Anthony Bourdain’s Rules For Eating
What Bourdain taught us about eating and not ordering the Monday fish
I’ve been reading Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential lately — and it’s wrecked me, in the best possible way. Every line he writes drips with that raw, nicotine-stained honesty that’s been scrubbed clean from most modern food writing. He writes like a chef, a man possessed, a man abashedly unafraid of pushback. The sentences crackle, the stories reek of sweat, butter, and self-loathing. It’s funny, vulgar, and weirdly tender. He doesn’t just discuss food, but life, life that happens behind the swinging kitchen door, where a chef’s station is his shrine and the floor is slick with grease and truth.
I find myself underlining every other page, pausing after certain paragraphs just to sit with the weight of what he’s saying.
He drags us into the underbelly of fine dining — the burns, the rot, the cocaine, the camaraderie — and shows us that the so-called temple of gastronomy was really just a cracked cathedral held together by duct tape, butter, and adrenaline. “Your body is not a temple,” he once wrote. “It’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”
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But beneath the profanity and bravado was a strange tenderness — the kind that only comes from loving something so deeply you can’t help but expose its flaws. Kitchen Confidential was Bourdain saying: “Here’s the truth. It’s ugly, it’s brilliant, it’ll probably make you sick — but it’s real.” And that’s exactly how he ate.
Here, then, are Anthony Bourdain’s rules for eating out — sharp, unfiltered, and absolutely worth it.
Never Order the Monday Fish
This one’s practically legend by now, but reading it in Kitchen Confidential never gets old. The “Monday fish special” — the one your waiter swears is fresh? It’s not. “Chances are that the Monday-night tuna you want has been kicking around in the kitchen since Friday morning, under God knows what conditions,” Bourdain wrote.
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More than the fish, he exposes the illusion of restaurants, and how they’re It’s not just about the fish. Behind every perfect fillet and artful drizzle lies chaos: deliveries delayed, fridges overstuffed, meat aging past its prime. Mondays are hangovers in chef-land. So might as well eat like we know it.
Tuesdays Are Sacred
I love how romantic he makes Tuesday sound. The quiet after the weekend storm. “Generally speaking, the good stuff comes in on Tuesday,” he said — the seafood is fresh, the chef is rested, the creativity’s back.
There’s something deeply human in that — the idea that the best meals come when no one’s performing. Tuesday is when restaurants cook for themselves again, not for the birthday crowd or the Instagrammers. It’s when the chef’s got a cigarette in one hand and a sense of purpose in the other. That’s when you want to eat there — not when the lights are dimmed and the menu’s shouting for attention. Tuesday is the truth shift.
Don’t Order Meat Well-Done (Unless You Hate Yourself)
When Bourdain said people who order well-done steak “pay for the privilege of eating our garbage,” we thought it was a culinary insult. But turns out, it’s not.
He called it the “save for well-done” practice: the old cuts, the tired meat, the bits no one else wants. Grill it to death and nobody notices. “The philistine who orders his food well-done is not likely to notice the difference between food and flotsam,” he wrote.
To him, eating was about trust and surrender. About letting the chef feed you the way food is meant to be — alive, pink, imperfect.
Chicken Is for Cowards
It’s almost funny how much he loathed chicken (almost as much as he loathed vegetarians). “It occupies its ubiquitous place on menus as an option for customers who can’t decide what they want to eat,” he wrote — and he wasn’t wrong. Chicken is safe. Chicken is beige. Chicken is the edible equivalent of an HR email.
Pork, on the other hand — that was rebellion. Pork was flavour, character, risk. “Pork is cool,” he said.
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Chicken, for Bourdain, represented the fear of living dirty. It spoiled fast, spread disease, and bored him to death. Pork? Pork was truth. Greasy, glorious, unapologetic truth.
