Bourdain, Anthony

• Born: June 25, 1956
• Birthplace: New York City, New York
• Died: June 8, 2018
• Place of death: Alsace, France

Chef, writer, television host, editor

"What Jean Genet was to the prison, what Tom Waits is to the lowlife bar, Anthony Bourdain is to the restaurant kitchen: a charmingly roguish guide to a tough, grimy underworld with its own peculiar rules and rituals," Adam Shatz wrote for the New York Times (May 13, 2001). A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, Bourdain conquered a years'-long addiction to illegal drugs to gain respect as a chef in some of New York's most exclusive restaurants. With his best-selling book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (2000)—a brutally honest memoir and a "half-humorous, half-frightening expose of the restaurant industry," in the words of Bill Gibron, writing for popmatters.com (August 1, 2005)—Bourdain became a celebrity. On the strength of the enormous popularity of Kitchen Confidential, he launched another career as a television personality, first as the host of A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines, a short-lived show for the Food Network. The book he wrote to accompany the program became another best-seller and won the 2002 Guild of Food Writers Award for Food Book of the Year. Bourdain returned to writing memoirs in Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (2010), followed by a pocket-sized Insider's Edition of Kitchen Confidential updated with Bourdain's annotations and a new afterword.

Well-known for his profane wit, Bourdain appeared from mid-2005 until November 2012 in a series for the Travel Channel called No Reservations. The success of No Reservations led to a second, "high-octane" Travel Channel series, The Layover, in each episode of which Bourdain had 24- to 48 hours—the time of an extended air-travel layover—to explore the food scene and construct a narrative about a given city. He also continued to write popular books, including The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones, (2006) and No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach (2007). In his introduction to the latter book, Bourdain wrote, "If one thing is clear to me about traveling perpetually, it's that it's a great gift. . . . If I have a single virtue, it's curiosity. It's a big world." He continued his exploration beginning in 2013 with the award-winning CNN series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, while also championing social causes including food justice and the #MeToo movement for sexual misconduct and abuse awareness. However, Bourdain's career was cut short by his suicide in 2018.

Education and Early Career

The first of the two sons of Pierre Bourdain, a Columbia Records executive who died in the late 1980s, and Gladys Bourdain, a New York Times editor, Anthony Bourdain was born on June 25, 1956, in New York City. He grew up with his brother, Christopher (who became a currency analyst), in Leonia, New Jersey. By his own account, he was a precocious child: as a preschooler, for example, he told Deborah Ross for the London Independent (June 11, 2001), he found a copy of Rudolf Flesch's book Why Johnny Can't Read (1955) in his parents' bedroom and proceeded to teach himself to read "way beyond what should have been my level." He has traced his love of food to a summer holiday in 1966, when he traveled with his family to France (his father's birthplace) to stay with relatives. In Paris some of what he had most enjoyed eating in New Jersey—hamburgers and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—could not be found, so he was forced to taste other foods. Eating his first oyster, he recalled to Deirdre Donahue for USA Today (November 29, 2001), affected him "viscerally, instinctively, spiritually—even in some small . . . way, sexually—and there was no turning back. . . . My life as a cook, and as a chef, had begun. Food had power. It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me . . . and others." Reflecting on his relationship with his father, Bourdain wrote in Bon Appétit (May 31, 2012), "To experience joy, my father taught me, one has to leave oneself open to it."

During his teens in New Jersey, Bourdain has said, he often felt angry—although he later maintained that he could not remember why—and he developed a drug habit, which became the focus of many fights he had with his parents. Nevertheless, in his high school (the Dwight-Englewood School, in Englewood, New Jersey), he performed well enough to gain admission to Vassar College, an elite institution in Poughkeepsie, New York, that had opened its doors to men in 1969 after more than 100 years as a women's college. He chose Vassar in order to be with his high-school girlfriend, Nancy Putkoski, who later became his first wife.

Bourdain claimed that at Vassar, which he entered in 1973, he did not attend any classes but wrote papers for other students so as to earn money to buy drugs. In the summer of 1974, he got a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. There, for the first time, he told Andrew Billen for the London Times (July 12, 2005), he felt respect for others—the people with whom he worked in the kitchen—and tried to gain their respect, although up until then he had never felt any for himself. After he completed his sophomore year at Vassar, he transferred to the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, New York, one of the most prestigious cooking schools in the United States.

