarchy and the language are already the real thing, and you can watch the voice of Kitchen Confidential assembling itself.
— LisanneGone Bamboo
A retired hitman and his wife are living quietly in the Caribbean when the mobster he failed to kill turns up in witness protection on the same island. Sun, rum, and a job that will not stay finished.
Looser and more enjoyable than the debut, and openly a holiday for its author. Completists only — but it explains the man who later found it perfectly normal to eat lunch anywhere on earth.
— LisanneKitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
What the restaurant industry is actually like from behind the pass: the drugs, the theft, the pirate crews, the brunch you should never order, the fish that has been sitting since Friday. Written by a working chef with nothing left to protect, expanded from his 1999 New Yorker essay.
This is the book that changed how a generation of readers thought about eating out, and it still reads as though it were written last week. Start here — everything after it is a person who has already told the truth once and cannot take it back.
— LisanneTyphoid Mary: An Urban Historical
The story of Mary Mallon, the Irish cook who carried typhoid without ever being ill, infected the households she worked for, refused to believe it, and was eventually confined to an island for twenty-three years. Bourdain writes her as a cook first and a public-health case second.
The great overlooked Bourdain, and almost never on the lists. It is short, it is angry on her behalf, and it is the only book where he writes about a cook who is not himself.
— LisanneA Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines
Bourdain takes the money from Kitchen Confidential and goes looking for the perfect meal: Vietnam, Cambodia, Russia, Portugal, Morocco, with a television crew following him. The book of the Food Network series of the same name.
The pivot point of his whole career — the moment the chef becomes a traveller. Rougher and more cynical than the later work, before he learned to listen to the people feeding him.
— LisanneBobby Gold
Linked stories about a large, reluctant enforcer working the door and the back rooms of the New York club scene, and the line cook he falls for. Published in Britain as Bobby Gold in 2001 and in the United States as The Bobby Gold Stories in 2003.
The best of his fiction, and the one where the two halves of him meet: a crime book whose most convincing chapter is a restaurant service. The two titles are the same book, which is why it is often counted twice or not at all.
— LisanneAnthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook
The actual recipes from the brasserie he ran, written in his own voice: French bistro cooking, stock, confit, steak frites, with instructions that stop to tell you off for buying pre-chopped garlic. Hectoring, funny, and genuinely usable.
The one Bourdain book people cook from rather than read, and it holds up as a bistro primer. If you only ever want one French cookbook in the kitchen, this is a serious candidate.
— LisanneThe Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Useable Trim, Scraps, and Bones
Occasional pieces, columns and reportage collected between covers — on Vietnamese cooking, on the Food Network, on cooks he admired, on his own growing discomfort with being a professional personality. Includes a short story.
Uneven by design, and the honest place to see what he was thinking between the big books. The self-critical pieces about celebrity are the ones that last.
— LisanneNo Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach
The illustrated companion to the Travel Channel series: photographs from the shoots, notes on what went wrong, and the meals that made the trip worth it. Closer to a scrapbook than a memoir.
Buy it for the pictures and the marginal notes rather than the prose. The behind-the-scenes material on how the show was actually made is the reason it is still in print.
— LisanneMedium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
Ten years after Kitchen Confidential, he goes back over the same ground as a rich and famous man — which chefs he was wrong about, what fame did to him, what he now thinks of the industry he blew open, and a chapter naming the people he despises.
The necessary sequel and, for a lot of readers, the better book. It is what happens when a man who built a career on candour has to be candid about himself.
— LisanneGet Jiro!
In a near-future Los Angeles ruled by rival food cartels, a sushi chef with a samurai's code refuses to serve a California roll and beheads the customer who asks. Written with Joel Rose, drawn by Langdon Foss.
Ridiculous, violent and completely sincere — every food-world grudge Bourdain ever held, played out as a martial-arts revenge story. Skipped by nearly every bibliography, which is a shame.
— LisanneGet Jiro: Blood and Sushi
The prequel: how Jiro, the son of a Tokyo crime boss, walked away from the family business to cut fish. Written with Joel Rose, drawn by Alé Garza.
Slighter than the first, and for readers who wanted more of that world. Read Get Jiro! first even though this comes earlier in the story.
— LisanneAppetites: A Cookbook
Home cooking rather than restaurant cooking — the food he actually made for his daughter and her friends. Roast chicken, a Thanksgiving chapter, macaroni and cheese, alongside a Vietnamese dinner party for the ambitious. Written with Laurie Woolever.
The warmest thing he ever published, and the strangest to read now. A famously unsentimental man writing about feeding a nine-year-old.
