An Ode to Anthony Bourdain, Social Critic
A Cultural Colossus and the Long Shadow He Still Casts
6 years ago today, on June 8, 2018, we lost Tony. I call him Tony because I knew him. He did not know me, mind you, but I felt as though I knew him. I shared hundreds of meals with him, though he did not know it. I travelled with him to Zanzibar and Iran, to Libya and Vietnam, and to Sicily and Tokyo — but he never knew my name.
I am not alone in this feeling. Losing Tony Bourdain was a shockingly personal feeling for foodies, cultural explorers, and wry smirking thrill-junkies the world over. For those of us who spent the vast majority of our 20s or 30s in the service industry, though, his death was a flaming arrow straight through the heart.
Bourdain rode a fine line. Teaching an audience how to be empathetic while knocking back shooters of straight vodka is a difficult needle to thread. It is the wisdom of bartenders, cooks, and Bourdain. It comes from nowhere else. As Bourdain echoed after taking a shot out back of a Sardinian agriturismo with local staff, “only the world changes, the cooks stay the same.”
When you get done with your 9 to 5 and want to kick back and bitch about your day, it is the bartender you seek. When you are desirous of a medium-rare hunk of beef to soak up the booze, you turn to the cook sweating it out in the kitchen, perhaps still recovering from last night’s coke binge. That is where the spirit of Bourdain lives. Where it has always lived. Yet, for all of his depravity and reveling in tortured youth long passed, Bourdain undoubtedly became a leading social critic.
Bourdain’s early writings and episodes were arguably a bit klutzy and he seemed uneasy with a camera in his face for the first few years. At the beginning he used crude humor and sometimes awkward self-aggrandizing to make up for this apparent discomfort. This is unsurprising, though, for a man who was launched into the limelight later in life following a storied career working the line in East Coast restaurants.
I wrote an article. My mom actually said “you should send it to the New Yorker.” The next day I got a call saying, “we’ll give you 50 grand to write a book.” I’m no dummy. I’m dunking french fries at age 44, I’ll write the damn book!
That book was Kitchen Confidential. Kitchen Confidential topped the New York Times Bestseller list when it was published in 2000 and again 18 years later, when Bourdain died.
Somewhere early on in Bourdain’s Discovery Channel series No Reservations he was firmly comfortable in his skin. By the time CNN picked him up for Parts Unknown in early 2013, Bourdain was fully prepared and deftly able to use his platform for good. He was ready to change our perceptions of social norms and turn our learned stereotypes on their head.
On Season 4, Episode 7 of Parts Unknown, Bourdain took a close look at the opioid epidemic and those deeply impacted by the fiery spread of OxyContin and heroin addiction. Having been a heroin addict himself in younger years, he was perhaps the only voice reporting on the issue with such striking experience and credibility.
I got off of heroin in the 1980s. Friends of mine from the ’70s and ’80s, they just got off five, six, maybe 10 years ago. And we’re the lucky ones. We made it out alive. There are a lot of guys that didn’t get that far. — 2016 Biography Interview
War on drugs’ implies an us versus them. And all over this part of America, people are learning there is no them. There is only us. And we’re gonna have to figure this out together. — Parts Unknown, Season 4, Episode 7
Nor did Bourdain shy away from more controversial social issues. On Season 2, Episode 1 of Parts Unknown he took on the impossible task of attempting to explain Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza in a mere 43 minute span. He somehow did that task true justice. Though the episode was filmed more than 10 years ago, Bourdain’s comments are more poignant than ever.
“Does he think he’ll be able to go to his ancestral homeland in his lifetime? His children’s lifetime?” Bourdain asked of a Palestinian man whose family was displaced to the Gaza Strip in 1948. The man responded hopefully. Bourdain then discussed the aimlessness of the death and destruction in the region with an Israeli man whose daughter was killed by a mortar launched by Hamas.
Bourdain was somehow simultaneously empathetic and unabashed in his questioning. He challenged West Bank settlers on the illegality of their presence in the area. He shed light on the grueling conditions in Gaza and called the difficult process of entering into and leaving Gaza “truly one of the most surreal travel experiences you can have on Earth.” Yet, he shared food with everyone involved.
There is a lesson in Bourdain’s ability to share meals with families in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza with honest curiosity and openness, while refusing to resign himself to both-sidesism or mere neutrality. He recognized and identified injustices throughout.
In fact, that episode won Parts Unknown the 2014 Muslim Public Affairs Counsel’s Courage and Conscience in Media Award. In accepting the honor, Bourdain said that the episode required “very little courage and — one would hope — an ordinary amount of conscience.”
I was enormously grateful for the response of Palestinians in particular, for doing what seemed to me an ordinary thing. Something we do all the time — showing regular people doing everyday things. Cooking and enjoying meals. Playing with their children. Talking about their lives, their hopes and dreams.
