Kitchen Confidential

Kitchen Confidential

Unless you only ever eat in, there's a load of great tips in Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential.

• No Monday seafood. There's no weekend deliveries. Thursday's fish arrived on Friday morning. By Monday it's four days old.

• Monday seafood specials are a special case. A special avoid at all costs case. They're special because the kitchen wants to get shot of them.

• Only eat mussels where you can see them being prepared and cooked.

Bourdain: “I have had, at a very good Paris brasserie, the misfortune to eat a single bad mussel, one treacherous little guy hidden among an otherwise impeccable group. It slammed shut like a book, sent me crawling to the bathroom shitting like a mink, clutching my stomach and projectile vomiting.”

I didn't know that about mink. He goes on:

“I prayed that night. For many hours. And, as you might assume, I'm the worst kind of atheist.”

• No fish 'en vinagrette', which, apparently, means 'preserved' or 'disguised'.

• No hollandaise. Not ever. It is the culinary equivalent of a petri dish in a germ warfare lab.

• Don't eat where the bogs are bad. They let you see the bogs. Imagine the kitchen.

• Saving for well-done. Dodgy dealing, really this, but it makes sense. Throw away meat that cost money? Nope, push it to the back of the locker, and hope for some sap to come in demanding his steak well-done. What was bound for the bin is now back on the plate.

Bourdain: “The dumb bastard is paying for the privilege of eating [the restaurant's] garbage! What's not to like?”

• Avoid the blackboard 'specials'. See above. Stick to the laminated menu.

• Long menu? Low turnover? Avoid the obscure items. They'll have been festering a while before you rescue them from the bin (see save for well done).

The Guardian has a dirty trick list, too:

• Top right menu item. That's where most people look first. Stick an expensive and unpopular item there, and everything else seems reasonable by comparison.

• The second-cheapest bottle of wine? The most popular. Therefore the one with the highest mark-up.

• Off-menu 'specials' (there's a theme developing here) given by waiters without the prices. Often high-cost items. They count on you being too shy to ask.

• The complimentary salt-laden snacks are not so much of a giveaway when a bottle of water costs over £4.00.

All the advice is prefaced by confirmation that, of course, on a Caribbean beach, where the barbecue seafood comes from coolers of uncertain efficiency, surrounded by flies, what the hell, the barbecue's hot and, after all, you're on a white sand beach, then go for it.