Swaggering chef became a TV star after lifting lid on life in restaurant kitchens
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 television personality in series such as A Cook’s Tour and No Reservations.
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 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.
Some thought his emergence as an outstanding writer was a lucky deliverance from the realisation that he would never make the top flight of chefs, but 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. Reviewing it in The Daily Telegraph, Hugh Massingberd observed that when dining out he would never again be able to order ‘‘Monday Specials’’ (particularly fish); moules marinieres (‘‘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). Massingberd declared the book to be worthy of a place on the shelf next to George Orwell’s classic memoir of working in a restaurant kitchen, Down and Out in Paris and London.
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 Chef and author b June 25, 1956 d June 8, 2018 sitting on a blanket in the snow on Broadway selling off his books and records to get money for heroin.
Whether on the page or on television, Bourdain in full bilious flow was a shocking 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 selfcontempt for giving up working in a restaurant and joining their ranks. He admitted his programmes were self-defeating, because the eateries he enthused about were then spoiled by becoming tourist destinations: ‘‘I’m in the business of finding great places, and then we f... them up.’’
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 asshole who’s been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious, over-testosteroned book for way too long’’.
Many critics felt that his account of his ascendancy to television fame was a cautionary tale. ‘‘Some have said I’ve already become a cartoon version of myself,’’ he said in 2007. ‘‘Maybe they have a point.’’
Anthony Michael Bourdain was born in New York City 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 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.
He graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978 and then ran various restaurant kitchens in New York, including the Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue and Sullivan’s; the work, he said, was ‘‘more air traffic controller than culinary’’.
In the 1990s an old college room-mate sensed that Bourdain would be a marketable author and offered him a free holiday if he promised to write a novel. Bone in the Throat (1995) was a well-received satirical thriller, followed by another, Gone Bamboo, in 1997. That year he told the New York Times that he hoped one day to write ‘‘a ribald account of my 22 years in the restaurant business that would probably appal and horrify anyone thinking of hiring me’’. Kitchen Confidential duly followed.
Bourdain married firstly, in 1985, his highschool sweetheart Nancy Putkoski, and secondly, in 2007, Ottavia Busia. Latterly he was in a relationship with the film actress Asia Argento. He is survived by Ariane, the daughter of his second marriage. – Telegraph Group
‘‘Some have said I’ve already become a cartoon version of myself,’’ he said in 2007. ‘‘Maybe they have a point.’’