Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
Published 2000 · 416 pages · 80,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Memoir & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Travel & Food
How hard is Kitchen Confidential to read?
Kitchen Confidential scores 21 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 30 out of 100
- Culinary terminology and street slang. Accessible and energetic.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 20 out of 100
- Entirely concrete. Kitchen experience, food, people.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Dense with culinary detail, anecdote, and insider knowledge.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Chronological memoir with themed chapters.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- The kitchen as a world apart. Otherwise literal memoir.
- Ironic distance: 25 out of 100
- Self-deprecating humor throughout. Bourdain mocks himself as readily as others.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- The memoir builds to Bourdain's emergence as a writer-chef.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- Chronological with themed chapters. Energetic, easy-to-follow structure.
How Kitchen Confidential is regarded
Kitchen Confidential holds a literary regard score of 51 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.