Legendary chef, author, addict, and TV star Anthony Bourdain (61) dies
ANTHONY Bourdain, who has died aged 61, was an American chef whose bestselling memoir ‘Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly’ turned many gastronomes’ stomachs with its depiction of what really happened behind the scenes in the murky world of a restaurant kitchen; on the strength of it he became a celebrity and a somewhat rebarbative television personality in series such as ‘A Cook’s Tour’ and ‘No Reservations’.
He was found dead of an apparent suicide in a hotel room in Strasbourg, France, where he had been working on an episode of ‘Parts Unknown’. Bourdain’s shows were travelogues in which he ranged far and wide in search of exotic dishes, but they were as memorable for the host’s swaggering manner, macho charisma and foul mouth as they were for the sight of him tucking into such unprepossessing native delicacies as sheep’s testicles or warthog rectum. There was far more to him than simply a New York version of Gordon Ramsay, however, as Bourdain was a superb writer who combined an evocative and quotable prose style with an almost pathological honesty about both the restaurant business and his own life, especially his battles with addiction.
He had gained a considerable culinary reputation by the time he began to publish fiction in the 1990s, and he was working as executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan when he published ‘Kitchen Confidential’ in 2000.
The book was essential reading for gourmets, not least because it provided an indispensable guide to what should be avoided.
One reviewer observed that when dining out he would never again be able to order ‘Monday Specials’ (particularly fish); moules marinières (“I don’t eat mussels in restaurants,” Bourdain observed, “unless I know the chef personally”); brunch (“old, nasty odds and ends”); hollandaise (“a veritable petri-dish of biohazards”); chicken (“a menu item for people who don’t know what they want to eat”); or breasts of veal (Bourdain’s cookery school instructor made hand-puppets out of them).
With alarming frankness, Bourdain revealed that most of those who had worked alongside him in kitchens were “people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong… wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths”.
But he was also unsparing about his own failings, describing a drug habit that led him to spend one Christmas Eve sitting on a blanket in the snow on Broadway selling off his books and records to get money for heroin.
Bourdain in full bilious flow was a delight. He denounced vegetarians and “their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans” as “the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit”. His other targets ranged from Henry Kissinger (“in my view he should not be able to eat at a restaurant in New York”) to Ainsley Harriott (“It makes me cringe to watch a grown black man doing shtick, capering and coddling an audience of bison-sized white women who, were Harriott not on TV, would probably call the cops if he wandered into their neighbourhoods.”)
Indeed, from the start of his writing career Bourdain repeatedly denounced television chefs, and later felt some measure of self-contempt for giving up working in a restaurant and joining their ranks. Bourdain admitted that his programmes were selfdefeating, because the eateries he enthused about were then spoiled by becoming tourist destinations.
In a second volume of memoirs, ‘Medium Raw’ (2010), Bourdain described himself as “the very picture of the jaded, overprivileged ‘foodie’ … that I used to despise” and “a loud, egotistical, one-note a**hole who’s been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious, over-testosteroned book for way too long.”
Anthony Michael Bourdain was born in New York City on June 25, 1956 and brought up in Leonia, New Jersey. His father Pierre, the son of French immigrants, was an executive at Columbia Records and his mother Gladys (née Sacksman) was a staff editor at ‘The New York Times’. He described himself as a “feral” child and developed a drug habit as a teenager; he was sent to a psychiatrist and tormented the man about his weight so that the sessions would stop.
His love of food, he recalled in ‘Kitchen Confidential’, was kindled by eating his first oyster on a boyhood holiday in France in the 1960s. It “tasted of seawater … of brine and flesh ... and somehow … of the future.” He dropped out of Vassar College after two years having spent much of his time working in seafood restaurants.
He graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978 and then ran various restaurant kitchens in New York City; the work, he said, was “more air traffic controller than culinary”.
Bourdain’s other books included ‘A Cook’s Tour’ (2001), ‘The Nasty Bits’ (2006), a biography of Typhoid Mary (2001) and two cookery books.
Since 2013 he had presented ‘Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown’, in which he experienced far-flung cultures and cuisines.
He first married his high-school sweetheart Nancy Putkoski in 1985; the marriage was dissolved in 2005 and he then wed, in 2007, Ottavia Busia; they divorced in 2016. Latterly he was in a relationship with the film actress Asia Argento, and supported her when she made accusations of rape against Harvey Weinstein, which he denies.
He is survived by Ariane, his daughter with Ms Busia.