Why Anthony Bourdain Rarely Ordered Fish On Mondays

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Among the influential celebrity chefs, Anthony Bourdain left more than an impression on the culinary world. Many people live by the things they've learned from reading his books and watching his travel documentaries. During his career, Anthony Bourdain advised against ordering several dishes from restaurants, and his 2000 book "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly" held many of these recommendations. For instance, Bourdain said everyone should be "wary of" ordering discount sushi because of the higher risk of getting sick. He also wrote about his rule to never eat restaurant fish on Mondays.

"I never order fish on Monday, unless I'm eating at Le Bernardin — a four-star restaurant where I know they are buying their fish directly from the source. I know how old most seafood is on Monday — about four to five days old!" Bourdain said in the book. He explained the tricky business of restaurant seafood, noting that chefs have to anticipate how much fish they will need when placing orders for Friday morning delivery. The fish that isn't fully prepared and served over the weekend is kept in a refrigerator with other raw proteins, and the refrigerator conditions aren't optimal as the doors are constantly opened and closed to retrieve items. As they try to recoup the money spent on their orders without getting diners sick, seafood vendors are closed on weekends and also trying to unload leftover inventory on Monday before the new catch comes in.

Bourdain's stance on the matter was very strong at the time. A decade later, though, he retracted the stance in the book "Medium Raw."

After getting so much attention for the no-fish-on-Monday perspective, Anthony Bourdain did a 180 in his 2010 book "Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook." The celebrity chef explained that, at the time he wrote "Kitchen Confidential," he was an angry, cranky old man. "I wrote those immortal words about not going for the Monday fish, the ones that'll haunt me long after I'm crumbs in a can, knowing nothing other than New York City. And times, to be fair, have changed," he said. Clarifying that the worst day of the week to order fish from a restaurant isn't necessarily Monday, he noted that he wouldn't order it from a restaurant where seafood isn't "the main thrust of their business. But things are different now for chefs and cooks."

Bourdain also went into detail about his change of heart during an interview with Insider Tech in 2016: "Look, do me one favor, people, please, eat the fish on Monday. It was 16 years ago. It was a very different world." Going into more detail about why, he noted that everyone now knows how to spot good fish — how it should look, smell, and be cooked. Food standards are higher now, and restaurants can't serve what they used to. Also, the culinary world and diners are no longer afraid of how enlightened cultures have been eating fish with the bones and heads still attached, and it's actually becoming more desirable. "Regrettably, 'don't eat fish on Monday' is going to be on my headstone," he added, "But it's almost two decades later. Things have changed. Eat the damn fish."