It is a measure, I guess, of how twisted and shallow our depiction of a people is that these pictures come as a shock to so many. The world has visited many terrible things on the Palestinian people, none more shameful than robbing them of their basic humanity. People are not statistics. That is all we attempted to show. A small — a pathetically small — step toward understanding.
There is no doubt that Bourdain would have been particularly outraged by the killing of 7 World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza earlier this year. World Central Kitchen, which provides humanitarian aid and hot meals to civilians in regions of disaster and warfare, was founded by Bourdain’s close friend and Michelin-starred Chef José Andrés.
The day of the Israeli airstrikes that killed the 7 aid workers, Andrés called on Israel “to stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon.” If Bourdain was anything, he was a multicultural ambassador of food. Given everything he stated clearly throughout his career, there can be no doubt that he would have spoken out on the weaponization of food in Gaza and the killing of aid workers attempting simply to feed civilians a warm meal.
Bourdain and Andrés travelled to Asturias, Spain together in an episode of Parts Unknown that aired posthumously. In a brief solo interview when Andrés stepped outside to smoke a cigar, Andrés talked about knowing the real Anthony Bourdain and called him “the most caring person I have ever met. That is why I am happy and proud to call him a friend.” Andrés then surprised Bourdain with a whole salmon specially prepared to render the fat from the skin inside the fish. The two men shared the meal over wine, the local moonshine, and laughter. That was Tony’s calling card.
I’m proud of the fact that I’ve had, as dining companions over the years, everybody from Hezbollah supporters, communist functionaries, anti-Putin activists, cowboys, stoners, Christian militia leaders, feminists, Palestinians and Israeli settlers, to Ted Nugent. You like food and are reasonably nice at the table? You show me hospitality? I will sit down with you and break bread. — Bourdain’s Sept. 25, 2016 Medium Log
Bourdain was also decidedly a political animal. Perhaps his most famous meal took place on a pair of small plastic stools in Hanoi. A motorcade pulled up in the rain to James Brown’s “The Boss” and out stepped then-sitting President Barack Obama. The two walked into Bún chả Hương Liên in the Vietnamese capital to deafening cheers from surprised market-goers to discuss bún chả etiquette, Obama’s childhood, cultural openness, and the unforgivable sin of dressing a hot dog in ketchup — the clearest reminder that Obama is from Chicago. As President Obama rolled up his sleeves and threw back a cold beer, Bourdain looked on with unmistakable admiration.
I can tell you that Barack Obama was, in spite of having had a high-ranking leader of the Taliban whacked in Pakistan a few days previous, very relaxed and at ease. He seemed to enjoy himself sitting on a low plastic stool eating noodles and pork bits with chopsticks. I talked to him as a father, as an enthusiast for the region, and he responded with real nostalgia for the Indonesian and Hawaiian street food of his youth. — Bourdain’s Sept. 25, 2016 Medium Log
Nor did Bourdain mince words about his seething hatred for political figures like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. On Season 3, Episode 5 of Parts Unknown, which aired in 2014, Bourdain sat across from his longtime travel companion Zamir Gotta at Hotel Metropol in Moscow drinking glass after glass of straight vodka and snacking on caviar.
Gotta: What do you think? What is the perception of Mr. Putin these days after 14 years in power?
Bourdain: My perception? Do you really want to hear it?
Gotta: I’m not sure, but let’s see.
Bourdain: A former mid-level manager in a large corporation. Short. That’s very important. Short. Who has found himself master of the universe. And like a lot of short people, if you piss him off, bad things happen to you. He likes to take his shirt off a lot. He strikes me as a businessman. A businessman with an ego. Okay, so he’s like Donald Trump…
[Bourdain looks into the camera]
Bourdain: …but shorter.
[Bourdain and Gotta take another shot of vodka]
Bourdain and Gotta then attended an opposition rally in Moscow seeking to free political prisoners and oust Putin, followed by dinner with Boris Nemtsov, Former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia and outspoken Putin critic. The men dined on classic Russian fare and discussed the frequency with which Russian dissidents are killed for speaking out against Putin. Nemtsov was assassinated less than a year after the airing of that episode.
The following year, on Season 5, Episode 5 of Parts Unknown, Bourdain stood outside in the winter looking up at the massive casinos of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Airing in May of 2015 — a full month before Trump descended his golden escalator and announced his candidacy for the 2016 election — Bourdain compared Trump to his now-former Atlantic City casino, the Trump Taj Mahal.
It’s sort of perfect. If you think of Trump as this carnival barker, with his operation designed to attract rubes, and it’s empty! You’ve got sort of a perfect metaphor here.
Bourdain’s loathing for Trump did not cool with time. In what is believed to be his final interview in 2018, Bourdain commented on the then-current Trump presidency: “Somebody at the White House press briefing has to sacrifice their job and say: You utter piece of shit! Do you really expect us to swallow that steaming load of horseshit? How do you live with yourself? You should be ashamed.”
