A lot has changed since Kitchen Confidential — for the subculture of chefs and cooks, for the restaurant business-and for Anthony Bourdain. Medium Raw explores these changes, moving back and forth from the author's bad old days to the present. Tracking his own strange and unexpected voyage from journeyman cook to globe-travelling professional eater and drinker, Bourdain compares and contrasts what he's seen and what he's seeing, pausing along the way for a series of confessions, rants, investigations, and interrogations of some of the most controversial figures in food. And always he returns to the question: 'Why cook?' Or the harder one to answer: 'Why cook well?' Beginning with a secret and highly illegal after-hours gathering of powerful chefs he compares to a Mafia summit, Bourdain, in his distinctive, no-holds-barred style, cuts to the bone on every subject he tackles.

After twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine, chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain has decided to tell all. From his first oyster in the Gironde to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown (where he first experiences the real delights of being a chef); through the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Center to drug dealers in the East Village, to Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain's tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable, as shocking as they are funny.