Over eight years after his death, the impact left by renowned celebrity chef, travel documentarian, writer, and bad boy of the culinary world, Anthony Bourdain, is still being felt. This month, Adult Swim premiered its animated adaptation of Bourdain and Joel Rose‘s bloody DC/Vertigo comic series Get Jiro! to critical acclaim, and new episodes are currently airing every Sunday. In film, meanwhile, A24 dug into the chef’s life with the new biopic Tony from Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie director, Matt Johnson, starring Dominic Sessa in the title role. Amid this surge in Bourdain-related content, the Folio Society is bringing back one of the multi-hyphenate’s most iconic works.
The independent publisher renowned for its hardback releases is sprucing up Bourdain’s bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly with a collectible definitive edition to memorialize the culinary rock star. In addition to containing his scintillating writings about life as a swaggering young chef navigating the behind-the-scenes subculture of restaurants, the book comes with a new cover, slipcase, and endpapers designed by Kishan Rajani to give it a clean black-and-white look, with photography by Jake Chessum. The biggest difference lies inside, however, where Chessum’s photography from a two-day 2008 shoot with Bourdain is integrated throughout, primarily as double-page spreads, alongside a new preface by Rose and a portrait commissioned for the new release from an award-winning artist and one of the writer’s good friends, Paul Pope. Before it releases, Collider can exclusively share a sneak peek at two of the 12 rare photos included within the pages that show the eventual CNN and Food Network icon in his element.
Chessum captures the energy that made Bourdain a superstar in his photos, both of which were taken in New York. One spread sees the chef leaning on a taxi in his leather jacket, looking effortlessly cool right outside of the legendary Katz’s Delicatessen. It wouldn’t be true to be Bourdain if he didn’t have some kind of food during the shoot, though. In the other image, he’s enjoying a hot dog, enjoying the simple pleasures of life and food out among the people. True to the book, it’s a look at the man outside the lens of his television career from a photographer hailed for his ability to capture icons from Brad Pitt to Amy Winehouse and President Barack Obama.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
‘Kitchen Confidential’ Delivers Anthony Bourdain’s Voice in Its Purest Form
Described as “part memoir, part exposé, part love letter to the trade,” Kitchen Confidential has since been recognized as a landmark book about food, culture, and the restaurant industry. Moreover, it was a raw and outrageous portrait of Bourdain that elevated him into a personality beloved by so many, with a distinct voice recognized by those closest to him. “Tony and I worked together many times, over many books, and from the day he climbed the stairs and walked into my life, I believed in his natural voice,” Rose wrote for the Folio Society edition’s new preface. “Having the opportunity to go back to Kitchen Confidential today, I cannot urge you strongly enough to make note of Anthony Bourdain’s voice, before it became a public instrument, before CNN, before the Food Network, when Tony’s power lay in the precision and intimacy of his prose, in his ability to trust himself enough to speak from both heart and mind.”
Editor Mandy Kirkby vouched for the novel’s authenticity, timeless truths, and a style that can only be associated with the man behind Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and Parts Unknown.
“Told in Bourdain’s signature exhilarating, full-throttle, and sharply funny style, Kitchen Confidential remains so compelling after all these years because its pages teem with the authenticity, passion, and generosity of spirit of its iconic author. Restaurant kitchen culture has changed since its writing, but some things remain: brunch is usually a rip-off, chicken is for scaredy-cats and the undiscerning, and shellfish is a bad idea in an empty restaurant, whatever the day of the week. It’s not a cookbook—and not even a book about food, per se—but it will definitely leave you feeling hungry.”
The Folio Society edition of Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly will go on sale for $130 starting at 11 a.m. ET on October 20, exclusively on the Folio Society website. Check out our exclusive images above.
Release Date
August 7, 2026
Runtime
106 minutes
Director
Matt Johnson
Writers
Todd Bartels, Matthew Miller, Matt Johnson, Lou Howe
Producers
Matt Johnson, Matthew Miller, Tim White, Trevor White
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