Why cooks loved Anthony Bourdain
For all his celebrity, he remained one of us: bruised and battered, imperfect and hopeful
Iwas introduced to Anthony Bourdain in 1999, at dinner at the home of the author Paula Wolfert. Not him, exactly, but his writing. It was late in the meal, the table covered with empty plates and wine bottles, when Wolfert suddenly jumped up and ran out of the room. She returned with the current copy of The New Yorker and started reading out loud from his now-legendary story Don’t Eat Before Reading This, in which he detailed the realities of a professional kitchen with gallows humour and scientific precision. It was electric. No one on the inside had ever written about professional kitchens in such an honest and open way.
That article and the man who wrote it changed everything — for readers and other writers, but even more so for his fellow cooks. The outpouring of grief and confusion from cooks around the world, overflowing social media and spilling into texts and emails and calls, speaks to how deeply he touched our lives. No matter how famous and seemingly unapproachable he became in the world, he was always one of us. He was a cook at heart.
In his writing, he ripped open the glossy facade of the celebrity chef, which in the early 2000s was still new and shiny, exposing the often unsavoury realities of the trade that lurked beneath. The legacy he left behind is vast. The compassionate scepticism with which Bourdain viewed the world has now become standard in food writing. As his celebrity grew, he created television shows that invited viewers to explore the world through his eyes, with the same openness and curiosity as he did. But more than anything, he left his mark on cooks.
At a time when we were just beginning to emerge from the shadows, he shone a bright but warm light on who we were. Misfits and outcasts. Conflicted and uncertain. Caring and generous.
As much as he humanised the people working in kitchens, he also made their lives seem somehow enviable. His early writing unintentionally glorified the culture of toxic masculinity that existed in kitchens then, and that in many ways still exists.
One of Bourdain’s strengths was his restlessness and his openness to new ideas, even when that meant admitting that his old ideas were wrong. In recent months he spoke loudly and frequently about the gender inequities and discrimination that still exist in professional kitchens. He criticised chefs accused of sexual harassment and took responsibility for his own words.
Kitchens were never safe places, and he always knew that — and more important, he always said that. The restaurant kitchen resembles a war zone more than a professional work environment. For so many cooks grinding it out day after day, we looked up to Bourdain as the one who succeeded against the odds, which makes his suicide even more devastating. As a friend asked me this morning, “If he can’t make it, with everything he’s accomplished, what chance do we have?”
He was a celebrity who seemed like one of us, which is increasingly rare in our era of plasticised heroes. His popularity was always rooted in his relatability, his humanness and imperfections. Bourdain celebrated life for what it is, a wondrous but difficult and often lonely journey: “As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks — on your body or on your heart — are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.”
For cooks all over the world, this one hurts.