Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Michael Bourdain was an American celebrity chef, author, and travel documentarian. He starred in programs focusing on the exploration of international culture, cuisine, and the human condition.
Anthony Michael Bourdain was born in Manhattan on June 25, 1956. His father, Pierre, was a salesman at a New York City camera store and a floor manager at a record store, and later became a classical music recording industry executive at Columbia Records. His mother, Gladys (née Sacksman), was a staff editor at the New York Times. Anthony's brother, Christopher, was a few years younger than him. Anthony grew up living with both of his parents and described his childhood in one of his books: "I did not want for love or attention. My parents loved me. Neither of them drank to excess. Nobody beat me. God was never mentioned so I was annoyed by neither church nor any notion of sin or damnation." His father was Catholic of French descent and his mother was Jewish. Bourdain stated that, although he was considered Jewish by halacha's definition, "I've never been in a synagogue. I don't believe in a higher power. But that doesn't make me any less Jewish, I don't think." His family was not religious.
Bourdain's love of food was kindled in his youth while on a family vacation in France. He first experienced two "pre-epiphanies" with the first being the vichyssoise served cold on the voyage to France on the Queen Mary, and the second was the realization that French children were allowed to have a cigarette on Sunday and allowed to drink vin ordinaire at dinner. The vichyssoise was an eye-opener to him because he had previously only experienced hot soup made from condensed canned soups. He described it in Kitchen Confidential as the "first food I really noticed. It was the first food I enjoyed and, more important, remembered enjoying." Later in the trip, while staying with his aunt in La Teste de Buch, his family went out on an oyster fisherman's boat. Bourdain had never eaten a raw oyster before, but the fisherman offered him one which he had just harvested. Bourdain described the experience as "Everything was different now. Everything.... This, I knew was the magic I had until now been only dimly and spitefully aware of. I was hooked."
Writing
In the mid-1980s Bourdain began submitting unsolicited work for publication to Between C & D, a literary magazine of the Lower East Side. The magazine eventually published a piece that Bourdain had written about a chef who was trying to purchase heroin on the Lower East Side. In 1985, Bourdain signed up for a writing workshop with Gordon Lish. In 1990, Bourdain received a small book advance from Random House, after meeting a Random House editor. His first book, a culinary mystery called Bone in the Throat, was published in 1995. He paid for his own book tour, but he did not find success. His second mystery book, Gone Bamboo, also performed poorly in sales. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, a 2000 New York Times bestseller, was an expansion of his 1999 New Yorker article "Don't Eat Before Reading This".
Television
Bourdain hosted many food and travel series, including his first show, A Cook's Tour (2002 to 2003). He worked for The Travel Channel from 2005 to 2013. He also worked for CNN from 2013 to 2018. Bourdain described the concept as, "I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do whatever the fuck I want." His programs focused on the exploration of international culture, cuisine, and the human condition. Nigella Lawson noted that Bourdain had an "incredibly beautiful style when he talks that ranges from erudite to brilliantly slangy". The acclaim surrounding Bourdain's memoir Kitchen Confidential led to an offer by the Food Network for him to host his own food and world-travel show, A Cook's Tour, which premiered in January 2002. It ran for 35 episodes, through 2003.
Publishing
In September 2011 Ecco Press announced that Bourdain would have his own publishing line, Anthony Bourdain Books, which included acquiring between three and five titles per year that "reflect his remarkably eclectic tastes". The first books that the imprint published, released in 2013, include L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food by Roy Choi, Tien Nguyen, and Natasha Phan, Prophets of Smoked Meat by Daniel Vaughn, Pain Don't Hurt by Mark Miller, and Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews by Marilyn Hagerty. In describing the line, he said, "This will be a line of books for people with strong voices who are good at something—who speak with authority. Discern nothing from this initial list—other than a general affection for people who cook food and like food. The ability to kick people in the head is just as compelling to us—as long as that's coupled with an ability to vividly describe the experience. We are just as intent on crossing genres as we are enthusiastic about our first three authors. It only gets weirder from here." Shortly after Bourdain's death, HarperCollins announced that the publishing line would be shut down after the remaining works under contract were published.
Film
Bourdain appeared as himself in the 2015 film The Big Short, in which he used seafood stew as an analogy for a collateralized debt obligation. He also produced and starred in Wasted! The Story of Food Waste.
