For Bourdain, food was storytelling tool — and passport
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Many people thought Anthony Bourdain had the most enviable career in existence. He didn’t deny it.
“I have the best job in the world,” the globe-trotting food-taster and culinary storyteller once told the New Yorker magazine, stating the rather obvious. “If I’m unhappy, it’s a failure of imagination.”
Bourdain’s stunned fans were mourning the loss of that singular imagination on Friday following his death from an apparent suicide, recalling everything from his fearless consumption of a beating cobra’s heart or a sheep testicle — “like any other testicle,” he remarked — to his outspoken support of the (hash)MeToo movement, to his blissful paean to syrup-soaked pecan waffles at Waffle House.
“I want it all,” he wrote in his breakthrough 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential.”
“I want to try everything once.” And it seemed that he pretty much accomplished that, traveling the globe some 200 days a year for his TV shows, reveling not in fancy tasting menus — which he scorned — but in simple pleasures like a cold beer and spicy noodles in Hanoi, which he once shared with former US president Barack Obama.
For him, food, though a huge pleasure, was more importantly a storytelling tool, and a passport to the world at large.
It was a lifestyle that, while undeniably glamorous, took a toll, he suggested in a 2017 New Yorker profile. “I change location every two weeks,” he said. “I’m not going to be there for the important moments in your life.”
Not surprisingly, it was on the road, in eastern France, that Bourdain, 61, was found unresponsive Friday morning by good friend and chef Eric Ripert.
At the time of his death, his girlfriend was Asia Argento, the Italian actress who has accused Harvey Weinstein of rape. In an essay written after fellow chef Mario Batali was accused of sexual assault, Bourdain wrote that “one must pick a side ... I stand unhesitatingly and unwaveringly with the women.”
Argento wrote on Twitter Friday that Bourdain “was my love, my rock, my protector.”
There was, of course, a more lighthearted side to his travels, including some wild and bizarre eating experiences. In Morocco, it was that roasted sheep’s testicle. In Canada, it was a raw seal’s eyeball. In Namibia, it was the wrong end of a warthog (he wound up with a parasite.) In Vietnam, it was the still-beating heart of a cobra that had just been sliced open.
Meanwhile, Bourdain’s own mother, Gladys Bourdain, a long-time editor at The
New York Times, said she had no indication that her son might have been thinking of suicide.
“He is absolutely the last person in the world I would have ever dreamed would do something like this,” she told the Times. “He had everything. Success beyond his wildest dreams. Money beyond his wildest dreams,” she said.