After his graduation in 1978, Bourdain began working in the kitchen of the Rainbow Room, a glamorous restaurant in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, where he stayed for eighteen months. During the next half-dozen years, Bourdain made his way up the hierarchy in New York's culinary world at a variety of restaurants, among them Chuck Howard's, Nicki & Kelly, and Gianni's. Then, in the mid-1980s, he again became a heavy user of drugs and alternately worked briefly in a series of restaurants or did not work at all. His stint as a short-order cook led him to hate such food as French toast and fried eggs, "because, to me, it smells of failure and defeat," as he told Ross. In time he developed an addiction to heroin and found himself with neither a job nor a home. In 1988 he entered a methadone program, "which got me off the street overnight," as he told Deborah Ross, "but three times a week I had to queue up with other hideous junkies"—in his view, an unbearable indignity. He thus tried to go cold turkey, suffering through withdrawals and substituting cocaine for heroin in the process. Eventually he succeeded in ending his drug habit and began to rebuild his career, first as a chef at the Supper Club in New York City, then at Vince and Linda Ghilarducci's Italian Affair in Santa Rosa, California, where he stayed for two years and one year, respectively. In 1996 he returned to New York and worked for a few months at Coco Pazzo Teatro before handing in his resignation.

While he was reestablishing himself in New York restaurants, Bourdain was also trying his hand at writing. During the mid-1980s, to pass the time, he had written notes for a novel. While the story was expanding, and after he had conquered his heroin habit, he had taken a creative-writing course at Columbia University, in New York. The book was still unfinished when, in 1992, Gordon Howard, his Vassar roommate, urged him to complete it. Indeed, Howard paid Bourdain's expenses for a ten-day vacation in Cozumel, Mexico, on the condition that Bourdain would do so. In 1993, within about six months of his return from Mexico, Bourdain had honored his pledge. Howard brought the novel to Random House, in New York City, which published it in 1995 with the title Bone in the Throat. Inspired in part by transcripts of the trial of the mobster John Gotti and by Bourdain's experiences as a restaurant worker, the book is a satiric thriller told from the perspective of Tommy Pagano, a chef at the Dreadnought Grill, a restaurant in the Little Italy section of Manhattan that is the cover for an FBI-financed mob sting operation. Marilyn Stasio for the New York Times Book Review (August 6, 1995) described Bone in the Throat as a "prodigiously self-assured" and "deliciously depraved" first novel whose author's "comic vision goes beyond original."

When Bone was arriving in bookstores, Bourdain was busy creating the menu for the Italian Affair restaurant. He was also spending four hours a day working on his next novel, Gone Bamboo (1997), another satiric thriller involving mobsters, this time set on the Caribbean island of St. Martin. The year Gone Bamboo was published, according to various sources, Bourdain became the chef at Sullivan's, in the Ed Sullivan Theater (from which David Letterman broadcast his TV program, The Late Show with David Letterman). The following year Bourdain became the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles, a New York restaurant specializing in French food; he would remain variously affiliated with the restaurant, including as "chef at large," until its closing in 2017.

A major turning point for Bourdain came after he submitted a piece called "Don't Eat before Reading This" to the New Yorker magazine. Although the New Yorker rarely accepts unsolicited manuscripts, the magazine published Bourdain's brief article in its April 19, 1999 issue. "Don't Eat before Reading This," as Howard Seftel wrote for the Phoenix (Arizona) New Times (June 10, 1999), "exposed restaurant practices that chefs and restaurant owners would prefer the public didn't know." For example, in it Bourdain warned diners to avoid ordering fish on Mondays, when it would be four days old, and revealed that when a customer orders a steak well-done, the chef chooses from among the worst cuts of meat. Only hours after the April 19 issue reached newsstands, Bourdain was offered a book deal.

