Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Michael Bourdain (/bɔːrˈdeɪn/ bor-DAYN; June 25, 1956 – June 8, 2018) was an American celebrity chef, author and travel documentarian. He starred in programs focusing on the exploration of international culture, cuisine, and the human condition.
Bourdain was a 1978 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and a veteran of many professional kitchens during his career, which included several years spent as an executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan. In the late 1990s Bourdain wrote an essay about the ugly secrets of a Manhattan restaurant but he was having difficulty getting it published. According to the New York Times, his mother Gladys—then an editor and writer at the paper—handed her son's essay to friend and fellow editor Esther B. Fein, the wife of David Remnick, editor of the magazine The New Yorker. Remnick ran Bourdain's essay in the magazine, kickstarting Bourdain's career and legitimizing the point-blank tone that would become his trademark. The success of the article was followed just a year later by the publication of a New York Times best-selling book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (2000).
Bourdain became a media darling almost overnight. His first food and world-travel television show A Cook's Tour ran for 35 episodes on the Food Network in 2002 and 2003. In 2005, he began hosting the Travel Channel's culinary and cultural adventure programs Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (2005–2012) and The Layover (2011–2013). In 2013, he began a three-season run as a judge on The Taste and consequently switched his travelogue programming to CNN to host Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. Although best known for his culinary writings and television presentations along with several books on food and cooking and travel adventures, Bourdain also wrote both fiction and historical nonfiction. On June 8, 2018, Bourdain died while on location in France, filming for Parts Unknown, of suicide by hanging..
Anthony Michael Bourdain was born in Manhattan on June 25, 1956. His father, Pierre, was a classical music recording industry executive. His mother, Gladys (née Sacksman), was a New York Times editor. Anthony's younger brother, Christopher, was born a few years after him.
Anthony grew up living with both of his parents and described his childhood in one of his books: "I did not want for love or attention. My parents loved me. Neither of them drank to excess. Nobody beat me. God was never mentioned so I was annoyed by neither church nor any notion of sin or damnation." His father was Catholic of French descent and his mother was Jewish. Bourdain stated that, although he was considered Jewish by halacha's definition, "I've never been in a synagogue. I don't believe in a higher power. But that doesn't make me any less Jewish, I don't think." His family was not religious.
At the time of Bourdain's birth, Pierre was a salesman at a New York City camera store as well as a floor manager at a record store. He later became an executive for Columbia Records, and Gladys was a staff editor at The New York Times.
Bourdain's paternal grandparents were French (his great-grandfather Aurélien Bourdain was born in Brazil to French parents) and his paternal grandfather Pierre Michel Bourdain emigrated from Arcachon to New York following World War I. Bourdain's father spent summers in France as a boy and grew up speaking French. Bourdain spent most of his childhood in Leonia, New Jersey. He felt jealous of the lack of parental supervision of his classmates and the freedom they had in their homes. In his youth, Bourdain was a member of the Boy Scouts of America.
Bourdain's love of food was kindled in his youth while on a family vacation in France when he tried his first oyster from a fisherman's boat. He graduated from the Dwight-Englewood School, an independent coeducational college-preparatory day school in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1973, then enrolled at Vassar College but dropped out after two years. He worked at seafood restaurants in Provincetown, Massachusetts, including the Lobster Pot, while attending Vassar, which inspired his decision to pursue cooking as a career.
Bourdain attended the Culinary Institute of America, graduating in 1978. From there he went on to run various restaurant kitchens in New York City, including the Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue and Sullivan's.
In 1998, Bourdain became an executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles. Based in Manhattan, at the time the brand had additional restaurants in Miami; Washington, D.C.; and Tokyo. Bourdain remained an executive chef there for many years and even when no longer formally employed at Les Halles, he maintained a relationship with the restaurant, which described him in January 2014 as their "chef at large." Les Halles closed in 2017 after filing for bankruptcy.
In the mid-1980s, Bourdain began submitting unsolicited work for publication to Between C & D, a literary magazine of the Lower East Side. The magazine eventually published a piece that Bourdain had written about a chef who was trying to purchase heroin in the Lower East Side. In 1985, Bourdain signed up for a writing workshop with Gordon Lish. In 1990, Bourdain received a small book advance from Random House, after meeting a Random House editor.
His first book, a culinary mystery called Bone in the Throat, was published in 1995. He paid for his own book tour, but he did not find success. His second mystery book, Gone Bamboo, also performed poorly in sales. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, a 2000 New York Times bestseller, was an expansion of his 1999 New Yorker article "Don't Eat Before Reading This."
In 2010, he published Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, a memoir and follow-up to the book Kitchen Confidential.
