Anthony Bourdain's First Kitchen Job Was Not Cooking

Famed chef and TV host, Anthony Bourdain, never planned on being either of those things. Long before he found his favorite burger in a cozy New York tavern, he actively fought being on TV, turning down opportunities and not taking his first show, "A Cook's Tour," seriously. He saw the show as just another way to fund his travels as he wrote and ate for his second book, also titled "A Cook's Tour." It was when he realized he could use the tools of TV to also tell stories that he embraced the cameras.

What started his whole career in food, though, was even more happenstance. It began when he was seventeen, and he followed friends to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to indulge in what he called in his book "Kitchen Confidential," his "sensualist inclinations." It was there that a roommate had enough with Bourdain's penniless ways and made him start washing dishes at the restaurant she waited tables at, The Flagship.

He didn't want the job. As he puts it in his first book, "Scrubbing pots and pans, scraping plates and peeling mountains of potatoes, tearing the little beards off mussels, picking scallops and cleaning shrimp did not sound or look attractive to me." He needed the money, so he showed up to work. Once he realized the job only helped him live a life of debauchery and not hinder it, he dove deeper into the suds.

Working at the dish pit didn't make Anthony Bourdain enamored with traditional French dishes like beef bourguignon or bowls of Vietnamese bún bò Huế soup; the love of food came later. It was the lives the chefs led that initially convinced Bourdain that working in the restaurant industry was a worthwhile endeavor. "Getting a job washing dishes to pay the rent, I was quickly impressed by the line cook. I wanted to drink as much free liquor as they had. I wanted to ** as many waitresses as they did. I wanted to be able to steal whole sirloin strips and load up my freezer with frozen shrimp just like they did. Ya know, it was exactly what you look for as a teenager," he reminisced on an episode of A Cook's Tour.

All the colorful degenerates he worked with inspired him to work his way up the line hierarchy. It was when The Flagship was bought by a more successful restaurateur in Provincetown named Mario that Bourdain decided to change his ways. He was humbled by the faster-paced, more professional environment that he could not keep up with. After being ridiculed and demoted, he made the choice to go to culinary school: "I would do whatever was necessary to become as good as, or better than, this Mario crew," he wrote in Kitchen Confidential.