The foundational gag of the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink—the McGuffin that moves the movie—is the “wrestling picture,” a made-up, preposterous genre that the audience is asked to believe was the cornerstone of every golden age Hollywood studio.

As genres go, “chef memoir” carries about the same level of plausibility. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, who cares how a cook got his first knife roll? Yet Anthony Bourdain made it real, and Kitchen Confidential is its Iliad.

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