Remembering Anthony Bourdain, the chef turned author who brought his audience into the kitchen with the heat turned up high
Bourdain overcame a years-long addiction to heroin and cocaine before remaking himself as an observant writer with a lively prose style and a taste for the absurd
Never order fish on Monday, Anthony Bourdain warned in his breakthrough book Kitchen Confidential, which exposed the greasy secrets behind the swinging doors of restaurant kitchens. A diner is a fool to waste money on brunch or ask for a steak well done, and vegetarians – well, don’t get him started.
Bourdain’s bestselling 2000 memoir, drawn from years of working in top restaurants in New York, created his persona as a dishy, dashing adventurer of the culinary universe. He knew his way around a stovetop, but he also had the unfiltered sensibility of an opinionated, leather-jacketed one-time drug addict revealing the sometimes unsavory truths beneath the chef’s white toque.
Despite his experience in restaurants, Bourdain was not exactly a celebrity chef. He was more of a Hunter S. Thompson of the food world than, say, a Jacques Pepin – more of a roguish gonzo journalist with sharpened knives than a master of the saucepan.
In his books and television programmes, including the Travel Channel’s Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and, since 2013, Parts Unknown on CNN, Bourdain explored exotic food and cultural traditions as a globe-trotting adventurer of the appetites. He was fearless in his consumption, eating scorpions, a seal’s eyeball, sheep’s testicles and the still-beating heart of a cobra.
“I want to try everything once,” he wrote in Kitchen Confidential.
Bourdain ate here: check out the chef’s Hong Kong haunts
Food had power. It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress