Dani de la Orden recommends a book with "a lot of irony and rawness"

BarcelonaTo be able to experience what it's like inside a professional kitchen, chef Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018) wrote in 2000 Confessions of a Chef, about the dark world behind the profession and the myths of haute cuisine. The book became a bestseller and was translated into more than thirty languages. For the 25th anniversary, Salamandra publishing house published a new version with a prologue by the Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting. Director Dani de la Orden has recently read it and recommends it. “Until now I hadn't been interested in the world of cooking, but I don't know if through series likeThe Bear, or even Joc de cartes, I started to become fascinated by this universe,” explains de la Orden.

In the book, Bourdain portrays the hidden side of New York and describes his experience from when he started washing dishes in a village fish restaurant to working behind the stoves at the top of Rockefeller Center. “I liked it a lot because it's told with a lot of irony and a lot of rawness, and that adds an important touch,” says De la Orden, who will premiere the series El director, based on the novel of the same name by journalist David Jiménez.

Following the success of Confessions of a Chef, Bourdain left the kitchen and created the television program Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, in which the chef traveled the world discovering different cuisines. Bourdain's life will reach cinemas with the biopicTony, by Matt Johnson, which will also star Antonio Banderas. The cook dedicated a report to El Bulli titled Decoding Ferran Adrià, which was screened at Berlinale in 2008. Adrià himself described Bourdain's memoirs, recommended by De la Orden, in this way: “No one has ever explained the inside of restaurant kitchens with such freshness and truthfulness”.