Though a longtime subscriber to The New Yorker, I never saw "Don't Eat Before Reading This," Anthony Bourdain's article on working in Manhattan restaurants that was published under "Annals of Gastronomy" in the issue of April 19, 1999. He died by his own hand this morning, age 61, so he was already into his 40s back then and no one had ever heard of him. The New Yorker article formed the scaffolding for Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, which came out the next year, and he was off. From what I can tell, his young adulthood, except for the restaurant work, is mainly a tale of heroin addiction, a solid excuse for having some "missing years" on your resume.
I became a fan of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations on the Travel Channel. It ran from 2005 to 2012. People who know him as a "celebrity chef" might be surprised to learn that the show was on the Travel Channel, not the Food Network, but for a lot of fans the attraction was the show's travelogue aspect. Yes, he ate the food, but vicariously going places and experiencing new things--not just the food, which you can't taste through the TV--kept me tuning in. Oh, also the host's telegenic charm and caustic intelligence. A recurring word in the tributes that are flooding the Internet is curiosity. Where one is trained to expect condemnation or condescension, you got from him simple questions: what makes you happy? what do you like to eat? And the door would open instead of get kicked shut.
The above YouTube clip is from an episode of No Reservations wherein he is visiting the Inuit. From a boat, they shoot a seal out on the ice, drag it across the ice back to the boat, haul it home across the water, spread a tarp on the kitchen floor and get after it with good knives and their hands--that simple, and of course blood everywhere, bowls of it, spattered chins. The only "side" is dessert, blackberries rolled in blubber. As the honored guest, Anthony is offered the delicacy of an eyeball, and if you listen carefully you'll hear the instructions he receives from the woman who has just cut a slit for him in the membrane: "Suck it like a nipple." He does and, though it's not a part of the clip, I believe I remember him concluding that it was nowhere near as odious as a Chicken McNugget.
People like me at home, watching TV while young children sleep and imagining that at least someone like Anthony Bourdain is living life all the way up, and then he does himself in. No one guesses what others are enduring, or trying to.
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