JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO / CONTRA-COSTA TIMES
	Food Network star Anthony Bourdain leaves no sacred cows standing in recounting his campy, trampy escapades through some of the world's finest eateries.

As I'm heading away from the broiler with the steak, a server passes me a note. "Greg . . . Sitting very comfortably at the bar . . . Get through the rush . . . See you when convenient . . . Tony." Below, there's a hand-drawn cartoon of a skull with a chef's hat and a knife underneath. It's Anthony Bourdain, author of "Kitchen Confidential" and "A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal," and star of the Food Network series "A Cook's Tour."

It's as if Julia Child were here. The executive chef at New York's brasserie Les Halles, Bourdain is not a home cook, he's a restaurant cook, a kitchen rat, a soldier of fortune. He once covered his naked sous chef in plastic wrap and persuaded him to hide in the freezer just to freak out the maitre d'hotel. This guy is cool, with a capital C. What's more, Tony is one of my few peers. He's a writer who cooks, or a chef who writes, only he does it better than I do. I can't wait to meet him.

Gourmet magazine editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl mixes tales of food, family and romance in her memoirs of growing up and becoming one of the country's premiere restaurant critics.
	MICHAEL DONNELLY

I deliver the steak and run down to the bar to tell Tony I'm glad he's here. "As soon as I cut the wedding cake," I say, "I want to spend some time with you. Are you hungry?" I go to the pantry and ask my garde manger to put together a tray full of cold seafood for his appetizer. I ask my chef de cuisine to find the best steak in the house, and I tell my sous chef, "Thanks for letting me know Tony was in town."

Bill Gates might bring Melinda to dinner, Kenny G might play his sax in the bar, but no other guest has generated such excitement among my cooks. No other guest is the chef who gave us all a voice. "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly," Bourdain's memoir about coming of age in professional kitchens, is unique in the world of letters, and for weeks we've been recounting stories from "A Cook's Tour."

"I wasn't the first," says Tony. "A guy named Ludwig Bemelmans wrote a book called 'Hotel Splendide' in 1941. It was fantastic. Luckily, I didn't know about it when I wrote 'Kitchen Confidential,' or I might never have written my book."

The original bad-boy restaurant raconteur, Bemelmans was best known for his Madeline stories, rhymed picture books about a Parisian schoolgirl. A prolific writer, he was also an artist who painted covers for The New Yorker and illustrated his children's books.

Bourdain recently drafted an introduction to "Hotel Splendide" for "The Modern Library Food Series," a selection of books chosen by Gourmet magazine editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl.

Did he like Ruth's books, "Tender at the Bone" and its sequel, "Comfort Me with Apples"? Bourdain admits he didn't expect to, but did. "I love the way she dishes all that dirt about the industry."

Reichl's latest memoir chronicles her career as a restaurant critic. Larded with recipes illustrating what she was eating and cooking when events unfolded, the book traces Reichl's sojourns at the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, with plenty of details about her affair with Colman Andrews, editor-in-chief of Saveur, in between

Both Reichl's memoirs and Bourdain's would fit nicely in the parameters Reichl has set for books in the series. "I know hundreds of great books about cooking . . . " she writes in the series introduction, but the ones chosen "offer more than recipes. You can certainly cook from these books, but you can also read through the recipes to the lives behind them. These are books . . . for people who believe that what people eat, and why, is important."

Bourdain's and Reichl's titles are just two in a burgeoning body of work that began, more or less, in 1941 when M.F.K. Fisher published "The Gastronomical Me."

"People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking?" Fisher wrote. "They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft." But Fisher was so thoughtful, witty and appetizing that her style became a standard, and food journalism became a respectable genre. "When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one."

Who could argue with that? Anyone, I suppose, who doesn't eat. For the rest of us, food and its various trappings provide us with a window, sometimes a door even, into the lives of people we have never met. Ever since Proust first sank his teeth into a madeleine cookie and launched into "Remembrance of Things Past," writers have been drawing on food memories to tell their stories. Recipes, explorations of foreign markets, descriptions of meals and seductive introductions to exotic ingredients — all have become useful literary tools in every writer's quiver, and writers of memoirs are the first to reach for them.

Greg Atkinson is chef at The Puget Sound Environmental Learning Center and Canlis restaurant and is author of "The Northwest Essentials Cookbook."