Hannah Goldfield on Anthony Bourdain's "Don't Eat Before Reading This"

I’m not being facetious when I say that I remember exactly where I was when I first became aware of Anthony Bourdain. It was the summer of 2002, two years after he published “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,” a seminal and unsparing account of life as a chef in restaurant kitchens. I was fifteen, and on vacation with a friend and her family, on Long Island. My friend’s father was reading the paperback and shared aloud one of the dirty secrets in the book, which we all took, immediately, as gospel: one should never order fish on a Monday.

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Bourdain’s elaborate passage explaining why this was true had first been published, in The New Yorker, in the 1999 essay “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” which he expanded, rapidly, into “Kitchen Confidential.” (The short answer was that “many fish purveyors don’t deliver on Saturday, so the chances are that the Monday-night tuna you want has been kicking around in the kitchen since Friday morning, under God knows what conditions”; the long answer took you deep into the culture and psychology of the restaurant business.) He wrote it, originally, for an alt-weekly called the New York Press, which had slated it as a cover story before the editor killed it at the last minute. Bourdain had imagined his audience would be insular and small: “I thought, I’m going to write something that will entertain other cooks, maybe I’ll get a hundred bucks, and my fry cook will find this funny,” he recalled in 2017, during an appearance at The New Yorker Festival. When the article found its way into