The best job in the world
MANY people thought Anthony Bourdain had the most enviable career in existence. He didn’t deny it.
“I have the best job in the world,” the globetrotting food- taster and culinary storyteller once told New Yorker magazine, stating: “If I’m unhappy, it’s a failure of imagination.”
Bourdain’s stunned fans were mourning the loss of that singular imagination on Friday following his death from an apparent suicide, recalling everything from his fearless consumption of a beating cobra’s heart or a sheep testicle – “like any other testicle,” he remarked – to his outspoken support of the # MeToo movement, to his blissful paean to syrupsoaked pecan waffles at Waffle House.
“I want it all,” he wrote in his breakthrough 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential.
“I want to try everything once.” And it seemed he pretty much accomplished that, travelling the globe some 200 days a year for his TV shows, revelling not in fancy tasting menus – which he scorned – but in simple pleasures like a cold beer and spicy noodles in Hanoi, which he shared with President Barack Obama.
For Bourdain, food, though a huge pleasure, was more importantly a storytelling tool, and a passport to the world at large.
It was a lifestyle that, while undeniably glamorous, took a toll, he suggested in a 2017 New Yorker profile: “I change location every two weeks,” he said. “I’m not going to remember your birthday. I’m not going to be there for the important moments in your life.”
Not surprisingly, it was on the road, in eastern France, that Bourdain, 61, was found unresponsive Friday morning by good friend and chef Eric Ripert. He’d been working on an episode for the 12th season of his CNN show, Parts Unknown.
A prosecutor said he had apparently killed himself in a luxury hotel in the ancient village of Kaysersberg. He left behind an 11- year- old daughter, Ariane, from his second marriage.
In a 2008 interview with The Associated Press, Bourdain said his daughter’s birth changed his outlook on life. “I feel obliged to at least do the best I can and not do anything really stupidly selfdestructive if I can avoid it.”
At the time of his death, his girlfriend was Asia Argento, the Italian actress who has accused Harvey Weinstein of rape.
In an essay after fellow chef Mario Batali was accused of sexual assault, Bourdain wrote “one must pick a side ... I stand unhesitatingly and unwaveringly with the women.” Argento wrote on Twitter Friday that Bourdain “was my love, my rock, my protector.”
Bourdain’s own mother, Gladys Bourdain, a longtime editor at The New York Times, said she had no indication that her son might have been thinking of suicide.