Anthony Bourdain, Renegade Chef Who Reported From the World’s Tabl... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/business/media/anthony-bourdain-...

The former chef exposed the underbelly of restaurant culture. Mr.

Bourdain later became a popular TV host of cooking and travel shows. He
was 61.Published OnJune 8, 2018CreditImage by Alex Welsh for The New
York Times

Anthony Bourdain, whose madcap memoir about the dark corners of New York’s
restaurants made him into a celebrity chef and touched off a nearly two-decade
career as a globe-trotting television host, was found dead on Friday at 61.

Mr. Bourdain spent two decades in restaurant kitchens, at first shucking oysters and
cleaning dishes in a Cape Cod seafood shack and later serving high-end meals in
Manhattan, before accepting a friend’s offer to fly him to Mexico if he agreed to write
a novel. It was the start of a second act as an author and then a host, redefining the
staid genres of food writing and food-tourism shows with an inquisitive but profane
bad-boy image that endeared him to fellow chefs, restaurant-goers and travelers.

Mr. Bourdain was found dead in his room at Le Chambard, a luxury hotel in the
village of Kaysersberg in the Alsace region of eastern France, according to a
prosecutor in the nearby city of Colmar. The prosecutor, Christian de Rocquigny du
Fayel, said the cause of death was hanging. “At this stage, we have no reason to
suspect foul play,” he said.

Mr. Bourdain had traveled to Strasbourg in France, near the country’s border with
Germany, with a television production crew to record an episode of his show “Parts
Unknown” on CNN, the network said. “It is with extraordinary sadness we can
confirm the death of our friend and colleague,” CNN said in a statement.

The United States Embassy in Paris also confirmed his death.

“Anthony was a dear friend,” Eric Ripert, a celebrity chef and restaurateur who
appeared with Mr. Bourdain on several of his shows, told The New York Times. “He
was an exceptional human being, so inspiring and generous. One of the great
storytellers of our time who connected with so many. I wish him peace. My love and
prayers are with his family, friends and loved ones.”

Mr. Ripert found Mr. Bourdain unresponsive in his hotel room, according to CNN.

In everything he did, Mr. Bourdain cultivated a renegade style and bad-boy persona.

For decades, he worked 13-hour days as a line cook in restaurants in New York and
the Northeast before he became executive chef in the 1990s at Brasserie Les Halles in
Manhattan, serving steak frites and onion soup. He had been an executive chef for
eight years when he sent an unsolicited article to The New Yorker about the dark side

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of the restaurant world and its deceptions.

[Read more: Mr. Bourdain spoke in 2017 about his favorite books.]

To his surprise, the magazine accepted it and ran it — catching the attention of book
editors. It resulted in “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,”
a memoir that elevated Mr. Bourdain to a celebrity chef and a new career on TV.

“Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural
provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and
McDonalds?” Mr. Bourdain wrote in the memoir. “Or do we want to eat without fear,
tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered
gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try
everything once.”

He first became conscious of food in fourth grade, he wrote. Aboard the Queen Mary
on a family vacation to France, he sat in the cabin-class dining room and ate a bowl
of vichyssoise, a creamy mix of leek and potato. What surprised him was that the
soup was cold. “It was the first food I enjoyed and, more important, remembered
enjoying,” he wrote. He did not remember much else about the trip.

Mr. Bourdain became an instant hero to a certain breed of professional cooks and
restaurant-goers when “Kitchen Confidential” hit the best-seller lists in 2000. He is
largely credited for defining an era of line cooks as warriors, exposing a kitchen
culture in which drugs, drinking and long, brutal hours on the line in professional
kitchens were both a badge of honor and a curse. Mr. Bourdain was open in his
writing about his past addictions to heroin and cocaine.

“Kitchen Confidential” has sold over a million copies in paperback and remains the
defining memoir in the field. “His prose voice was instant and unmistakable,” said
Dan Halpern, the HarperCollins editor who became Mr. Bourdain’s friend, fellow
eater and literary collaborator. “You can read out any sentence and know instantly
who wrote it.”

In 2011, Mr. Bourdain, an omnivorous reader, began his own publishing imprint at
HarperCollins, editing books by the chefs Roy Choi, Wylie Dufresne and Danny
Bowien that were as unconventional as his own.

Before he joined CNN in 2012, he spent eight seasons as the globe-trotting host of
“No Reservations” on the Travel Channel, highlighting obscure cuisine and unknown
restaurants. “No Reservations” largely focused on food and Mr. Bourdain himself.
But on “Parts Unknown,” he turned the lens around, delving into different countries
around the world and the people who lived in them. He explored politics and history
with locals, often over plates of food and drinks.

Mr. Bourdain famously appeared with President Barack Obama on an episode of

“Parts Unknown” in Vietnam in 2016. Over grilled pork, noodles and beers at a
restaurant in Hanoi, they discussed Vietnamese-American relations, Mr. Obama’s
final months in office and fatherhood.

“‘Low plastic stool, cheap but delicious noodles, cold Hanoi beer.’ This is how I’ll

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remember Tony,” Mr. Obama said on Friday. “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. We’ll miss him.”

For the past two years, Mr. Bourdain had been dating the actor Asia Argento.
“Anthony gave all of himself in everything that he did,” Ms. Argento said Friday on
Twitter. “His brilliant fearless spirit touched and inspired so many, and his
generosity knew no bounds. He was my love, my rock, my protector. I am beyond
devastated.”

