Tributes as celeb chef Bourdain found dead
TV presenter fondly remembered after Dublin visit
CELEBRITY chef Anthony Bourdain was found dead in his hotel room yesterday.
He is believed to have killed himself while filming in France for his TV series, Parts Unknown.
The 61-year-old American, who had spoken in the past of fighting addictions to heroin and cocaine, was found unresponsive by French chef Eric Ripert, a close friend. He had been staying in the town of Kaysersberg, just south of Strasbourg.
Bourdain rose to fame after his tell-all memoir, Kitchen Confidential, about the dark underbelly of life in New York restaurants. His globe-trotting food programmes became so popular he was able to tempt Barack Obama into a Vietnamese restaurant for one episode.
Tributes poured in from fellow chefs yesterday. Nigella Lawson, who was a judge with Bourdain on the Channel 4 cooking show The Taste, said she was ‘heartbroken’ and that it was ‘unbearable’ for his family.
Gordon Ramsay said he was ‘stunned and saddened’.
During a Dublin-centred episode of his show in 2012, Mr Bourdain expressed his admirareally tion for the city. John Kavanagh – The Gravediggers, a pub in Dublin’s Glasnevin, came in for particular praise.
The TV host wrote in the pub’s guestbook at the time, saying ‘heaven looks just like’ the pub and its food, adding that its pig’s feet dish was ‘sublime’.
‘He stayed until 3am, he was a nice person,’ Ciaran Kavanagh, of The Gravediggers, told Independent.ie of the visit.
‘We had a really deep conversation about life and the ups and downs of being a chef.
‘People would ask him about his favourite places and he’d say Dublin, The Gravediggers – we were in his top five places to drink in the world.’
As news of his death broke, there was speculation that Bourdain might have recently split up with his girlfriend, Italian actress and director Asia Argento. Yesterday, she tweeted: ‘Anthony... was my love, my rock, my protector.’
‘He was a really nice person’