Utopia Lost? The Cultural Incorporation of the Subcultural Kitchen

The publication of Anthony Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly marked a turning point in the representation of chefs and cooks in popular media. Bourdain, although by no means the first celebrity chef, introduced a new image, what I call the “chef underground.” The kitchen is a space of labor exploitation. Yet, for those travelers in the chef underground it allowed for a transient existence, relatively free from outside scrutiny and normative expectations of behavior. By detailing these alternative social and cultural dispositions—and aligning himself with them—Bourdain constructed a unique antiestablishment persona for himself as well as rendered the nebulous group of outsider chefs and cooks legible in mainstream culture. Drawing on the work of José Esteban Muñoz, I argue that, prior to the publication of Kitchen Confidential, the professional kitchen functioned in a utopian manner by providing a space in which alternative, antisocial ways of being offered a refuge from dominant notions of proper subjecthood. Through ethnographic fieldwork in a restaurant featured on Bourdain’s television show No Reservations, I aim to understand how Bourdain’s exposure of the chef underground affects those in professional kitchens and if this once utopian space offers a way of recuperating an alternative temporality.