6th April 2009

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CURRENT OBSESSION: kitchen confidential

If I’m being completely honest with myself and with you, Internet, I watched this show (after discovering its entire first season on Hulu) for two reasons, besides the basic reasoning that Sunday night TV sucks.

Number one: my brother is a culinary student so by proxy, I have a mild fascination with all things culinary. Number two: Bradley Cooper. He has occasional bouts of doucheface and for some reason I occasionally confuse him with Bear Grylls in my head, but I’ve been a little bit infatuated with Bradley Cooper since his February appearance on SNL. While the episode is probably forgettable to most SNL fans, Cooper’s evident enthusiasm was endearing and I thought that he was one of those rare hosts who seemed completely in his element performing alongside the cast.

But if I came to Kitchen Confidential with only a silly crush on a sorta-famous actor and a mild interest in culinary culture, I stuck around for the show’s stellar cast and up-tempo storytelling. The writers do not spend very much time letting the story stew and instead set up the premise that Jack Bourdain is a renowned chef recovering from a bad reputation; out of the blue, he gets an offer to take over as head chef at a “nice, really nice” downtown restaurant called Nolita (Frank Langella aka Nixon plays the intimidating financier). Jack assembles his rag-tag team of chefs in a mere matter of minutes (in TV time) and by the end of the pilot episode he is declared the premiere chef in New York City by the top restaraunt critic in town. See what I mean about up-tempo? The rest of the episodes follow suit by introducing a major conflict early-on and resolving it within 22 minutes. Very satisfying storytelling in contrast to the tendency that some shows have and that is to let the story slow-boil by concentrating on the minutiae of characters’ lives and teasing us with tiny morsels of meaning each episode but never letting us see what is actually happening until it’s all already happened. THIS SHOW IS NOT LIKE THAT and, while some may criticize it for that, I appreciate it for that reason.

Oh and that stellar cast? Immediately, I recognized Nicholas Brendan from Buffy as a scheming, fast-talking, not-as-cool-as-he-is-in-his-own-mind pastry chef and John Francis Daley as a comically nervous new chef from Freaks & Geeks. And then there’s my favorite: Steven the not-so-ethical, but always charming “kitchen magician” who can make anything happen played by Welsh actor, Owain Yeoman.

The show is inspired by chef, writer, and world traveller Anthony Bourdain’s book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (2001) his expose/memoir of working in the NYC restaurant biz. The TV show retains some of the edge that Bourdain is known for, but Cooper’s portrayal of Jack Bourdain is notably more sanitized and more sober than the actual Anthony Bourdain. Cooper said, “I think of my Bourdain not as the dark, jaded guy in the book, but rather a Bourdain like Sam Malone in Cheers: the guy everyone revolves around, the semi-sane guy in a crazy place.” I certainly get the Sam Malone-ness, but if it’s any consolation for the other Anthony Bourdain fans out there, I think quite a bit of him is preserved in Yeoman’s Steven who is certainly not sober and hardly clean.

-rachael