Drew Magary, in a column for GQ published on the day of Bourdain's death, opined that Bourdain was the spiritual successor to Hunter S. Thompson. Tributes declared Bourdain "the original rock star" of the culinary world, and his public persona that of a "culinary bad boy". Due to his liberal use of profanity and sexual references in his television show No Reservations, the network added viewer-discretion advisories to each episode. Bourdain was known for consuming local specialty dishes his audiences found exotic, including black-colored blood sausages called mustamakkara (lit. 'black sausage') in Finland, sheep testicles in Morocco, ant eggs in Puebla, Mexico, a raw seal eyeball as part of a traditional Inuit seal hunt, and an entire cobra—beating heart, blood, bile, and meat—in Vietnam. Bourdain was quoted as saying that a Chicken McNugget was the most disgusting thing he ever ate, but he was fond of Popeyes and Jollibee chicken. He also declared that the unwashed warthog rectum he ate in Namibia was "the worst meal of [his] life", along with the fermented shark he ate in Iceland.
In the 1970s, while attending high school at Dwight-Englewood School, Bourdain dated Nancy Putkoski. He described her as "a bad girl", older than he was and "part of a druggy crowd". She was a year ahead of him and Bourdain graduated one year early to follow Putkoski to Vassar College since they had just started admitting men. He studied there between the ages of 17 and 19. He then attended The Culinary Institute of America, a 15-minute drive from Vassar. The couple married in 1985 and remained together for two decades, divorcing in 2005. On April 20, 2007, he married Ottavia Busia. The couple's daughter was born in 2007. Bourdain said having to be away from his family for 250 days a year working on his television shows put a strain on the relationship. Busia appeared in several episodes of No Reservations, notably the ones in Tuscany, Rome, Rio de Janeiro, Naples, and her birthplace of Sardinia. The couple separated in 2016.
In early June 2018, Bourdain was working on an episode of Parts Unknown in Strasbourg with his frequent collaborator and friend Éric Ripert. On June 8, 2018, Ripert became worried when Bourdain had missed dinner and breakfast. He subsequently found Bourdain dead of suicide by hanging in his room at Le Chambard hotel in Kaysersberg near Colmar. Texting records show that Bourdain had argued with Asia Argento in the days leading to his death, with Argento ending their relationship shortly before his suicide. Bourdain was 61 years old. Bourdain's body bore no signs of violence, and his suicide appeared to be an impulsive act. Rocquigny du Fayel disclosed that Bourdain's toxicology results were negative for narcotics, showing only a trace of a therapeutic non-narcotic medication. Bourdain's body was cremated in France on June 13, 2018, and his ashes were returned to the United States two days later, before being given to his brother Christopher.
Reactions and tributes
Bourdain's mother, Gladys Bourdain, told The New York Times, "He is absolutely the last person in the world I would have ever dreamed would do something like this. ... He had everything. Success beyond his wildest dreams. Money beyond his wildest dreams." Following the news of Bourdain's death, various public figures expressed condolences. Among them were fellow chefs Andrew Zimmern and Gordon Ramsay, former astronaut Scott Kelly, and then-U.S. president Donald Trump. CNN issued a statement, saying that Bourdain's "talents never ceased to amaze us and we will miss him very much". Former U.S. president Barack Obama, who dined with Bourdain in Vietnam on Parts Unknown, wrote on Twitter: "He taught us about food—but more importantly, about its ability to bring us together. To make us a little less afraid of the unknown." On the day of Bourdain's death, CNN aired Remembering Anthony Bourdain, a tribute program.
In an assessment of Bourdain's life for The Nation, David Klion wrote that, "Bourdain understood that the point of journalism is to tell the truth, to challenge the powerful, to expose wrongdoing. But his unique gift was to make doing all that look fun rather than grim or tedious." According to Klion, Bourdain's shows "made it possible to believe that social justice and earthly delights weren't mutually exclusive, and he pursued both with the same earnest reverence". Bourdain advocated for communicating the value of traditional or peasant foods, including all of the varietal bits and unused animal parts not usually eaten by affluent 21st-century Americans. He also praised the quality of freshly prepared street food in other countries—especially developing countries—compared to fast-food chains in the U.S. Regarding Western moral criticism of cuisine in developing countries, Bourdain stated: "Let's call this criticism what it is: racism. There are a lot of practices from the developing world that I find personally repellent, from my privileged Western point of view. But I don't feel like I have such a moral high ground that I can walk around lecturing people in developing nations on how they should live their lives."
