APPETITES, Anthony Bourdain's first cookbook in more than ten years, boils down forty-plus years of professional cooking and globe-trotting to a tight repertoire of personal favorites --- dishes that everyone should (at least in Mr. Bourdain’s opinion) know how to cook. After years of traveling more than 200 days a year, he now enjoys entertaining at home. Years of prep lists and the hyper-organization necessary for a restaurant kitchen, however, have caused him, in his words, to have "morphed into a psychotic, anally retentive, bad-tempered Ina Garten."

In a not-too-distant future L.A. where master chefs rule the town like crime lords, a bloody culinary war is raging. On one side are the Internationalists, who blend foods from all over the world. On the other, the "Vertical Farm," who prepare nothing but organic, vegetarian, macrobiotic dishes. Into this maelstrom steps Jiro, a renegade and ruthless sushi chef. Both sides want Jiro to join their factions. 

Almost two decades ago, the New Yorker published a now infamous article, “Don’t Eat before You Read This,” by then little-known chef Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain spared no one’s appetite as he revealed what happens behind the kitchen door. The article was a sensation, and the book it spawned, the now classic KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL became an even bigger sensation, a mega-bestseller with over one million copies in print. Frankly confessional, addictively acerbic and utterly unsparing, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business.