In 2000, the chef Anthony Bourdain made his name as a writer with Kitchen Confidential, a book full of funny stories and candid accounts of life in restaurant kitchens. His path to that book began with a summer job washing dishes.
As a teenager, Bourdain shared a summer house with friends in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He wasn't working, and his housemates wanted him to help pay the rent. One of them waited tables at a local seafood restaurant and helped him get a job there as a dishwasher. It was the Flagship Restaurant, which Bourdain would later call "The Dreadnaught" in his writing.
Bourdain had already become curious about food on a family trip to France, where he tried raw oysters and vichyssoise, a cold soup. At the Flagship, it was life in the kitchen that drew him in. He loved listening to the cooks and their tall tales. Before long, he moved from washing dishes to cooking.
In 1978, Bourdain graduated from the Culinary Institute of America. He went on to spend two decades in the restaurant industry and wrote two mystery novels in the 1990s. His breakthrough came with "Don't Eat Before Reading This," a 1999 essay for The New Yorker. Bourdain expanded it into his first nonfiction book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. It became a New York Times bestseller. The world he had first encountered at the dishwashing station had given him a subject to write about.