Bourdain was an open book the night I met him
SO, FAREWELL then, Anthony Bourdain – cook, writer, music fan, explorer, bon viveur, iconoclast, educator, rebel. When the news broke on Friday that Anthony Bourdain had been found dead in a hotel room in France, with the cause quickly announced as suicide, the reaction was, obviously, one of shock.
To his millions of fans, this tall, seemingly unbreakable presence seemed immune from the usual pitfalls of depression and anxiety. But as we have seen in the few days since that untimely death, nobody ever knows what is going on behind the public veneer.
To most of us, Bourdain was the man who had it all – his first, ground-breaking exposé of the food industry in New York, ‘Kitchen Confidential’, published in 2000 had made him a literary sensation.
‘Kitchen Confidential’ was written with all the energy and verve of a young Hunter S Thompson, and combined salacious recollections of his own time working in kitchens as well as such famous tips as why you should never order the fish on a Monday.
Some 18 years later, it remains not just a classic of the genre, but a classic of a genre it actually invented – the previously stuffy world of food literature was blown open by this foul-mouthed New Yorker who could construct a sentence as expertly as he could run a busy kitchen, and even people who had no interest in food were entranced by the fizzing style of the writing and the cheeky, snarky, gossipy nature of the material.
Indeed, this self-confessed ‘snarkologist’ would go on to spend much of the next few years arguing, belittling and gleefully insulting the sacred cows of the American food industry, particularly those TV chefs he despised, such as Rachel Ray – no small feat for a man who was, at the time, starting to dip his own toes into the world of TV food programmes.
For someone like me, who had worked long hours in a basement as a kitchen porter, where the day began with cleaning up the roaches and only ended when you’d swept away the last of the mouse dropping from the dumb waiter, while also coping with the ever-changing moods of deranged chefs and moronic owners, ‘Kitchen Confidential’ came as a revelation – except for the fact, of course, that Bourdain, even in trying to remove the glamour, made it seem even more glamorous.
In his eyes, those on the lowest rung of the professional kitchen hierarchy were the glue that kept a business together and it was this interest in the so-called lower orders which would go on to define so much of his work.
He was a man driven by rage against the establishment and a boundless curiosity – curiosity which could get occasionally land him in trouble with even his own fans, such as the time he infamously ate a still-beating snake’s heart in Vietnam.
That incident was all part of his philosophy that when you visit a country and reject the food you’ve been offered, you’re also rejecting
the culture. Instead, it blew up in his face.
A few years later, when I sat down to interview him – to be honest, it was really just an excuse to go for a few beers with a man I had admired from afar for years – he was quick to put his head in his hands when the topic came up.
“Yeah, I’m the jerk-off who ate the f***in’ snake’s heart, kill me,” he grimaced.
Over the course of that afternoon and evening, he regaled myself and journalist George Byrne with nightmarish tales of near-death experiences, the various feuds he liked to start whenever he was bored and mischievous, his love for Irish cheese, and his frustration that this country hadn’t done more to make itself an internationally renowned food hub and whatever happened to be passing through his mind.
We discussed our shared love for his fellow New Yorker Andrew Vachss and that author’s brutal, uncompromising fiction, which was set mostly around Bourdain’s old stomping grounds of the Bowery, Chinatown and Little Italy.
Even when the tape recorder was turned off, the conversation was largely the same.
Usually, that’s because the subject is so careful that they don’t open up even when they’re off the record, with Bourdain it was the opposite – what you saw was what you got, whether the tape was rolling or not. That’s because, as he liked to say, he didn’t really give a f***.
That, perhaps, was one of the reasons for the remarkable success of his books and his travel shows such as ‘No Reservations’ and ‘Parts Unknown’ – in an era of celebrity fakery, he seemed to be a man genuinely without artifice. For all the hard-bitten New York clichés, and hard-bitten, street-smart, wise-ass cockiness, there was also deep curiosity, a burning sense of fair play and an apparent refusal to compromise.
As he admitted at the time, “if it was up to me I’d stay in bed all day and just smoke weed, but that’s not really an option anymore”.
Of course, you never get to know someone when you interview them, and certainly not after a few too many beers, but he remains the most open book of anyone I’ve ever met in a professional capacity, and he seemed both happy and relieved to be a man living the type of life he never thought he would have.
From a man whose various addictions had once seen him sell his beloved record collection in Washington Square Park for the price of a fix, to an internationally famous author whose fame was so great that then president Obama specifically asked to appear on his show, he appeared to be the guy who had it all.
In recent months, he had become involved, through his girlfriend Asia Argento, with the #MeToo movement, and he was quick to distance himself from former friends such as fellow chef Mario Batali, who has been accused of sexual harassment.
He also fretted over whether ‘Kitchen Confidential’ had contributed to the ‘bro culture’ of restaurants, although in truth that book reflected something that was already there.
As we shook hands that night, before he headed off to meet even more admiring fans, he laughed that he was “just happy to be alive, man”.
But even an open book can have hidden chapters, and we’re now learning more about the private anguish he was suffering and that is how it should remain – private.
When I heard the news on Friday, my first instinct was to ring George Byrne with the awful news.
Halfway through dialling, I remembered that he too is dead.