National Post (National Edition)
Parts unknown
Anthony Bourdain never stopped learning
‘It always sucks,” Anthony Bourdain admitted, conceding a weary laugh. “You get to the end of the day and the people talking to you are absolutely punchy, but you’re in this snarky, s--tty mood. It even happens to George Clooney — you see him promoting his latest film, and he’s on interview 49, and he’s just so f--king pissed off and weird and he doesn’t want to give a straight answer to anything. I’m better than that at least.”
It was a balmy afternoon, Halloween 2016, and I had met up with the late chef, writer and adventurer at the rooftop bar of the Drake Hotel in Toronto to talk about his latest cookbook, Appetites. I was starting to regret leading with a question about the tedium of interviews.
Bourdain could sense it — and, in a generous show of goodwill, reassured me. “Don’t worry. We’re not quite there yet.”
I’ve thought about this exchange often since learning on Friday morning that Bourdain took his own life in a hotel room in Strasbourg, France, while filming an episode of his documentary travel series Parts Unknown. I’ve thought of it because it seems to me to embody so much about the man and his character
— about his attitude and his insight, his disregard for affected courtesy and his unflagging consideration for others.
It was simply not in Bourdain’s nature to go through the motions of a press junket or media tour pretending to be cheerful, or to promote a book without acknowledging how bizarre it is to answer the same questions from different journalists 15 times in one day. But it was not in Bourdain’s nature, either, to be anything less than gracious and forthcoming with another human being, no matter the circumstances of the meeting. He loathed the phoniness of an interview. Yet, he was an ideal interviewee.
What a rare combination of qualities this was. The punk-rock vibe Bourdain emanated could sometimes seem to outsiders like a jaded indifference — no doubt because a punk-rock attitude usually does signify jaded indifference, in particular among the many legions of callous culture warriors who share with Bourdain his contempt for artifice and the more frivolous exponents of popular culture.
The difference is that Bourdain’s intolerance for nonsense was only one side of his personality. The other side was interested, open-minded, flexible and passionate. That was the secret to the classic Bourdain Disdain: yes, he detested much in this world that was worth detesting, but for everything he abhorred, he admired something else. He saw the blights on the planet — all those adversaries of joy like housemade ketchup and Kobe sliders — and lambasted them in order that more reliable delights could be enjoyed by us in earnest.
HIS LIFE-LONG WILLINGNESS TO CHANGE MADE HIM AN AUTHORITY.
He was smart enough to hate many things, and wise enough to want to like them.
It takes confidence to know the difference. Bourdain was always discerning: he was never an enthusiast, rarely a champion, scarcely a fan. He prized his own judgement, which made it easy for audiences to accept his praise as the conviction of someone who has thought hard about what he thinks and what he says.
We live in an era of instant evaluation, when we are encouraged to weigh in on every matter with a certainty for which none of us are reasonably capable. Bourdain was one of the few who advised us by example to heed caution, take it slow and (most of all) never stop learning.
I asked him, when we spoke that day, how often he changed his mind. “Oh, a lot,” he said. “I mean, some things are bone-deep. But you never know. That’s one of the joys of travelling, is constantly being proven wrong. Anything is possible.”
You don’t think of Anthony Bourdain as a man willing to be proven wrong. It’s the perception of him as truth-teller and bulls--t-detector: he knows what he’s talking about and has the no-nonsense last word. But it’s precisely his life-long willingness to discover and change, to better understand the world around him and let go of old conceptions, that made him such an indispensable authority on matters of travel and culture and food.
Why would you want to listen to someone who thinks they’ve got it all figured out? His insatiable curiosity bespoke not merely intelligence, but a real, fundamental sensitivity — an empathy so profound that it became in the end the ultimate liability. It is, of course, idle to speculate about one’s reasons for ending one’s own life. But with Bourdain it’s easy to understand why the state of the world, so deeply felt to a man so alive to it, might have seemed finally too much to bear.
It’s heartening to concentrate now on the happinesses Bourdain wanted us to savour. When we spoke he was particularly eloquent on the magic of cooking — not of anything spectacular, not of the secret culinary mysteries of the far corners of the globe, but of simple, straightforward home cooking. Like making pasta.
“It’s something that makes you happy,” he told me wistfully. “It reminds you that you’re home. There’s that moment when you cook a pasta, and the pasta is still al dente, and you drag it out of the water and into the hot sauce in the pan and then you finish it in the sauce, and there’s that moment where it sucks in the sauce, where it sort of sits up. This miraculous, wondrous thing has happened again. It makes me happy to see that and recognize that it’s happened again: the pasta’s done. That still amazes me.”