I want Kitchen Confidential. Now.

From Time:
In Medium Raw, Bourdain Is the Last Honest Man

The book Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, Anthony Bourdain's long-awaited sequel to Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, went on sale on Tuesday; it should far outsell its predecessor, which came out a decade ago, before its author was a big star and before the country developed a hearty appetite for back-of-the-house tell-alls. While any number of copycat memoirs, blogs and reality shows have flourished since Bourdain's best seller detailed his cooking years, he has moved on to other things, traveling the world for his TV show, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations; writing funny and thoughtful books based on his adventures with the show; hitting the lecture circuit hard; and generally having a good time. Like his hero Bob Dylan, as soon as he founds a movement, he leaves it behind. Now he's back, writing about chefs and restaurants again, with the same quality that made Kitchen Confidential so compelling. There is no more honest man in the media than Tony Bourdain. And that makes all the difference between him and the food-media complex that he helped create.

You can see some measure of how things have changed by looking at Bourdain's subject matter. He is no longer a working chef; the moral authority of being an anonymous, hardworking, weathered veteran cook is gone in Medium Raw. He's another outsider now, a morally suspect "sellout" with a cushy life and a different perspective. But of course, that's what you would expect a former chef to say. Bourdain loathes the Food Network (his show is on the Travel Channel) and distrusts the rah-rah spectacle and hype of celebrity chefdom, a world in which he is a major presence, to his considerable discomfiture. "What the f___ am I doing here?" he asks himself at an elite banquet. "I am the peer of no man nor woman at this table. None of them at any time in my career would have hired me, even the guy sitting next to me [Eric Ripert]. And he's my best friend in the world." (Ripert, the chef at the famous Le Bernardin in New York City, has become Bourdain's BFF over the past few years.)

A whole chapter follows parsing the advantages of selling out; it is as torturous in its self-examination as a seminarian's confession. Bourdain isn't famous because he knows so much about restaurant cooking (though he does) or because he's always cool (he isn't) or even because he hosts a popular show about liquor and piglets. Bourdain is famous because he is vivid and real and mercilessly honest at every second — in a sphere whose atmosphere consists of bombast, shilling, sanctimony and the unholy alliance between marketing communications and social networking.

The contrast is best seen in the chapters on Bourdain's heroes and villains. (The phrase appears in the book but could well be the title.) The heroes are honest chefs who cook not on TV but in the real world, doing good work, like Ripert, England's nose-to-tail chef Fergus Henderson and Momofuku's David Chang, who gets his own chapter and whom Bourdain most seems to identify with — minus Chang's prodigious talent. The villains include bloggers; vegetarians; wealthy, drug-addled philistines; and, worst of all, the GQ critic Alan Richman, who gets a counterpart chapter to Chang's, pithily entitled, "Alan Richman Is a Douchebag." (See what famous chefs would eat for their last supper.)

The Richman chapter should be required reading for anyone who is regularly exposed to the food media; no more withering, or accurate, picture has ever been painted of the strange ethical twilight in which chefs, writers, bloggers and publicists all circle frantically, like so many fruit bats at dusk. Bourdain accuses only a few writers of being actively corrupt, but he is appalled by how self-serving they are and how disingenuous they can be about their motivations. Richman, a multiple James Beard Award–winning critic, has been fighting a flame war with Bourdain, who was enraged when Richman took a cheap shot at Bourdain's former restaurant without saying why he was attacking it. Bourdain makes it clear who his friends and enemies are and writes about them without pretense of objectivity. Like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, there's nothing he despises so much as the stench of lies.

In the end, of course, there is no one in Medium Raw that Bourdain is as unsparing with as himself, and that is the book's redemption, what sets it apart from the mindless cheers-and-jeers cacophony of so much food writing. In a searingly revealing final chapter, the cynical but essentially guileless chef breaks down the reason for his anger: once being a working chef with no health plan, no hopes and a bad marriage. In the present, he is angry at the abuse of food and cooking by TV food stars, those stars' frauds and follies and himself for being part of the circus. He's still mad; that's where his energy and eloquence come from. It's the best part of who he is. Happily, that anger is still white and pure after all these years; it burns away all the impurities of the food-media fog that is now his habitat. Stay angry, Tony: you're the conscience of the culinary world. We need you now more than ever.

And now, a few words with Bourdain:

One of the cool things about the book is how it reflects your moral universe, à la the heroes and villains part. Alice Waters is a well-meaning hypocrite, Sandra Lee a sexual predator, Fergus Henderson and David Chang heroes of gastronomy. Why do you have such a Manichean view of the world?
I admit I have a somewhat apocalyptic worldview. It comes from the years in the kitchen, maybe — where the waiter during the heat of service is either your best friend ever or the worst, most miserable, evil son of a b____ in the history of the world, at least until the shift is over and you have beers together at the bar. I am passionate in my dislikes as well as my likes. I have an acute — maybe overacute — sense of injustice and the absurd. Maybe it goes back to too-early exposure to the works of Stanley Kubrick. Or maybe it's the Nixon re-election. I never got over that. Or maybe it's like a gland thing.

You talk in the book about how you're going to sell out, but for some reason you still haven't. Why not? What are you waiting for?
What did Molière say about writing being like prostitution? "First you do it for fun. Then you do it for a few friends. Finally you do it for money." I've done "product integrations" for the show. In this brave new world of TiVo and DVR, no one watches television as scheduled. They fast-forward through the commercials, they delete them, they download [shows] commercial-free. Advertisers-sponsors aren't stupid. They know that increasingly, the only way to get their product seen is in the body of the show. Once I agreed to do that, for the cause, for the budget, for whatever, I pretty much lost my cherry. As I said in the book, it's vanity that precludes me from doing actual ads. So far. Not integrity. That surely will change. I think it was the Keith Richards ad for Vuitton. I thought, Jesus! If he's not too cool to do it, what's my problem?

What are you doing with Eric Ripert in Paris?
Making an episode of No Reservations. It's pretty amazing what's going on here. The word revolution is not entirely inappropriate. The other day I watched Eric having to actually defend himself for running a great, three-star restaurant. Incredible food from really creative young chefs for cheap. Like, really cheap. And everywhere we go, whatever new chefs we meet, rogue artisan types serving Michelin-quality food in tiny little bistros, they speak the name of He Who They Have All Heard Of — or already know and admire: "Chang ... Chang ... Chang." This should be a pretty amazingly food-centric episode. We're eating some good stuff. And I got to do the little sailboat thing in the fountain at the Tuileries like my father did with me when I was a kid. That was cool.

Now that you are traveling in the U.S. for speaking gigs, are there any chain restaurants you'll eat in?
I do everything I can to avoid eating at chain restaurants. But if it's 5 in the morning in a Midwestern airport and I'm coming off a late-night gig having had nothing to eat and I'm starving or desperate for coffee and some filler, I have been known to slink, shamefacedly, into a Chili's or Mickey D's. I've gotten pretty good at familiarizing myself with decent airport food around the world and planning around it. On the other hand, when in L.A., I always, always load up with In-N-Out Burger on the way from LAX to the hotel. Love that stuff.

Josh Ozersky is a James Beard Award—winning food writer and the author of The Hamburger: A History. His food video site, Ozersky.TV, is updated daily. He is currently at work on a biography of Colonel Sanders.