Kitchen Confidential is the renowned chef Anthony Bourdain's memoir, and it also serves as an attempt to illuminate the various hazards and logistical errors that exist in restaurant kitchens. Bourdain characterizes the culinary industry as constantly undermined by problems that aren't obvious to the consumer, who is primarily conscious of the generally presentable sphere of the dining room.

Bourdain's work obtains its power from its confessional style: he details and criticizes the failures of the modern kitchen but grounds his analysis in his own failures. He casts the plight of the modern chef as a series of necessary failures that build toward, but never actually reach, a perfect, cinematic culinary ideal. The book also looks beyond the kitchen itself, providing a holistic analysis of the lives of the people who wish to inhabit a professional kitchen, detailing struggles he has seen with drug abuse and poverty. Though he empathizes with the plight of the modern aspiring chef, his book is also partially a warning and guide for consumers to avoid certain ugly restaurant patterns which appear fine on the surface, for example, ordering well-done beef.