Anthony Bourdain: the rogue-ish cook behind

Anthony Bourdain, who has died aged 61, did not profess to be a great chef. While he ran several New York restaurant kitchens he was, he said, just a “competent line cook”. Yet in 2000, he took the food world by storm with his brutally honest memoir Kitchen Confidential. In vivid prose, he exposed the seamy “underbelly” of the restaurant industry, said The Daily Telegraph – the pressure-cooker atmosphere in its kitchens, and the cast of lowlifes and losers, drug addicts, alcoholics and thieves who work in them. Modelled in part on George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, the book also detailed his own addiction to cocaine and heroin, and contained some useful advice to diners – in particular, about which items on the menu to avoid. These included Monday specials (especially fish), brunch (“old, nasty odds and ends”) and hollandaise (a “Petri dish of biohazards”). The book – “not exactly Delia”, as one review noted – became a bestseller and Bourdain used his new-found fame to launch a second career as a TV presenter, travelling the world in search of culinary adventures. His series, such as A Cook’s Tour and No Reservations, 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 local delicacies as sheep’s testicles”. Hugely admired, he attained near rock-star status, yet remained painfully self-aware. In a second memoir, Medium Raw (2010), he called himself “the very picture of the jaded, overprivileged ‘foodie’… that I used to despise”, a “one-note asshole who’s been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious, over-testosteroned book for way too long”.

Born in New York in 1956, Bourdain grew up in New Jersey, the son of a French father, who worked in the music industry, and an American mother, an editor at The New York Times. It was his parents who inculcated his love of French cuisine on a family holiday. By his teens, however, he had developed a drug habit and was seeing a psychiatrist. He went to Vassar College, but dropped out and enrolled in cookery school. He spent 20 years working in restaurants, ending up as executive chef of Manhattan’s Brasserie Les Halles. Always fascinated by the demi-monde, he wrote two thrillers before producing the New Yorker article – Don’t Eat Before Reading This – that formed the basis of his first memoir.

Separated from his second wife, Bourdain had a daughter whom he adored, said The New Yorker, and was dating Asia Argento, an actress who has accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. He said hearing her “awful” story, and those of other women, had led him to become an ally of the #Metoo movement and to re-examine his own past. “In these current circumstances, one must pick a side,” he said. Kitchen Confidential