HEAT RISING

The era of the line cook.

- HANNAH GOLDFIELD

How back-of-house workers came to the forefront of pop culture.

In “Kitchen Confidential,” the book that launched Anthony Bourdain’s writing career, he explained that his subject was “street-level cooking and its practitioners.” Line cooks—the people actually making your food—“were the heroes,” he wrote. It was clear what kind of heroism he meant: obscured and nearly undetectable; all drudgery, no glory; the hustle its own reward. In the preface to an updated paperback edition, Bourdain said that the book had been wrongly perceived as an exposé of the restaurant business, when all he was trying to do was write something that his fellow cooks found “entertaining and true.” “I was not—and am not—an advocate for change in the restaurant business,” he wrote. “I like the business just the way it is.”

Whether he meant to or not, Bourdain did change the business, in part by stoking the public’s interest in its inner workings. His vivid portrait of life in the kitchen helped turn the line cook into an ascendant figure; a quarter of a century later, people without any particular connection to the industry are familiar with the image of a cook drinking ice water out of a plastic quart container; with the term “back of house”; with the ritual of “family meal.” The TV show “The Bear” has proffered an insider’s view of the quotidian dramas of opening a restaurant, giving focus not only to Carmy, the head chef and owner, but also to Sydney, a sous-chef learning her worth in macho environs, and to Lionel, a quietly ambitious pastry chef.