The resulting work, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly was published in 2000. Going beyond simply telling readers unsavory details about restaurant kitchens, Bourdain took the opportunity to describe his alcohol and drug abuse, casual sexual encounters, and experiences in food preparation. Among those who expressed mixed feelings about the book was Sarah Billingsley, who wrote for the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Post-Gazette (September 24, 2000) that the "richly described preparations and food references alone are enough to keep a reader entertained" but complained that "the chef's ego throbs on every page, even when Bourdain is self-deprecating. He is an unreliable and somewhat bitter narrator, with the limited writing skills of a college freshman who's been granted the 'literary' quarter to use profanity." More often, however, reviewers lavished Kitchen Confidential with praise. "In a style partaking of Hunter S. Thompson, Iggy Pop and a little Jonathan Swift," Thomas McNamee wrote for the New York Times (June 4, 2000), "Bourdain gleefully rips through the scenery to reveal private backstage horrors little dreamed of by the trusting public. He calls paying customers 'weekend rubes' and describes himself in an earlier, less enlightened incarnation as 'a shiftless, untrustworthy coke-sniffer, sneak thief and corner-cutting hack.' Thankfully, in his new life he has retained his brutal honesty."

Kitchen Confidential became a best-seller; by 2001, according to Deirdre Donahue, it had sold more than 700,000 copies, and it has been translated into many languages. A sitcom called Kitchen Confidential, inspired by Bourdain's book, even debuted on the Fox network in September 2005. It starred Bradley Cooper as a chef named Jack Bourdain, who is determined to rebuild his career after being mired in drug addiction and experiencing homelessness. However, the series was canceled after thirteen installments.

Meanwhile, Bourdain had become a celebrity. He immediately signed contracts for two more nonfiction books. The first, Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical (2001), tells the story of Mary Mallon, a cook whom the New York City Department of Health determined was spreading typhoid fever in 1906 and who became famous as the first healthy carrier of the disease in the United States. Despite the Health Department's insistence that she was spreading typhoid through her unwitting contamination of the food she prepared, she refused to stop cooking, even after she secured her release from a government-imposed quarantine by promising never to cook again. For Bourdain the "central question" regarding Mary was, as quoted by Adam Shatz, "Why did she go on cooking when she had every reason to believe she was spreading a possibly fatal disease?" Drawing on his own experiences, Bourdain suggested that Mary was simply a proud cook who wanted to work under any circumstances, even if she was sick or in pain. In an assessment for Newsday (April 15, 2001), Peg Tyre described Bourdain's retelling of the story as "competent" but felt that "his emphatic and sometimes coarse style . . . sometimes detracts from the story."

The second nonfiction book that Bourdain wrote to fulfill the terms of his contract was A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal (2001), which reached various best-seller lists. It was published as a companion to Bourdain's debut TV series A Cook's Tour, which aired for twenty-two weeks on the Food Network in 2001; among other glimpses of Bourdain overseas, installments showed him in Vietnam eating a still-beating cobra heart immediately after it had been cut out of the snake and consuming sheep's testicles in Morocco. The book A Cook's Tour earned the Guild of Food Writers Award for Food Book of the Year in 2002 and was shortlisted for the 2002 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. It also impressed critics. "Bourdain swaggers where the rest of us fear to tread," Karen Stabiner wrote for the Los Angeles Times (December 23, 2001). "Having scorched his way through the New York restaurant scene, he turns his attention in A Cook's Tour to the rest of the world. This time around, Bourdain is off in search of the perfect meal. Not your idea of a perfect meal, which might revolve around such civilized thrills as a beautiful wine or a bottomless bowl of caviar. His idea . . . reads more like a catered screening of Apocalypse Now." The book convinced some critics that Bourdain was, above anything else, a food writer. As Kathryn Hughes wrote for the London Daily Telegraph (December 29, 2001), "Take away the food, and Bourdain begins to sound like just one more middle-aged writer sent on assignment by a glossy American men's magazine to various hearts of darkness. But keep him close to the steam, the blood and the guts of everyday eating and he remains untouchable."

Bourdain's next book was the novel The Bobby Gold Stories (2003), about a mob-connected ex-convict who works in restaurants and clubs. In a review for the Palm Beach (Florida) Post (December 14, 2003), Scott Eyman wrote that The Bobby Gold Stories "isn't great, but it is good. It's all text and no subtext, which is why it's fun to read, but also why it doesn't hang in your head afterward." Jack Batten, a critic for the Toronto (Canada) Star (October 5, 2003), felt that the "tales of restaurant life behind the scenes radiate exotic authenticity" but complained, "Bourdain's touch is less convincing when he deals with the Mafia thugs who bring the violence to his books."

