It’s Anthony Bourdain’s birthday today; he would have been 69 years old. I usually shrug off celebrity deaths, but his passing in 2018 hit me hard enough to dash off a quick essay on the morning the news broke. That essay was subsequently picked up by Medium, which slapped it on their front page for a few hours, which earned me more than enough money (thanks to that platform’s pageviews-for-cash setup) to go out to dinner at a very expensive and excellent restaurant, which I’m sure would’ve met Tony’s approval. It only seemed appropriate.
Why did Bourdain’s death smack me around a bit? It was the prose, and the soul behind it. Here’s that long-ago essay for your reading pleasure; pair it with a messy, smoky, musky, faintly terrifying nibble: