Writer Bourdain dies

Food author Anthony Bourdain is dead at 61

Never order fish on Monday, Anthony Bourdain warned in his breakthrough book “Kitchen Confidential,” which exposed the greasy secrets behind the swinging doors of restaurant kitchens. A diner is a fool to waste money on brunch or ask for a steak well done, and vegetarians – well, don’t get him started.

Bourdain’s best-selling 2000 memoir, drawn from years of working in top restaurants in New York, created his persona as a dishy, dashing adventurer of the culinary universe. He knew his way around a stovetop, but he also had the unfiltered sensibility of an opinionated, leather-jacketed onetime drug addict revealing the sometimes unsavory truths beneath the chef’s white toque.

Despite his experience in restaurants, Bourdain was not exactly a celebrity chef. He was more of a Hunter S. Thompson of the food world than, say, a Jacques Pepin – more of a roguish gonzo journalist with sharpened knives than a master of the saucepan.

In his books and television programs, including the Travel Channel’s “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations” and, since 2013, “Parts Unknown” on CNN, Bourdain explored exotic food and cultural traditions as a globe-trotting adventurer of the appetites. He was fearless in his consumption, eating scorpions, a seal’s eyeball, sheep’s testicles and the still-beating heart of a cobra.

“I want to try everything once,” he wrote in “Kitchen Confidential.”

He was in eastern France, working on an episode of “Parts Unknown,” when he was found dead Friday in his hotel room in the Alsatian town of Kaysersberg. CNN and the U.S. Embassy in France confirmed the death, which a French prosecutor described as an apparent suicide by hanging.

Bourdain, who grew up in New Jersey, was drawn to the wonders of food at age 10, when he first visited France with his family. With no American food to be found, he sampled French cuisine, including his first oyster, which he later recalled to USA Today, touched him “viscerally, instinctively, spiritually – even in some small ... way, sexually. . . . Food had power. It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress.”

After studying at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, Bourdain worked for more than 20 years in New York restaurants, eventually becoming executive chef of Brasserie Les Halles. He also overcame a years-long addiction to heroin and cocaine before remaking himself as an observant writer with a lively prose style and a taste for the absurd.