Butter Is the Secret Sauce
There’s this moment in Kitchen Confidential where he just admits it: the thing that makes restaurant food taste better than your cooking is butter. Lots of it. A full stick in every sauce. “In almost every restaurant worth patronising,” he said, “sauces are enriched with mellowing, emulsifying butter.”
That Bread Basket? It’s Been Around
“The reuse of bread has been an open secret — and a fairly standard practice — in the industry for years,” he wrote, as if he’s shrugging through the page.
But then again, he’s not saying it as a way of warning us. “If the germs that may have been breathed in the basket’s general direction upset you,” he added, “you might as well avoid air travel, or subways.”
That’s Bourdain in one line: you can either be the kind of person who sends the bread back or the kind who tears into it anyway, knowing the world’s a little dirty. He’d prefer you to be the latter.
Brunch Is Where Dignity Goes to Die
No one eviscerated brunch quite like Bourdain. To him, it was a scam — a convenient way for restaurants to dump their leftovers under a pile of hollandaise. “Brunch is punishment,” he said. “It’s the B-Team’s shift.”
It makes sense, doesn’t it? You take Friday’s fish, Saturday’s steak, dice them up, drown them in sauce, and call it “Sunday special.” Meanwhile, the real chefs are sleeping off hangovers.
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Meanwhile, he called hollandaise “a veritable petri dish,” — made hours ago, held warm for eternity.
Never Trust Discount Sushi
“I can’t imagine a better example of Things To Be Wary Of than bargain sushi,” he wrote — and honestly, if Bourdain says that, believe him.
Cheap sushi is a contradiction in terms. Sushi, done right, is craftsmanship — fresh fish, precision, respect. The moment you slap a “half-off” sticker on it, something’s wrong. Maybe the fish is old. Maybe the rice isn’t vinegared right. Maybe the worms are still wriggling.
Bourdain’s rule was simple: respect what’s raw. Or it’ll disrespect you back.
Mussels: Proceed With Caution
Mussels, for him, were a gamble he rarely took. “Most cooks are less than scrupulous in their handling of them,” he said. “More often than not, mussels are allowed to wallow in their own foul-smelling piss.”
That line alone could make you swear off shellfish for life. But it’s not really about mussels — it’s about knowing when to trust the kitchen. If you know the chef, if you’ve seen the place, if you can smell the sea instead of the sewer — go ahead. Otherwise, skip it.
Ground Beef Specials Are Just Disguises
You know those comforting dishes — shepherd’s pie, chili, anything “house-made” with minced beef? Yeah, he didn’t touch them. To him, those were where leftovers went to die. “Perfect for disguising tired meat,” he said.
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You can’t see the age of ground meat, can’t smell what’s hidden under spice. So they grind it, sauce it, and move on. It’s not evil — it’s just restaurant math.
Swordfish: Just Don’t
Even the man who ate cobra hearts drew the line somewhere. For Bourdain, that line was swordfish. “Riddled with parasites,” he said — worms as long as three feet, coiled like snakes inside the flesh. That visual alone is enough.
He also knew swordfish carried high mercury levels, and honestly, why risk it? There’s courage in eating adventurously — and then there’s stupidity. Bourdain knew the difference.
Always Be Kind to Your Waiter
This might be my favourite Bourdain rule — not because it’s practical, but because it’s moral. “Your waiter is your ally,” he wrote. They know the truth — which dishes are dead, which ingredients are fresh, what the chef’s actually proud of tonight.
If they like you, they’ll save you. Sometimes literally. Be polite. Bourdain understood that better than anyone — kindness gets you better meals and better stories.
And Finally, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dirt
The thing about Bourdain is, even after all the horror stories — the spoiled fish, the recycled bread, the dodgy sauce — he never told you to stop eating out. “Do all these horrifying assertions frighten you?” he wrote. “Should you stop eating out? No way.”
In the end, his philosophy wasn’t about avoiding risk — it was about embracing it.
“Your body is not a temple,” he said. “It’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.” And maybe that’s all any of us can do.