The 'Pretentious' Kitchen Tool Anthony Bourdain Couldn't Stand

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Anthony Bourdain's knife was his secret weapon in the kitchen, but wit was his weapon for success in books, interviews, and various television series. Some of his most savage food takes include comparing club sandwiches to Al Qaeda, saying hollandaise was a breeding ground for bacteria, and that he liked his coffee with a slight taste of cardboard from New York City's famous Anthora cups. And, in a deeper cut, he hated the metal rings found in so many fancy (or at least fancy-presenting) restaurant kitchens, too.

More precisely, Bourdain had an antipathy toward the eccentric DIY devices that some chefs use to build their plates up to the ceiling — those Jenga-like layers of protein, vegetables, and sometimes even foam. "But... but chef, you say... how do they make the food so tall?" Bourdain wrote in his famed "Kitchen Confidential" tome. "How can I make my breast of chicken and mashed potatoes tower like a fully engorged priapus over my awed and cowering guests?" The answer, of course, was a metal ring used to stabilize such marvels of organic architecture, which he referred to as "the backbone of pretentious food presentation."

Anthony Bourdain allocated even more colorful copy to his hatred for the two-inch-tall metal cylinders in "Kitchen Confidential," but he made sure to follow up with tools that he found to be more practical. He recommended a mandolin for slicing vegetables, and suggested that cooks put their money toward heavy stock pots and pans. However, among all the devices in his kitchen, the plastic squeeze bottle was an inexpensive item Bourdain considered essential. Perhaps more familiar as a ketchup or mustard dispenser, the inexpensive tool has plenty more applications across sauces and other liquid ingredients.

Oils are the obvious use case for plastic squeeze bottles, particularly if you buy the big, unwieldy extra virgin olive oil tins. Homemade dressing is also much more easily applied from a squeeze bottle versus trying to spoon every serving out of a mason jar. These bottles make creating things like dark, milk, and white chocolate zig-zags across your cookies, brownies, and other baked goods much easier than it would be with a less intentional utensil. If you're looking to add a squeeze bottle to your kitchen collection, the OXO Good Grips squeeze bottle is reasonably priced, and it comes with a built-in measurement for ounces and milliliters. Not every kitchen tool needs to be high-end, but something this simple is still a bit more sophisticated than what you might find at a hamburger stand.