Celebrities in the food and entertainment worlds expressed deep shock and disbelief.
Nigella Lawson, the British cookbook author and television personality, tweeted,
“Heartbroken to hear about Tony Bourdain’s death. Unbearable for his family and
girlfriend. Am going off twitter for a while.”

Image
Anthony Bourdain sampled Appalachian cuisine in West Virginia in an
episode of “Parts Unknown.”CreditCNN

[Read more: Fans and friends reacted to Mr. Bourdain’s death.]

Andrew Zimmern, the television personality and chef, had much in common with
Mr. Bourdain. The two met 13 years ago and were friends who often spoke of the
pressures that come with fame and who both worked to overcome addiction.

“We shared a very, very deep feeling of wanting to get off this crazy roller coaster, but
at the same time knowing that this was our work,” he said. “The world has lost a
brilliant human being and I’ve lost one of the few people I could talk to about some of
this stuff. When I did see him he and I would walk off into a corner or have dinner
together and share our deepest, darkest stuff.”

He last spoke with Mr. Bourdain about a month ago. “He told me he’d never been
happier. He felt that he had finally found his true soul mate in Asia,” he said.

But Mr. Zimmern had some indication that perhaps there was more going on.

“Things on the surface never seemed to add up or make sense,” he said.

“We have lost someone who was in my opinion the sharpest and keenest observer of
culture that I have ever known,” he said. “When we were alone his hopes and dreams
extended into amazing areas.”

Anthony Michael Bourdain was born June 25, 1956, the oldest son of Pierre
Bourdain, who was an executive in the classical-music recording industry, and
Gladys Bourdain, who was a longtime copy editor at The New York Times. He grew
up outside New York City, in Leonia, N.J., and his parents exposed him to fine
cuisine, taking him often to France.

Mr. Bourdain graduated from high school in 1973 and attended Vassar College,
dropping out after two years, where he spent long nights drinking and smoking pot.
“I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructing and

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thoughtless young lout,” he wrote in “Kitchen Confidential.”

But before he left Vassar for a chance at a culinary career, he met Nancy Putkoski,
who would become his first wife. Mr. Bourdain spent a summer in Provincetown on
Cape Cod with some friends. There, he started working as a dishwasher at a seafood
restaurant and closely watched the cooks, men who dressed like pirates, with gold
earrings and turquoise chokers. “In the kitchen, they were like gods,” he wrote.

The experience solidified his determination to make cooking his life’s work.

“I saw how the cooks and chefs behaved,” Mr. Bourdain told The Times in 1997.
“They had sort of a swagger, got all the girls and drank everything in sight.”

He then enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America in 1975 and graduated in 1978,
stepping away at times to work at restaurants in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. He
started at the bottom in the kitchen hierarchy, with stops at the Rainbow Room, the
W.P.A. restaurant on Spring Street and Gianni’s at the South Street Seaport. He
reached the top in the 1990s, becoming an executive chef at Sullivan’s, the restaurant
next to the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway, and at Les Halles.

Mr. Bourdain’s first marriage ended in divorce in 2005. In 2007, he married Ottavia
Busia, who appeared in several episodes of “No Reservations,” and they had a
daughter, Ariane, who is 11. The couple divorced in 2016. He had been dating Ms.
Argento for about two years.

Mr. Bourdain had emerged as a leading male voice in support of the #MeToo
movement in the wake of rape and abuse allegations against the film producer
Harvey Weinstein and others.

Ms. Argento, 42, said in a lengthy story in The New Yorker that she endured multiple
attacks and manipulation by Mr. Weinstein, and that he sexually assaulted her in a
hotel room years ago, when she was 21.

She said she had left her native Italy and moved to Berlin to escape the tension and
victim-shaming culture she said she experienced at home.

Last month, she gave a speech at Cannes that stunned the room. “In 1997, I was
raped by Harvey Weinstein here at Cannes,” Ms. Argento said. “This festival was his
hunting ground.”

In an interview with IndieWire this month, Mr. Bourdain called her speech a nuclear
bomb.

“I was so proud of her. It was absolutely fearless to walk right into the lion’s den and
say what she said, the way she said it. It was an incredibly powerful moment, I
thought. I am honored to know someone who has the strength and fearlessness to do
something like that.”

Mr. Bourdain continued speaking out boldly on the subject of sexual abuse and
harassment, taking on everyone from Alec Baldwin to the chef Mario Batali, who is
under investigation for sexual assault charges. Several women have come forward

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and described repeated incidents in which they said Mr. Batali had subjected them to
groping, unwanted kisses or sexual propositions.

When news of Mr. Batali’s plans to attempt a comeback were exposed, Mr. Bourdain
kicked down the idea.

“Retire and count yourself lucky,” Mr. Bourdain, a longtime friend of Mr. Batali’s
who had not spoken with him recently, said. “I say that without malice, or without
much malice. I am not forgiving. I can’t get past it. I just cannot and that’s me,
someone who really admired him and thought the world of him.”

[If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of
additional resources. Here’s what you can do when a loved one is severely
depressed.]

Reporting was contributed by Laura M. Holson, Iliana Magra, Julia Moskin and
Elian Peltier.

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