He wrote two more bestselling nonfiction books: A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines (2001), an account of his food and travel exploits around the world, written in conjunction with his first television series of the same title, and 2006's The Nasty Bits, a collection of 37 exotic, provocative, and humorous anecdotes and essays, many of them centered around food, and organized into sections named for each of the five traditional flavors, followed by a 30-page fiction piece ("A Chef's Christmas").
Bourdain later published a hypothetical historical investigation, Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical, about Mary Mallon, an Irish-born cook believed to have infected 53 people with typhoid fever between 1907 and 1938. In 2007, Bourdain published No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach, covering the experiences of filming and photographs of the first three seasons of the show and his crew at work while filming the series.
His articles and essays appeared in many publications, including in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Times of the Los Angeles Times, The Observer, Gourmet, Maxim, and Esquire. Scotland on Sunday, The Face, Food Arts, Limb by Limb, BlackBook, The Independent, Best Life, the Financial Times, and Town & Country. His blog for the third season of Top Chef was nominated for a Webby Award for Best Blog (in the Cultural/Personal category) in 2008.
In 2012, Bourdain co-wrote the graphic novel Get Jiro! with Joel Rose, with art by Langdon Foss. It will receive an adult animated series adaptation produced by Warner Bros. Animation for Adult Swim.
In 2015, Bourdain joined the travel, food, and politics publication Roads & Kingdoms, as the site's sole investor and editor-at-large. Over the next few years, Bourdain contributed to the site and edited the Dispatched By Bourdain series. Bourdain and Roads & Kingdoms also partnered on the digital series Explore Parts Unknown, which launched in 2017 and won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Short Form Nonfiction or Reality Series in 2018.
Bourdain hosted many food and travel series, including his first show, A Cook's Tour (2002 to 2003). He worked for The Travel Channel from 2005 to 2013. He also worked for CNN from 2013 to 2018. Bourdain described the concept as, "I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do whatever the fuck I want." Nigella Lawson noted that Bourdain had an "incredibly beautiful style when he talks that ranges from erudite to brilliantly slangy."
The acclaim surrounding Bourdain's memoir Kitchen Confidential led to an offer by the Food Network for him to host his own food and world-travel show, A Cook's Tour, which premiered in January 2002. It ran for 35 episodes, through 2003.
In July 2005, he premiered a new, somewhat similar television series, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, on the Travel Channel. As a further result of the immense popularity of Kitchen Confidential, the Fox sitcom Kitchen Confidential aired in 2005, in which the character Jack Bourdain is based loosely on Anthony Bourdain's biography and persona.
In July 2006, he and his crew were in Beirut filming an episode of No Reservations when the Israel–Lebanon conflict broke out unexpectedly after the crew had filmed only a few hours of footage. His producers compiled behind-the-scenes footage of him and his production staff, including not only their initial attempts to film the episode, but also their firsthand encounters with Hezbollah supporters, their days of waiting for news with other expatriates in a Beirut hotel, and their eventual escape aided by a fixer (unseen in the footage), whom Bourdain dubbed Mr. Wolf after Harvey Keitel's character in Pulp Fiction. Bourdain and his crew were finally evacuated with other American citizens, on the morning of July 20, by the United States Marine Corps. The Beirut No Reservations episode, which aired on August 21, 2006, was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2007.
In July 2011, the Travel Channel announced adding a second one-hour, 10-episode Bourdain show to be titled The Layover, which premiered November 21, 2011. Each episode featured an exploration of a city that can be undertaken within an air travel layover of 24 to 48 hours. The series ran for 20 episodes, through February 2013. Bourdain executive produced a similar show hosted by celebrities called The Getaway, which lasted two seasons on Esquire Network.
In May 2012, Bourdain announced that he was leaving the Travel Channel. In December, he explained on his blog that his departure was due to his frustration with the channel's new ownership using his voice and image to make it seem as if he were endorsing a car brand, and the channel's creating three "special episodes" consisting solely of clips from the seven official episodes of that season. He went on to host Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown for CNN. The program focused on other cuisines, cultures and politics and premiered on April 14, 2013.
President Barack Obama was featured on the program in an episode filmed in Vietnam that aired in September 2016; the two talked over a beer and bun cha at a small restaurant in Hanoi. The show was filmed and is set in places as diverse as Libya, Tokyo, the Punjab region, Jamaica, Turkey, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Far West Texas and Armenia.
Between 2012 and 2017, he served as narrator and executive producer for several episodes of the award-winning PBS series The Mind of a Chef; it aired on the last months of each year. The series moved from PBS to Facebook Watch in 2017.
