Author Guide · Lisanne Swart
Books Written by Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Bourdain was not really a food writer. He was a writer who happened to work in kitchens — and who understood, better than almost anyone, that what people eat, how they cook, and where they sit down together tells you everything about who they are. His books are rude and funny and sometimes devastating. They are about power and class and hunger in every sense of the word. He died in 2018 and left behind a body of work that holds up completely. This is all of it, in order — with notes on where to start and what connects to what.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 books · Non-Fiction, Memoir & Crime Fiction · Updated May 2026
Bone in the Throat
Bourdain’s debut novel, written while he was still working as a chef. Tommy Pagana is a young cook in a New York restaurant owned by his uncle — and connected to the mob. When he witnesses a murder in the kitchen, he becomes the kind of inconvenient witness that nobody survives being. It is sharp, funny, and completely specific about how professional kitchens actually work. You can feel the grease on every page.
Nobody reads this one first, and that’s a mistake. The voice is already fully formed — dark, wiseass, unimpressed. If you’ve only known Bourdain through television, this is a useful reminder that he was always, first, a writer who had read his crime fiction and knew exactly what he was doing with it.
Gone Bamboo
A hitman and his wife are retired and living on a Caribbean island, trying to stay out of trouble. They do not succeed. Gone Bamboo is looser and sunnier than Bone in the Throat — it reads like Elmore Leonard on vacation — and the food and drink details are, predictably, impeccable. Bourdain is having fun here in a way that feels genuine.
This is the least-read of his books and the most purely enjoyable. The plot does not particularly matter. What matters is the feeling of reading someone who loves good crime fiction and good rum in equal measure and is not going to apologize for either.
Kitchen Confidential
The book that changed everything — for Bourdain and, arguably, for how the public thinks about restaurant kitchens. Written from inside twenty years of professional cooking, it is brutally honest about the chaos, the hierarchy, the drugs, the loyalty, and the strange beauty of working service on a Saturday night. It was adapted from a 1999 New Yorker essay and became an immediate bestseller. It still reads like a punch in the face, in the best possible way.
This is where you start. It is one of those rare books that invented its own genre — the behind-the-scenes professional memoir told without any interest in making the industry look good. The chapter on how kitchens actually work on a Sunday morning (don’t order fish) became genuinely influential. Everything Bourdain did afterwards was in conversation with this book.
A Cook’s Tour
The book version of his first television series. Bourdain travels — Vietnam, Japan, Morocco, Russia, Portugal — eating whatever is in front of him and trying to understand what a place actually is through its food. The TV version was fine. The book is better, because in the book he is allowed to be uncomfortable and uncertain and occasionally wrong without the camera requiring resolution.
This is where the travel writing begins in earnest, and where you understand what Bourdain was actually doing: not reviewing restaurants, but using food as a way into questions about how people live. The best journalism — and this is journalism — makes the subject a lens, not the point. He learned that here.
The Nasty Bits
A collection of 37 essays and articles drawn from his magazine writing — Gourmet, the New York Times, various food publications — plus some new pieces and a short story at the end. The range is deliberately strange: celebrity chefs he admires, celebrity chefs he doesn’t, a piece on the ethics of eating meat, a piece on cocaine in restaurant kitchens, a piece on the best meal he ever ate. The quality is uneven and Bourdain says so in the introduction.
This is the book that shows you the scope of what he was doing as a writer. The essays are looser than the memoirs — more opinionated, less polished, more willing to be wrong. If you find yourself wanting to read him at his most uncensored, start here. The introduction alone, where he describes the collection as something between a clearinghouse and a valediction, is worth the price.
→ My personal essays reading list: when you want something real
Medium Raw
The follow-up to Kitchen Confidential, written a decade later when Bourdain was famous and wealthy and deeply ambivalent about both. He is harder on himself here than in any other book — about what success did to him, about the distance between the person he presents on television and whoever he actually is, about the ways the food world he helped make popular became exactly the kind of self-congratulatory culture he once mocked. There is a chapter about the perfect meal that is as good as anything he ever wrote.
This is the more interesting book, though fewer people read it. Kitchen Confidential is the arrival. Medium Raw is the reckoning — what happens after you get everything you wanted and have to figure out what it means. The self-awareness is uncomfortable in exactly the right way.
Appetites: A Cookbook
His last major book published in his lifetime, and his most personal. Not a restaurant cookbook — a home cookbook, built around what he actually cooked for his daughter. The recipes are unfussy and serious: roast chicken, pasta, Thanksgiving. The voice is the same as always but quieter. Photographed by Bobby Fisher with a deliberately unglamorous aesthetic. The introduction is one of the most honest things he ever wrote about fatherhood.
People expect this to be a performance and it isn’t. The Bourdain of Appetites is trying to feed a child well and thinking carefully about what that means. Read it after Medium Raw, not before — it lands differently when you understand what he was working through in the decade between the two books.
World Travel: An Irreverent Guide
Compiled after his death by his longtime collaborator Laurie Woolever from notes, transcripts, interviews, and the vast archive of his television work. Country by country, it collects his actual recommendations — where to eat, what to order, what to avoid, what a place actually feels like versus what the guidebooks say. Contributors including Eric Ripert, Nigella Lawson, and others add their own takes. It is unfinished in a way that is both its limitation and its honesty.
This is not a Bourdain book in the way the others are — it does not have his momentum or his argument. But for anyone who wants to travel the way he traveled, which is to say with curiosity and appetite and no interest in the tourist infrastructure, it is genuinely useful. Read it as a document of someone who paid close attention to the world for twenty years and left his notes behind.
Where to start with Bourdain
If you have never read him
→ Start with Kitchen Confidential. It is the one that explains everything else and it is still, twenty-five years later, one of the most readable non-fiction books of the decade it came from.
If you want to understand what he was actually doing as a writer
→ Read Medium Raw after Kitchen Confidential. The gap between the two books — and the self-awareness about what that gap cost — is where the real thinking happens.
If you want to understand where he fits in the tradition of gonzo non-fiction
→ Read The Nasty Bits alongside Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson. Bourdain cited Thompson constantly. The lineage is direct — same refusal to be objective, same insistence on being inside the story, same suspicion of comfort.
If you want the essays at their most unfiltered
→ The Nasty Bits, and then my personal essays reading list for what to read next.
If the investigative, truth-from-the-inside quality is what draws you
→ Bad Blood by John Carreyrou and my best investigative journalism reading list — the same commitment to exposing what institutions don’t want you to know, applied to Silicon Valley instead of restaurant kitchens.
If the memoir quality is what you’re after — the honest reckoning with a life lived at full volume
→ My best memoirs and biographies list has everything I’d reach for next.
Frequently asked questions about Anthony Bourdain’s books
From the bookshelf
“I am not a chef. I am a writer who cooks.” — Anthony Bourdain
If you enjoyed this, you'will find more honest, unfiltered books on my personal bookshelf — curated for readers who want the real thing.
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