Nor did he spare his professional contemporaries. Bourdain notoriously and repeatedly expressed his thoughts on American restaurateur Guy Fieri, who was high on Bourdain’s shit-list along with hipsters and the third slice of bread in a club sandwich. In 2011 Bourdain was quoted as saying:
I look at Guy Fieri and I just think, ‘Jesus, I’m glad that’s not me.’ You work that hard and there’s not a single show of yours that you’d want to sit down and say, ‘Hey, I made that last week. Look at that camera work. It’s really good, huh?’ I’m proud of what I do.
Bourdain’s disdain for Fieri was partially based on the homophobic and abusive ways Fieri had been purported to run his shows and his kitchen. There is little doubt that Bourdain would have further called out Fieri for his open embrace of Donald Trump at a UFC fight in Las Vegas in July of 2023.
Yet, far from being a run-of-the-mill East Coast liberal, Bourdain had a libertarian streak. He shot guns, attended bullfights, slit the throat of the occasional goat, derided political correctness, and hunted for his meals when the opportunity presented itself.
I like guns. I don’t own a gun, but I like holding them. I like shooting them. There is something compelling. An eerie rush. An unholy sense of empowerment feeling the warm glow of these heavy, iconic shapes in your hands. You just can’t help mouthing “make my day” or “you feelin’ lucky, punk?” — Parts Unknown, Season 2, Episode 3
Nor did Bourdain hold back on people he considered to be smug liberals. In a 2016 election post-mortem, Bourdain discussed HBO host Bill Maher, who he had a particular distaste for:
[Maher is] insufferably smug. Really the worst of the smug, self-congratulatory left. I have a low opinion of him. I did not have an enjoyable experience on his show. Not a show I plan to do again. He’s a classic example of the smirking, contemptuous, privileged guy who lives in a bubble. And he is in no way looking to reach outside, or even look outside, of that bubble, in an empathetic way.
Underpinning all of Bourdain’s bluster and unbridled hatred of these public figures was a deep core of empathy. He did not suffer a bully. Unafraid to use his international platform to put the world’s most powerful jackasses in his crosshairs, it is almost surprising that CNN allowed so much of his sociopolitical commentary on the network. Bourdain’s was a long-held constitution, though, that stretched back to his earlier writings and shows. It was a package deal. Take it or leave it.
In 2001 — more than a decade before Parts Unknown aired on CNN — Bourdain stepped directly into the sphere of American foreign policy in his memoir, A Cooks Tour.
Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.
To some extent this hatred of Kissinger was more personal than political — if the two are not inextricably intertwined. Bourdain first visited Cambodia on film in the Spring of 2000 for his first show, titled A Cook’s Tour like his memoir. 10 years later he returned to Cambodia for No Reservations, “hoping to get it right this time.” This type of self-deprecating yearning to become better was typical of Tony.
During his No Reservations visit, Bourdain shared pepper crab with a member of the opposition party in parliament who described the horrors of Cambodia’s years under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, resulting in the genocide of approximately 1.7 million Cambodians. Bourdain tracked the history for his viewers:
Literally overnight entire cities were emptied, their inhabitants marched off to the countryside. Slave labor forced to farm the land as a means of realizing Pol Pot’s agrarian utopia. Money was abolished. Books were burned. Families purposely broken apart. Teachers, merchants, doctors, and almost the entire intellectual elite of the country were murdered. The scale of killing was so immense that whole areas later known as killing fields in and around Phnom Penh were used to dispose of the bodies.
Kissinger was astoundingly hands-on in the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. In Kissinger’s words, the bombings were to be carried out “against anything that flies or anything that moves,” leading to the dropping of more than 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia between 1965 and 1973.
Kissinger’s bombing campaign in Cambodia turned ordinarily peaceful citizens against the West and toward the otherwise fledgling and likely unsuccessful Communist rebels, the Khmer Rouge. In a very direct way, the United States and Kissinger created and empowered the Khmer Rouge. In 1965, the Khmer Rouge totaled fewer than 10,000. By 1973, they were arming more than 200,000 experienced soldiers. Without the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge would never have won power.
In 1975, when the Khmer Rouge seized control of Phnom Penh and began their genocide, the Americans were nowhere to be found.
While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg. — A Cook’s Tour, Memoir, 2001.
In a 2017 New Yorker interview, Bourdain once again reaffirmed his long-standing hatred for Kissinger.
I’m a big believer in moral gray areas, but when it comes to that guy, in my view he should not be able to eat at a restaurant in New York.
I lament that Tony did not live long enough to see Kissinger die. What a cosmic blunder that Kissinger — responsible for the deaths of so many — got to live to the ripe old age of 100. Only the good die young.
