The rebel chef who explored the world through food

Anthony Bourdain took an expansive approach to eating. The former chef turned writer and TV host saw history and culture in every plate of food, and was equally at ease dining in a three-star restaurant in Paris or at a roadside stall in Malaysia. As a best-selling author, Bourdain tapped his decades of experience in New York City kitchens to dish on industry secrets: The fish is least fresh on Mondays; specials are often made of leftover ingredients long past their sell-by dates. As a host, most recently of CNN’s Parts Unknown, Bourdain used food as a window into foreign cultures, humanizing places such as Gaza and Congo by simply breaking bread with the locals. Six-foot-four, glib, and endlessly curious, the cook balanced humility with a determination to roast culinary pretensions. “Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park,” said Bourdain, who committed suicide last week at age 61. “Enjoy the ride.” Raised in Leonia, N.J., by a record company executive father and a mother who worked as a New York Times copy editor, Bourdain discovered that “food had power” at age 10 after tasting snails and oysters on a family trip to France, said The Washington Post. He experimented with drugs as a teenager—he called his younger self “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic”—and after two unproductive years at Vassar College enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America. He graduated in 1978 and spent the next two decades working his way up through New York’s top restaurants, eventually becoming executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles. Bourdain lived hard during his kitchen years, said The Times (U.K.). Laboring around the clock, he consumed every kind of drug, including heroin, cocaine, and “psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey.” In his worst period, “he did not remove his Christmas tree from his New York apartment until August.”

Bourdain rose to fame in 1999 after sending an “unsolicited article to The New Yorker about the dark side of the restaurant world and its deceptions,” said The New York Times. To his surprise, the magazine ran it, and the article became the basis of his best-selling memoir, 2000’s Kitchen Confidential. In the book he said cooks were often viewed as “sneak thieves, sluts, and psychopaths”—and happily counted himself among their ranks. Soon he had a series on the Food Network, A Cook’s Tour, and was hailed as a bad-boy celebrity chef. He bristled at that title, insisting he was merely a “competent line cook.”

On A Cook’s Tour and later shows, Bourdain honored his commitment “to try everything once,” said the Associated Press. He ate lamb’s testicles (“tender,” he said, “even fluffy”) with Morocco’s Tuareg tribe, a raw seal eyeball with an Inuit family in northern Canada, warthog rectum in Namibia (it gave him a parasite), and the still-beating heart of a cobra (“like eating a hyperactive oyster”) in Vietnam. Food was “a huge pleasure” and “a storytelling tool” for Bourdain. It could also trigger the depression that he’d battled all his life, said the Los Angeles Times. In a 2016 episode of Parts Unknown, he admitted that an “insignificant thing” like a mediocre airport hamburger could send him into “a spiral of depression that can last for days.” Asked earlier this year how he’d like to be remembered, Bourdain said, “Maybe that I grew up a little. That I’m a dad, that I’m not a half-bad cook, that I can make a good coq au vin. That would be nice. And not such a bad bastard after all.”