From 2013 to 2015, Bourdain was an executive producer and appeared as a judge and mentor in ABC's cooking-competition show The Taste. He earned an Emmy nomination for each season.
Bourdain appeared five times as guest judge on Bravo's Top Chef reality cooking competition program. He was also one of the main judges on Top Chef All-Stars (Top Chef, Season 8). He made a guest appearance on the August 6, 2007, New York City episode of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, and Zimmern himself appeared as a guest on the New York City episode of Bourdain's No Reservations airing the same day. On October 20, 2008, Bourdain hosted a special, At the Table with Anthony Bourdain, on the Travel Channel.
Bourdain was a consultant and writer for the television series Treme.
In 2011, he voiced himself in a cameo on an episode of The Simpsons titled "The Food Wife", in which Marge, Lisa, and Bart start a food blog called The Three Mouthkateers.
He appeared in a 2013 episode of the animated series Archer (S04E07), voicing chef Lance Casteau, a parody of himself. In 2015, he voiced a fictionalized version of himself on an episode of Sanjay and Craig titled "Snake Parts Unknown."
From 2015 to 2017, Bourdain hosted Raw Craft, a series of short videos released on YouTube. The series followed Bourdain as he visited various artisans who produce various craft items by hand, including iron skillets, suits, saxophones, and kitchen knives. The series was produced by William Grant & Sons to promote their Balvenie distillery's products.
In September 2011, Ecco Press announced that Bourdain would have his own publishing line, Anthony Bourdain Books, which included acquiring between three and five titles per year that "reflect his remarkably eclectic tastes." The first books that the imprint published, released in 2013, include L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food by Roy Choi, Tien Nguyen, and Natasha Phan, Prophets of Smoked Meat by Daniel Vaughn, Pain Don't Hurt by Mark Miller, and Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews by Marilyn Hagerty.
In describing the line, he said, "This will be a line of books for people with strong voices who are good at something—who speak with authority. Discern nothing from this initial list—other than a general affection for people who cook food and like food. The ability to kick people in the head is just as compelling to us—as long as that's coupled with an ability to vividly describe the experience. We are just as intent on crossing genres as we are enthusiastic about our first three authors. It only gets weirder from here."
Shortly after Bourdain's death, HarperCollins announced that the publishing line would be shut down after the remaining works under contract were published.
Bourdain appeared as himself in the 2015 film The Big Short, in which he used seafood stew as an analogy for a collateralized debt obligation. He also produced and starred in Wasted! The Story of Food Waste.
Drew Magary, in a column for GQ published on the day of Bourdain's death, reflected that Bourdain was heir in spirit to Hunter S. Thompson. Smithsonian magazine declared Bourdain "the original rock star" of the culinary world, while his public persona was characterized by Gothamist as "culinary bad boy." Due to his liberal use of profanity and sexual references in his television show No Reservations, the network added viewer-discretion advisories to each episode.
Bourdain was known for consuming exotic local specialty dishes, having eaten black-colored blood sausages called mustamakkara (lit. 'black sausage') in Finland and also "sheep testicles in Morocco, ant eggs in Puebla, Mexico, a raw seal eyeball as part of a traditional Inuit seal hunt, and an entire cobra—beating heart, blood, bile, and meat—in Vietnam." Bourdain was quoted as saying that a Chicken McNugget was the most disgusting thing he ever ate, but he was fond of Popeyes chicken. He also declared that the unwashed warthog rectum he ate in Namibia was "the worst meal of [his] life", along with the fermented shark he ate in Iceland.
Bourdain was noted for his put-downs of celebrity chefs such as Paula Deen, Bobby Flay, Guy Fieri, Sandra Lee, and Rachael Ray, and appeared irritated by both the overt commercialism of the celebrity cooking industry and its lack of culinary authenticity. He voiced a "serious disdain for food demigods like Alan Richman, Alice Waters, and Alain Ducasse." Bourdain recognized the irony of his transformation into a celebrity chef and began to qualify his insults; in the 2007 New Orleans episode of No Reservations, he reconciled with Emeril Lagasse, whom he had previously disparaged in Kitchen Confidential. He later wrote more favorably of Lagasse in the preface of the 2013 edition. He was outspoken in his praise for chefs he admired, particularly Ferran Adrià, Juan Mari Arzak, Fergus Henderson, José Andrés, Thomas Keller, Martin Picard, Éric Ripert, and Marco Pierre White, as well as his former protégé and colleagues at Brasserie Les Halles. He spoke very highly of Julia Child's influence on him.