The Bobby Gold Stories was followed by Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook: Strategies, Recipes, and Techniques of Classic Bistro Cooking (2004). Elliot Essman, reviewing the book at stylegourmet.com in 2005, commented, "Bourdain greatly respects top culinary artists like Alain Ducasse and Thomas Keller, but his subject is bistro cooking, 'the most beloved, old-school, typical and representative [French] cooking, the wellspring of all that came after.' He writes as executive chef of New York's Les Halles; a brash, Parisian-style bistro. . . . Bourdain's mission is to position bistro cooking as a truly accessible cuisine for the non-professional cook . . . He's chosen his sections and recipes with intelligence and care."

Bourdain's fourth nonfiction book, The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006), contains essays about food, leisure, and travel that originally appeared in such publications as the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Gourmet and that, in some cases, Bourdain updated for the collection. Various pieces make clear the writer's disdain for "celebrity" chefs and media food personalities and his intolerance for veganism. Bruce Handy, in a review of The Nasty Bits for the New York Times (May 28, 2006), called it "a mix of the inspired, slightly less inspired . . . and the occasionally random or perfunctory" and concluded that overall Bourdain is a "vivid and witty writer" whose "greatest gift is his ability to convey his passion for professional cooking." After characterizing Bourdain as "the bad boy of the culinary world" and a knock-off of the cult hero and writer Hunter S. Thompson, Mia Stainsby, a Vancouver Sun (June 17, 2006) critic, described The Nasty Bits as "an entertaining, gritty, witty, nasty read."

Later Career

In July 2005 Bourdain began appearing in the weekly series Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations; in that show, which aired on the Travel Channel, he introduced viewers to cuisine in different parts of the world. In his review of No Reservations for popmatters.com, Bill Gibron wrote, "Tony Bourdain is angry—and he's not afraid to share it with the world. He hates processed and pre-packaged foods. He loathes TV chefs who reduce classic cuisine to a series of easy to follow steps and perky soundbites. He argues for the purity of ingredients and the classicism of cultural culinary expression. But mostly he is mad at us, for allowing our taste buds to be tainted by fast food and microwaved mediocrity." Gibron continued, "When Bourdain turns off the anger and enjoys the food, he's fabulous. His obvious love of whatever he is eating, bordering on the orgasmic in some instances, is complemented by a complete knowledge of why the food has this effect." According to Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times (July 25, 2005), Bourdain "indulges wanderlust and regular lust. Or rather," she added, ". . . he's not saying no to anything here, and one of his many principles about food is that 'it does lead to sex, and it should.'" The series won the Critics' Choice Best Reality Series award in 2012. In 2009 and again in 2011, No Reservations won a Creative Arts Emmy Award for Outstanding Cinematography for Nonfiction Programming, for which it was also nominated in 2012. It garnered numerous additional Emmy nominations: best long form documentary (2007); best editing (2009); outstanding nonfiction series (2009, 2011, 2012); outstanding picture editing for nonfiction programming (2011, 2012); and outstanding writing for nonfiction programming (2010, 2011, 2012).

The show often touched on subjects other than food. In July 2006, for instance, while Bourdain was filming an installment of No Reservations in Beirut, Lebanon, violence erupted there between members of Hezbollah, an Islamic terrorist paramilitary group, and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). "We were there because of the food, of course; I'm in love with mezze [a selection of appetizers], huge, groaning tables everywhere filled with these little, delicious treats," Bourdain told a reporter for the London Independent (September 30, 2006). But, as cinematographer Jerry Risius recounted on his website: "We continued to film and document while waiting to be evacuated. The subsequent episode included footage of both Bourdain and our production staff, and included not only our initial attempts to film the episode, but also our firsthand encounters with Hezbollah supporters, days of waiting for news with other expatriates in a Beirut hotel, and their eventual escape aided by a "cleaner" (prohibited to shoot and unseen in the footage); and our eventual departure with the US Marines. The episode was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2007."

The success of No Reservations led to the creation of another Travel Channel series, a one-hour, ten-episode series entitled The Layover, which premiered in November 2011. The show's premise was the exploration of a city accomplished within the span of an air-travel layover of 24- to 48 hours. Bourdain found the shooting schedule of the second show "a burden," and he announced in April 2012 that he would do another season of The Layover but that it would be his last. He told Gabe Ulla of the "foodie" website Eater that, "The Layover was hard on me. It was hard with that much food and liquor in a two-day shooting period, back-to-back-to-back. And that's after shooting No Reservations. No Reservations is a pleasure most of the time. . . . Layover has its utilitarian aspects" (April 9, 2012).