— LisanneHungry Ghosts
Eight horror stories built on Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai, the Edo-period game in which samurai told a hundred ghost stories by candlelight — here retold by chefs, with food at the centre of every haunting. Written with Joel Rose.
The last book published in his lifetime, and much better than a celebrity comic has any right to be. The recipes appended to each story are real.
— LisanneWorld Travel: An Irreverent Guide
A destination-by-destination guide to the places he returned to — where to eat, where to stay, what to avoid — assembled by his longtime assistant Laurie Woolever from his own words, his notes and the shows, with essays from family and colleagues filling the gaps.
Read it as an anthology of his voice rather than a book he wrote. As a working travel guide it is genuinely useful, and the contributed essays are the best obituary he got.
— LisanneThe Anthony Bourdain Reader: New, Classic, and Rediscovered Writing
A 512-page career retrospective of his own prose, compiled by his longtime agent Kimberly Witherspoon with a foreword by Patrick Radden Keefe. Alongside the familiar work it prints material that had never been published: diary entries from a teenage trip to France, a short story called “I Quit My Job Yesterday”, and chapters from No New Messages, the novel he left unfinished.
The Books Most Bourdain Lists Leave Out
Almost every bibliography online counts eight or nine titles. Eight more exist, and they are the reason his output looks smaller than it is:
- The posthumous collection — The Anthony Bourdain Reader (Ecco, 28 October 2025) is too recent to have reached most lists. It is 512 pages of his own writing, compiled by his agent Kimberly Witherspoon, and it prints work that had never appeared anywhere — teenage travel diaries, a short story, and chapters of the novel he never finished.
- The crime fiction — Bone in the Throat (1995), Gone Bamboo (1997) and Bobby Gold (2001) came before and around the fame, and are shelved as genre rather than food writing. Bobby Gold is also published in the US as The Bobby Gold Stories (2003), so it is often double-counted or dropped entirely.
- The graphic novels — Get Jiro! (2012), Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi (2015) and Hungry Ghosts (2018), all co-written with Joel Rose. Comics rarely make it into author bibliographies, but he wrote them, and Hungry Ghosts was the last book he published while alive.
- The history — Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical (2001) is not about him, not about restaurants he worked in, and not about travel — which is exactly why it disappears from the lists.
- The tie-ins — Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook (2004) and No Reservations (2007) get treated as merchandise rather than books. The Les Halles book in particular is a real cookbook that people still cook from.
- What this guide does not count — Books he edited rather than wrote — he was guest editor of The Best American Travel Writing 2008, and chose the pieces — along with introductions and forewords for other people's books, his magazine journalism, and reissues such as Get Jiro! The Complete Collection (2026), which collects the two graphic novels without adding anything new.
- Books about him, not by him — Three titles are regularly filed under his name by mistake: Anthony Bourdain Remembered (2019), a tribute assembled by CNN; Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography (2021) by Laurie Woolever; and Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (2019), in which he is the one being interviewed. Good books, none of them his.
Which Anthony Bourdain Book to Read First
Start with Kitchen Confidential (2000). There is no argument here. It is the book that made him, it is still the best thing he wrote, and everything else assumes you have read it.
Then Medium Raw (2010). The same man ten years and a great deal of money later, going back over what he got wrong. Read the two together and you have the whole arc.
Then A Cook's Tour (2001), where the chef becomes a traveller and the television career begins.
After that, follow whichever Bourdain you like. Typhoid Mary if you want the historian, Bobby Gold if you want the novelist, the Les Halles Cookbook if you want to cook, Get Jiro! if you want the one nobody expects. Leave World Travel until last; it reads best as a farewell.
And The Anthony Bourdain Reader (2025) is for afterwards, not for the start. A career-spanning collection is the wrong first door into a writer — but once you know the voice, the unpublished material in it, including chapters of the novel he left unfinished, is the only genuinely new Bourdain there will be.
Books About Anthony Bourdain
Written by other people, so they are not part of the sixteen above. These are the three worth knowing about.
- Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography (2021) — compiled by Laurie Woolever, his assistant of almost ten years and the co-author of Appetites and World Travel. His life told in the words of family, friends and colleagues, among them Eric Ripert, Nigella Lawson and José Andrés. Warm, authorised, and the gentlest of the three.
- Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain by Charles Leerhsen (2022) — an unauthorised biography, based on extensive interviews. It is the most reported account of his life and the most contested: reviewers praised the research and objected to how relentlessly it circles his death. The Guardian argued that doing so short-changes him.