Bourdain was known for his sarcastic comments about vegan and vegetarian activists, considering their lifestyle "rude" to the inhabitants of many countries he visited. He considered vegetarianism, except in the case of religious exemptions, a "First World luxury." However, he also believed that Americans eat too much meat, and admired vegetarians and vegans who put aside their beliefs when visiting different cultures in order to be respectful of their hosts.
Bourdain's book The Nasty Bits is dedicated to "Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee" of the Ramones. He declared fond appreciation for their music, as well that of other early punk bands such as Dead Boys and The Voidoids. He said that the playing of music by Billy Joel, Elton John, or Grateful Dead in his kitchen was grounds for firing. Joel was a fan of Bourdain's, and visited the restaurant.
On No Reservations and Parts Unknown, he dined with and interviewed many musicians, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, with a special focus on glam and various rockers such as Alice Cooper, David Johansen, Marky Ramone, and Iggy Pop. He featured contemporary band Queens of the Stone Age on No Reservations several times, and they composed and performed the theme song for Parts Unknown.
In the 1970s, while attending high school at Dwight-Englewood School, Bourdain dated Nancy Putkoski. He described her as "a bad girl", older than he was and "part of a druggy crowd." She was a year ahead of him and Bourdain graduated one year early in order to follow Putkoski to Vassar College since they had just started admitting men. He studied there between the ages of 17 and 19. He then attended the Culinary Institute of America, a 15-minute drive from Vassar. The couple married in 1985 and remained together for two decades, divorcing in 2005.
On April 20, 2007, he married Ottavia Busia, who later became a mixed martial artist. The couple's daughter, Ariane, was born in 2007. Bourdain said having to be away from his family for 250 days a year working on his television shows put a strain on the relationship. Busia appeared in several episodes of No Reservations, notably the ones in Tuscany, Rome, Rio de Janeiro, Naples, and her birthplace of Sardinia. The couple separated in 2016.
Bourdain met Italian actress Asia Argento in 2016 while filming the Rome episode of Parts Unknown. In October 2017, Argento said in an article in The New Yorker that she had been sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein in the 1990s. After being criticized for her account in Italian media and politics, Argento moved to Germany to escape what she described as a culture of "victim blaming" in Italy. Argento delivered a speech on May 20, 2018 following the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, calling the festival Weinstein's "hunting ground" and alleging that she was raped by Weinstein in Cannes when she was 21. She added, "And even tonight, sitting among you, there are those who still have to be held accountable for their conduct against women." Bourdain supported her during that period. On June 3, 2018, Bourdain tweeted a video where the team was celebrating during the production of the show with Argento as director, him and Chris Doyle. In August 2018, Argento said that Bourdain handled the payment of $380,000 to Jimmy Bennett, who had accused Argento of sexually assaulting him. She stated the payment by Bourdain was one he "personally undertook to help Bennett economically, upon the condition that we would no longer suffer any further intrusions in our life.”
Bourdain practiced the martial art Brazilian jiu-jitsu, earning a blue belt in August 2015. He won gold at the IBJJF New York Spring International Open Championship in 2016, in the Middleweight Master 5 (age 51 and older) division.
Bourdain was known to be a heavy smoker. In a nod to Bourdain's two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, Thomas Keller once served him a 20-course tasting menu which included a mid-meal "coffee and cigarette", a coffee custard infused with tobacco with a foie gras mousse. Bourdain stopped smoking in 2007 for his daughter, but relapsed towards the end of his life.
A former user of cocaine and heroin, Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential of his experience in a SoHo restaurant in 1981, where he and his friends were often high. Bourdain said drugs influenced his decisions and that he would send a busboy to Alphabet City to obtain cannabis, methaqualone, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, secobarbital, tuinal, amphetamine, codeine and heroin.
In early June 2018, Bourdain was working on an episode of Parts Unknown in Strasbourg with his frequent collaborator and friend Éric Ripert. On June 8, 2018, Ripert became worried when Bourdain had missed dinner and breakfast. He subsequently found Bourdain dead by suicide in his room at Le Chambard hotel in Kaysersberg near Colmar. He was 61 years old.
Bourdain's body bore no signs of violence and the suicide appeared to be an impulsive act. Rocquigny du Fayel disclosed that Bourdain's toxicology results were negative for narcotics, showing only a trace of a therapeutic non-narcotic medication. Bourdain's body was cremated in France on June 13, 2018 and his ashes were returned to the United States two days later then given to his brother Christopher.
Bourdain's mother, Gladys Bourdain, told The New York Times, "He is absolutely the last person in the world I would have ever dreamed would do something like this."