Bourdain also visited neighboring Laos in Season 9, Episode 3 of Parts Unknown in 2017, directly addressing the secret war the United States waged in that country. From 1964 to 1973, the Unites States dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on Laos, making it the most heavily bombed nation in the history of the world per capita.
Bourdain visited with Laotians whose bodies were ripped open by shrapnel from Unexploded Ordnances (UXOs) and who lost limbs from UXOs detonating many decades after the United States repeatedly carpet-bombed a nation it was not at war with. Some 30% of the bombs the United States dropped on Laos still remain undetonated, causing heavy casualties every year.
Over bamboo and chicken soup in a small village, Bourdain asked a man severely injured by a UXO whether he is angry.
Bourdain: Here on one hand we have Americans dropping bombs that blow this then-child up, and there are American [C.I.A.] doctors to put him back together. Given that, is he angry?
Translator [in Lao]: What do you think about the Americans who dropped the bombs on the village and houses?
Man Injured by UXO: It does not matter. They hurt us, but they also helped and supported us. They also sent the doctors to provide treatment for the people who got injured.
Bourdain: I mean all of the bombing, all of the suffering, all of the death. What did he think it was all for?
Man Injured by UXO: I don’t know what the reason is.
Bourdain did not seem to understand how or why the man was not angrier over the injustice of it all.
Bourdain’s harsh criticisms of the United States’ role in the Vietnam War and its secret bombing campaigns in neighboring countries is reflective of Bourdain’s love of the food and people of Mainland Southeast Asia (sometimes referred to as Indochina). This love was probably most pronounced in Vietnam itself, where Bourdain shot episodes in 2002, 2003, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2014, and 2016. These episodes inevitably begin with Bourdain making a reference to the feeling of returning home.
During his 2014 visit to Vietnam, Bourdain spoke with a man named Tan who was born in the tunnels dug under the village of Vịnh Mốc. Built in response to heavy United States bombing of the area, the tunnels were initially dug at a depth of 10 meters. When the United States devised bombs that could pierce a depth of 10 meters, the tunnels were dug to a depth of 30 meters. They held. Bourdain explored these tunnels with Tan.
Bourdain (voice-over): Children played here. But people also emerged from these tunnels to kill or cripple Americans. To shoot them, to plant booby traps, and that’s what they did. Six years in darkness. And at the end of the war, the people of Vịnh Mốc emerged from that darkness. And what did they do?
Bourdain (to translator): What was that like, after living in darkness for so long? What was it like to come out and be able to spend the rest of his life in the sun?
Tan: When the officials allowed mom to come out, she was so overjoyed by the brightness of the world outside the tunnels. We came out and began cutting grass and bamboo to rebuild our house. Then I started fishing, following after my father as a fisherman.
[Tan hands Bourdain a fish on a stick he has just cooked over a flame.]
Truly all of Bourdain’s vocal positions seemed to derive from some personal cultural experience where he saw a wrong worth righting. Typically, these stances stemmed from a conversation over a bowl of noodles meant for slurping or even a simple fish on a stick.
Standing up against oppression while traveling the world buzzed on negronis is not a balance many men can pull off with any semblance of credibility. Not only did Bourdain manage to strike that balance, he did it in a way that to some extent people of all cultural, political, and social stripes showed open respect for.
Yet, 6 years ago today Chef Eric Ripert found Tony dead in his hotel room in France, and by his own hand. It is an unavoidable and important detail. While it is a detail that raises necessary conversations about mental health in the face of reluctant stardom, in the service industry itself, and perhaps in whirlwind love, there is absolutely no utility in defining Anthony Bourdain by the way he died. There is — however — unending utility in admiring the way he lived: vigorously, with conscience, and drunk with locals whenever possible.
Finally, there is my favorite side of Chef Anthony Bourdain. His gentle side. The humble dinner guest in the home of the local family, eating with his hands and politely smiling, asking what the hardest part of rice farming is. Fleeting moments of dining with his then-wife Ottavia in her family’s traditional Sardinia. Holding Palestinian author Laila El-Haddad’s baby and rocking her to sleep in the middle of shooting the Israel/Palestine episode. This side of the man, too, is worth celebrating.
6 years is likely not long enough to fully assess the kind of man Tony Bourdain was. Perhaps reducing him to a series of descriptors — such as social critic, gourmand, tortured author, sincere dinner guest, chef, humanitarian, or empathetic student — would not do the man justice. Bourdain was — in my estimation — nothing much more than a good man of simple pleasures. I’ll drink to that.
“When I die, I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time.” — Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential.
June 25th of each year — Anthony Bourdain’s birthday — is #BourdainDay, an international celebration for all that loved him. Take that opportunity to have a cold beer in the afternoon, to learn about a culture you do not yet understand, and to show empathy for others.