- Care and Feeding: A Memoir by Laurie Woolever (2025) — not a book about Bourdain so much as a book about working for him, and for Mario Batali before him. A New York Times bestseller, and the most honest writing there is about what that job was like.
If you want him in his own voice instead, start with Kitchen Confidential.
Quick facts about Anthony Bourdain
- Born
- 25 June 1956, New York City
- Died
- 8 June 2018, in France, aged 61, while filming Parts Unknown
- Books
- 16 — 9 non-fiction, 3 novels, 3 graphic novels, 1 posthumous collection, 1995–2025
- Trained at
- The Culinary Institute of America, graduated 1978. Two years at Vassar before that, no degree
- Day job
- Executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles, Manhattan, from 1998; still billed by the restaurant as its “chef at large” in January 2014, long after he had left the kitchen
- Breakthrough
- “Don't Eat Before Reading This”, The New Yorker, 19 April 1999 — submitted unsolicited, and the seed of Kitchen Confidential
- Best known for
- Kitchen Confidential (2000) and Medium Raw (2010)
- Last book he saw published
- Hungry Ghosts (2018). World Travel (2021) and The Anthony Bourdain Reader (2025) both appeared after his death
- Awards
- Parts Unknown won 12 Primetime Emmys; Bourdain was a named recipient on eight of them, two for writing. One Peabody, for the 2013 season
How Anthony Bourdain Writes: The Voice From the Line
He wrote the way cooks talk to each other after service, and he never adjusted it for a general audience. The profanity, the speed, the abrupt swerves from a joke to something serious — that is kitchen register, and putting it on a page in 2000 is most of why Kitchen Confidential landed the way it did. Food writing at the time was reverent. He was not.
The trick underneath the swagger is specificity. He almost never tells you a meal was good; he tells you what was in it, who made it, what the room smelled like and what it cost. The famous warning about ordering fish on a Monday works because it comes with the delivery schedule attached. Take the concrete detail out and the persona collapses, which is what happens in the weaker tie-in books.
And he kept revising himself in public. Medium Raw exists to correct Kitchen Confidential — chefs he had been unfair to, positions he no longer held, the discomfort of having become the thing he mocked. Very few writers with a bestselling persona are willing to go back and mark their own homework. That willingness is the reason the later work is worth reading and not just watching.
One of the last long interviews he gave
On Eric Ripert, competition, and the writing life
Frequently asked questions about Anthony Bourdain's books
How many books did Anthony Bourdain write?
Anthony Bourdain wrote 16 books, published between 1995 and 2025: nine works of non-fiction, three novels, three graphic novels and one posthumous collection. The non-fiction is Kitchen Confidential (2000), Typhoid Mary (2001), A Cook's Tour (2001), Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook (2004), The Nasty Bits (2006), No Reservations (2007), Medium Raw (2010), Appetites (2016) and World Travel (2021). The fiction is Bone in the Throat (1995), Gone Bamboo (1997) and Bobby Gold (2001), and the graphic novels, all with Joel Rose, are Get Jiro! (2012), Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi (2015) and Hungry Ghosts (2018). The Anthony Bourdain Reader (2025) collects his writing and adds previously unpublished work. Lists that say eight or nine are counting only the food writing.
What was Anthony Bourdain's first book?
Bone in the Throat, a crime novel published by Villard in 1995. It is set in a Little Italy restaurant whose kitchen is being used by a mob crew, and Bourdain wrote it while he was still cooking full-time, five years before Kitchen Confidential made his name. His first work of non-fiction, and the book most people mean when they ask this, is Kitchen Confidential (2000).
What was Anthony Bourdain's last book?
The last book published while he was alive was the graphic novel Hungry Ghosts (2018). Two more have appeared since his death: World Travel: An Irreverent Guide in April 2021, which he had planned and given interviews toward and which his longtime assistant Laurie Woolever assembled from his notes, his published work and the television shows; and The Anthony Bourdain Reader in October 2025, a 512-page collection compiled by his agent Kimberly Witherspoon that includes chapters of No New Messages, the novel he never finished. The last prose book he wrote himself, start to finish, was Appetites in 2016.
Which Anthony Bourdain book should I read first?
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (2000). It is the restaurant memoir that made his name, it can be read in an evening, and every later book assumes you know it. Read Medium Raw (2010) next, in which he revisits the same material a decade on and argues with his younger self.
What is Kitchen Confidential about?
It is a memoir of professional kitchens written by a working chef: how restaurants really run, who works in them, what happens to food that does not sell, and which dishes to avoid ordering and when. It grew out of “Don't Eat Before Reading This”, an essay Bourdain submitted unsolicited to The New Yorker, which ran on 19 April 1999. He was still executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan when the book was published in 2000.