Meanwhile, Bourdain continued to pursue other ventures. In 2011 Ecco Press, a division of HarperCollins, announced that Bourdain would have his own imprint, Anthony Bourdain Books. In the Ecco press release (February 22, 2012), Bourdain commented, "This will be a line of books for people with strong voices who are good at something—who speak with authority. . . . We are just as intent on crossing genres as we are enthusiastic about our first three authors." With Joel Rose, Bourdain co-wrote the original graphic novel Get Jiro! (2012), with art by Langdon Foss, for DC Comics/Vertigo. (It was followed up by Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi in 2015.) He was also a consultant and writer for the HBO series Treme, and appeared on several occasions as a guest judge for the Bravo reality show Top Chef, among other television guest appearances and cameos.

In May 2012 Bourdain announced that he would be leaving the Travel Channel to host a new series for CNN, again focusing on food and culture. For a finale season of No Reservations, the Travel Channel repackaged the last seven episodes of season 8 plus some re-edited older episodes—Bourdain called them "clip shows." No Reservations's run concluded in November 2012. Bourdain's CNN series, entitled Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, premiered on April 14, 2013. As the title suggests, the series focused on exploring cultures and cuisines outside of mainstream tourist attention. In its first season, it earned four Emmy nominations, and it was quickly renewed. The show also won a Peabody Award in 2013, and went on to win ten Primetime Emmy Awards by 2018. Locations featured on the show ranged from Armenia to Libya to Texas, and notable guest appearances included President Barack Obama, who joined Bourdain in Vietnam in a 2016 episode.

In addition to the many Emmy Awards for his television programs, Bourdain earned several prominent honors throughout his career. He was inducted into the James Beard Foundation's Who's Who of Food and Beverage in America in 2008, and in 2010 he received an Honorary CLIO Award for Food and Travel. He was presented with an honorary doctorate by his alma mater, the Culinary Institute of America, in 2017. Bourdain also drew attention for his social advocacy, which included not only food-related issues but also recognition of Spanish-speaking immigrants' economic contributions and vocal support of efforts to expose and combat sexual harassment.

During his later career Bourdain had an apartment in Manhattan, although he spent much of his time traveling. He married Nancy Putkoski in 1985; they were divorced in 2005. Bourdain married Ottavia Busia in 2007, and their daughter Ariane was born that year. The couple announced their amicable divorce in 2016. Bourdain subsequently dated actor Asia Argento, who he met during filming of Parts Unknown.

While in France working on a new episode of Parts Unknown, Bourdain was found dead from an apparent suicide in his hotel room on June 8, 2018. He was sixty-one years old. His death drew widespread media coverage and numerous tributes from high-profile individuals, including figures across the culinary industry. In response, many of his friends and fans directed support to advocacy organizations such as the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. CNN presented a program in tribute to Bourdain, and announced it would conclude Parts Unknown with a twelfth and final season using previously shot footage.

Selected Works

Fiction: Bone in the Throat, 1995; Gone Bamboo, 1997; The Bobby Gold Stories, 2002; Get Jiro!, 2012 (with Joel Rose); Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi, 2015 (with Joel Rose)

Nonfiction: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, 2000; A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal, 2001; Typhoid Mary: an Urban Historical, 2001; Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, 2004; The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones, 2006; No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach, 2007; Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, 2010; Appetites: A Cookbook, 2016

Bibliography

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Harvard Business Review, Vol. 80 No. 7 Jul. 2002

(London) Independent p34 Sep. 30, 2006

Los Angeles Times R p3 Dec. 23, 2001

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New Zealand Listener Nov. 8–14, 2003; popmatters.com Aug. 1, 2005

Severson, Kim, Matthew Haag, and Julia Moskin. "Anthony Bourdain, Renegade Chef Who Reported From the World's Tables, Is Dead at 61." The New York Times, 8 June 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/business/media/anthony-bourdain-dead.html. Accessed 27 Nov. 2018.

(London) Sunday Times p3 Oct. 24, 2004

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USA Today Nov. 29, 2001