When I was eighteen, I worked in a hole-in-the-wall noodle shop manned by twenty-something year old cooks and chefs: half-papered cooking academy drop-outs who thought they knew better than their teachers, and who decided to open a little nineteen-seat joint to prove it. It was half Tampopo and half Kids: sociopaths saucing noodles at 6 PM and drinking shots at 9:30. It was 2002, and Bourdain had recently published Kitchen Confidential (the cover photo showing him and two unnamed associates posing with kitchen knives the size and attitude of machetes) and A Cook's Tour (the cover image of him, in some unnamed Asian country, camo tank and half-smirk on display). Everyone in the restaurant had read them, and most had taken the Gospel of Anthony to heart, which was: eat good food, see the world, and be as macho as you can. Bourdain knew he was putting on a persona—he says in the introduction of A Cook's Tour that he wants to see the world, and hopes it looks like the movies—but for precocious chefs in small towns, Bourdain was an avatar of all they might be one day: smoky, smart, gnawing on roasted duck on the floor of a Vietnamese fishing hut.
Perhaps most of all, Bourdain represented a certain kind of authentic man. He certainly curated his experiences to be tough, what with the drinking and the drugs and the travel. He wanted to get in there, see things not from the window of a tour bus, but from the back of a sampan. Cooking, which is often fussy and perfectionist, wasn't really his calling. He wanted to be a war correspondent, with the front lines on the edges of the kitchen. He offered a path into the world that was informed by adventure and great food, not necessarily in that order. I still remember a daily special that our cook created: mango and lightly grilled octopus served wrapped in udon noodles and nori, a bastard's version of sushi, and easily one of the top three things I've eaten in my life. That dish would never had been made if the cook hadn't said, "Fuck it, I've been reading about Bourdain in Japan."
One of my favourite things about Bourdain was that he ain't no snob. He insisted that international street food be taken seriously as a culinary tradition, which, for a guy who came up in relatively posh rooms, bucked the norm. He opposed the insistence that only French food could be serious, and, with his books and television shows, showed viewers at home the plethora of unfamiliar, weird, confusing, and downright unpalatable eating there was to be had. Some of it was stunt food, for sure, but a lot of it was just saying, "Hey, chuckleheads, get a load of this pho." I really believe that reading Bourdain in 2002, before moving to Toronto and before getting my feet wet with David Chang or Munchies, opened me up to what was out there. It taught me that you can eat basically anything, anywhere, and have it be meaningful.
Because Bourdain was passionate and erudite and raw and sexy, because he was well-traveled and a halfheartedly reformed drug addict and an accomplished cook, because he could write 3000 words on, basically, "I went for dinner at this place," he was a hero to a lot of us young food-minded folks. His space was unabashedly male—there were not a lot of women in his books, like, at all—but it was also about all the damage that he had inflicted on his body and his psyche, and that he had lived to tell about. He was a survivor, saying, "Hey, follow me. I made it. You might too."
In later years, I stayed away from his media presence, because I was worried that he was like an album I had listened to too much freshman year: would it hold up if I went back and spun it again? But I always loved encountering him in the wild. I read his articles in Lucky Peach. When his partner came out against Harvey Weinstein, Bourdain was there by her side. His support for her complicated his macho persona: it was her fight, and he was in her corner. It felt grown-up, to be there but not in the centre of the frame.
And then, of course, he died this morning. I wonder if those young punks who staffed that hole-in-the-wall had a bad time hearing about it. They followed a lot of his same path: drugs, disappearing into other jobs, running out of money or good luck before their thirtieth birthday. He was what winning looked like, what getting out alive could be. Suicide is a haunting thing—questions about what went wrong, and how, and why—and it's scary, because maybe you or me hold the seeds of it in our own imperfect little hearts. It seems like something we're powerless against, because we don't see the dark heart of it, creeping up and around and inside; we see the outside, where people fake feeling okay for one more day, until they don't.
I am so, so grateful to Anthony Bourdain for teaching me what it is to eat. Taking my time, considering my options. Treating highbrow like lowbrow and vice versa. To have a brotherhood of cooks, a community of people who look to food to answer questions: how am I creative? How do I express myself? What do I bring to this millennia-long conversation about how we nourish ourselves? To go in search of deliciousness in unexpected places, of adventure, of hope. Because that's what eating great food is, really: it's the hope that somewhere in the meal, you'll taste something you've truly never tasted before.
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