Did Anthony Bourdain write fiction?
Yes, and it came first. Bone in the Throat (1995) and Gone Bamboo (1997) are crime novels published while he was still cooking full-time and years before anyone knew his name. Bobby Gold (2001) is a set of linked crime stories, published in the United States as The Bobby Gold Stories in 2003. He also co-wrote three graphic novels with Joel Rose.
Did Anthony Bourdain write a cookbook?
Two. Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook (2004) is French bistro cooking taken straight from the brasserie he ran — stock, confit, steak frites — and is the Bourdain book people actually cook from. Appetites (2016), written with Laurie Woolever, is home cooking: the food he made for his daughter, plus a Thanksgiving chapter and a few ambitious dinner parties.
What are Anthony Bourdain's graphic novels?
Get Jiro! (2012), Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi (2015) and Hungry Ghosts (2018), all co-written with Joel Rose. The two Get Jiro books are a violent near-future story about a sushi chef in a Los Angeles run by food cartels; Hungry Ghosts is a set of horror stories told by chefs, based on an Edo-period Japanese ghost-story game, with real recipes appended.
In what order should I read Anthony Bourdain's books?
None of them require another, so publication order is optional. For a first reader: Kitchen Confidential (2000), then Medium Raw (2010), then A Cook's Tour (2001). After those three, follow whatever interests you — the crime fiction, the history, the cookbooks or the comics — and leave World Travel (2021) until last, because it reads as a farewell.
What did Anthony Bourdain do before he was a writer?
He cooked. He spent two years at Vassar College without taking a degree, graduated from The Culinary Institute of America in 1978, worked his way through a series of New York kitchens including the Supper Club and One Fifth Avenue, and became executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan in 1998. He was still running that kitchen when Kitchen Confidential was published in 2000. Long after he had stopped working there the restaurant went on billing him as its “chef at large”, a title it was still using in January 2014.
What should I read after Kitchen Confidential?
Medium Raw (2010). It is the direct sequel in everything but name: the same man ten years and a great deal of money later, going back over which chefs he had been unfair to and what fame had done to him. After that, A Cook's Tour (2001) if you want the travel writing, Typhoid Mary (2001) if you want the one nobody expects, and the Les Halles Cookbook (2004) if you would rather cook than read.
Which is the best Anthony Bourdain book?
Kitchen Confidential (2000) is the usual answer and the defensible one — it is the book that made him and the one every later book assumes you have read. Medium Raw (2010) is the book a lot of readers end up preferring, because it is him correcting himself in public. Outside the food writing, Typhoid Mary (2001) is the most consistently underrated thing he published.
Is there an Anthony Bourdain memoir or autobiography?
He never wrote a straight autobiography, but two books do the job. Kitchen Confidential (2000) is a memoir of his years in professional kitchens, and Medium Raw (2010) picks up the same life a decade later, after the fame. Together they are as close to an autobiography as he left. The Anthony Bourdain Reader (2025) adds autobiographical material he never published, including diary entries from a teenage trip to France.
Is there an Anthony Bourdain book called Parts Unknown?
No. Parts Unknown was his CNN television series, not a book, and Bourdain never published a book under that title. The closest thing is World Travel: An Irreverent Guide (2021), the posthumous destination-by-destination guide drawn from the places he covered on Parts Unknown and No Reservations. There is also Anthony Bourdain Remembered (2019), a tribute volume put together by CNN — a book about him rather than by him.
What books are there about Anthony Bourdain?
Three worth reading: Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography (2021), compiled by his longtime assistant Laurie Woolever; Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain by Charles Leerhsen (2022), an unauthorised and much-debated biography; and Woolever's own memoir Care and Feeding (2025), about working for him. None of them is written by Bourdain himself.
Who finished Anthony Bourdain's last books?
Laurie Woolever, who worked with him for almost ten years, completed World Travel: An Irreverent Guide (2021) from his own writing and from interviews she recorded with him before his death. The Anthony Bourdain Reader (2025) was assembled by his literary agent, Kimberly Witherspoon.
Sources
- Anthony Bourdain — Wikipedia
- Kitchen Confidential — Wikipedia
- Don't Eat Before Reading This — The New Yorker, 19 April 1999
- World Travel: An Irreverent Guide — HarperCollins
- The Anthony Bourdain Reader (Ecco, 28 October 2025) — ISBN 9780062863959
- Anthony Bourdain '78 — The Culinary Institute of America
- Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown — Television Academy awards record
Bibliography last verified 7 September 2026.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”
— Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential.
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