Anthony Bourdain: Loving the Ugly Bits

He's refusing to go away. And that's a good thing.

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:

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The world feels more fragmented than ever, which is what made Anthony Bourdain such a special creature. As the host of Parts Unknown, his documentary series on CNN, he would roll into different countries — Myanmar, South Africa, India, and so on — and point a camera (as well as his palate) at the local cuisine. In the process, he would inevitably highlight a global commonality: no matter who we are, or where we come from, we all want to gather and eat, and laugh, and live.

Many of Bourdain’s obituaries are focusing on his television work, and with good reason. But let’s take a moment to remember that, long before Travel Channel or CNN signed him up, the man was an excellent writer. Here’s a tasty bit from his April 1999 article in The New Yorker, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” which helped launch his career:

“Gastronomy is the science of pain. Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness. The members of a tight, well-greased kitchen staff are a lot like a submarine crew. Confined for most of their waking hours in hot, airless spaces, and ruled by despotic leaders, they often acquire the characteristics of the poor saps who were press-ganged into the royal navies of Napoleonic times — superstition, a contempt for outsiders, and a loyalty to no flag but their own.”

That tone — vivacious, aggressive — persisted through his subsequent books, and helped define him as a writer who was, above all else, lively and fearless: he wasn’t afraid to piss people off, and have fun doing it. There was a bit of Hunter S. Thompson in his writerly DNA, and Bukowski, but his voice was ultimately unique. To anyone who felt that the vast majority of food writing was stilted and genteel, Bourdain was a revelation.

That’s why Bourdain’s first book, “Kitchen Confidential,” spawned a subindustry of imitators. But other food writers couldn’t hope to match his lifetime of kitchen knowledge; and the chefs who wanted to write weren’t willing (or able) to put in the effort to create a distinctive voice, much less express a controversial opinion. Meanwhile, Bourdain was crafting passages like: “Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.” (You can picture him chuckling as he wrote out that one.)

Bourdain had a habit of irritating folks in the culinary world. Years ago, after he fired off a rhetorical torpedo in the direction of Rachael Ray (quote: “Rachael has used her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public.”), I asked Bobby Flay — who I was interviewing for a magazine feature — what he thought about it.

“Anthony Bourdain is not [a good chef]… and even admits it,” Flay told me. “And that kind of irritates me a bit, you know? Honestly, I wish he didn’t have that much to say. Honestly, if he never had another word to say about another chef, I’d be OK with that.”

Bourdain later expressed regret over trash-talking Ray, although he never apologized for his broadsides against other chefs he felt were arrogant, too stardom-hungry, or some toxic combination of both. Let’s not forget that he once called Alain Ducasse, the famous French chef, an “arrogant [expletive],” and compared Guy Fieri’s infamous Times Square restaurant to a “terror dome.” And that was part and parcel of Bourdain’s public persona: Once you’ve spent decades working in hot kitchens, you’re not going to mince words.

Such was Bourdain’s legacy as a writer: he was going to show you the messy, ugly bits — and he was going to do it in a way that made you want to swallow them all down. How many people pursued a rough, difficult (and hopefully rewarding) kitchen career because of him? How many bit into something scary-looking that he recommended — and discovered a new favorite food? Few writers have such power. Lift a glass to him; or better yet, order something daring off the menu.