Following the news of Bourdain's death, various public figures expressed condolences. Among them were fellow chefs Andrew Zimmern and Gordon Ramsay, former astronaut Scott Kelly, and then-U.S. president Donald Trump. CNN issued a statement, saying that Bourdain's "talents never ceased to amaze us and we will miss him very much." Former U.S. president Barack Obama, who dined with Bourdain in Vietnam on Parts Unknown, wrote on Twitter: "He taught us about food—but more importantly, about its ability to bring us together. To make us a little less afraid of the unknown." On the day of Bourdain's death, CNN aired Remembering Anthony Bourdain, a tribute program.
In the days following Bourdain's death, fans gathered to pay tribute to him outside his former place of employment, Brasserie Les Halles (which had closed down the previous year). Cooks and restaurant owners held gatherings, tribute dinners, and memorials, and donated the net revenue from these events to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
In August 2018, CNN announced a final, posthumous season of Parts Unknown. Its remaining episodes were completed using narration and additional interviews from featured guests with the season including two retrospective episodes paying tribute to the series and to Bourdain's legacy.
In June 2019, Éric Ripert and José Andrés proclaimed the first annual Bourdain Day as a tribute to Bourdain. That month, the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) established a scholarship in Bourdain's honor.
A collection of Bourdain's personal items were sold at auction in October 2019, raising $1.8 million, part of which went to support the Anthony Bourdain Legacy Scholarship at his alma mater, the Culinary Institute of America. The remainder went to his family. His custom-made Bob Kramer Steel and Meteorite Chef's Knife sold for the highest price, a record $231,250.
In June 2021, a documentary film directed by Morgan Neville and produced by CNN Films and HBO Max titled Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. It was released by Focus Features on July 16, 2021.
In October 2022, Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain, an unauthorized biography of Bourdain, was published.
In August 2024, a biopic of Bourdain titled Tony was announced to be in the works with A24 in negotiations to acquire the film and Dominic Sessa attached to star as Bourdain.
In an assessment of Bourdain's life for The Nation, David Klion wrote that, "Bourdain understood that the point of journalism is to tell the truth, to challenge the powerful, to expose wrongdoing. But his unique gift was to make doing all that look fun rather than grim or tedious." According to Klion, Bourdain's shows "made it possible to believe that social justice and earthly delights weren't mutually exclusive, and he pursued both with the same earnest reverence."
Bourdain advocated for communicating the value of traditional or peasant foods, including all of the varietal bits and unused animal parts not usually eaten by affluent 21st-century Americans. He also praised the quality of freshly prepared street food in other countries—especially developing countries—compared to fast-food chains in the U.S. Regarding Western moral criticism of cuisine in developing countries, Bourdain stated: "Let's call this criticism what it is: racism. There are a lot of practices from the developing world that I find personally repellent, from my privileged Western point of view. But I don't feel like I have such a moral high ground that I can walk around lecturing people in developing nations on how they should live their lives."
With regard to criticism of the Chinese, Bourdain stated: "The way in which people dismiss whole centuries-old cultures—often older than their own and usually non-white—with just utter contempt aggravates me. People who suggest I shouldn't go to a country like China, look at or film it, because some people eat dog there, I find that racist, frankly. Understand people first: their economic, living situation." Regarding the myth that monosodium glutamate in Chinese food is unhealthy, Bourdain said: "It's a lie. You know what causes Chinese restaurant syndrome? Racism. 'Ooh I have a headache; it must have been the Chinese guy.'"
In an acceptance speech for an award given by the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Bourdain stated, "The world has visited many terrible things on the Palestinian people, none more shameful than robbing them of their basic humanity." He opened the episode of Parts Unknown on Jerusalem with the prediction that "By the end of this hour, I'll be seen by many as a terrorist sympathizer, a Zionist tool, a self-hating Jew, an apologist for American imperialism, an Orientalist, socialist, a fascist, CIA agent, and worse."
He championed industrious Spanish-speaking immigrants—from Mexico, Ecuador, and other Central and South American countries—who are cooks and chefs in many United States restaurants, including upscale establishments, regardless of cuisine. He considered them talented chefs and invaluable cooks, underpaid and unrecognized even though they have become the backbone of the U.S. restaurant industry.
In 2017, Bourdain became a vocal advocate against sexual harassment in the restaurant industry, speaking out about celebrity chefs Mario Batali and John Besh, and in Hollywood, particularly following his then-girlfriend Asia Argento's sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Bourdain accused Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino of "complicity" in the Weinstein sex scandal.
Following the death of Elizabeth II, a 2018 video resurfaced on Twitter showing Bourdain refusing to complete a toast to the Queen, saying "I hate the aristocracy."