Any assessment of Anthony Bourdain’s life, his suicide notwithstanding, is likely to be tinged with jealousy. We suppose someone had to get paid to be a world traveler and bon vivant, but did Bourdain have to be so good at it? At a minimum, few people have a constitution that can alternately subsist on gallons of rich bone marrow and spicy Asian street food cooked in hygienically mysterious circumstances.
America’s favorite food writer was brusque and opinionated and, perhaps too often, offensive. But there was much to admire in a man who refused to abide mediocrity or bow to the dictates of cultural fashion. The 1999 New Yorker essay that made him famous declared of vegetarians that “serious cooks regard these members of the dining public—and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans—as enemies of everything that’s good and decent in the human spirit.”
Bourdain was not unaware of America’s shortcomings, but he loved the country that made him famous and wealthy and he never engaged in the sort of anti-patriotic tut-tutting one sees from many famous Americans abroad. The writer James Gleick reports that he appeared on a panel discussion with Bourdain in Australia where an audience member asked whether the 9/11 attacks weren’t America’s own fault. While Gleick was mulling over what to say, Bourdain immediately responded with string of profanities directed at the questioner ending with “and the horse you rode in on.”
Imaginative, ferociously curious, humane in the widest sense, cool but never pretentious—Anthony Bourdain was one of those rare celebrities who was justly celebrated.
