” That essay would become Kitchen Confidential, the memoir.īourdain’s first show, A Cook’s Tour, aired on the Food Network from 2002 to 2003. “I immediately found myself entertained by and riveted by. “You never know, good writing, where it’s going to come from, and I opened this envelope with no expectations whatsoever,” Remnick tells Eater.
In 1999, the New Yorker published Bourdain’s first piece of nonfiction writing on kitchen life, an essay titled “ Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” The story had come to New Yorker editor David Remnick via his wife, Esther Fein, who worked with Bourdain’s mother at the New York Times. Just two years later, Bourdain’s talent for storytelling would earn him mainstream fame. In 1998, he answered an ad in the New York Times for an executive chef position at Les Halles, and he got the job.
Meanwhile, Bourdain rotated between kitchens at New York City restaurants the Rainbow Room, W.P.A., Chuck Howard’s, Nikki and Kelly, Gianni’s, and the Supper Club, according to the New Yorker. “A lot of our life was built around that, and happily so.” In a 2017 New Yorker profile of Bourdain, Bourdain described the relationship: “That kind of love and codependency and sense of adventure - we were criminals together,” he said. During this time, Bourdain struggled with his well-documented addiction to heroin and cocaine. He spent two years at the liberal arts college before dropping out to pursue cooking at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park.īourdain and Putkoski moved to New York City in 1978. It was there, after witnessing a dalliance between a Flagship chef and a wedding party guest, that Bourdain decided, for the first time, that he too wanted to be a chef.Īfter that defining summer, Bourdain followed his girlfriend Nancy Putkoski to Vassar.
The summer after graduating high school (a year early), Bourdain got his first taste of professional kitchen work as a dishwasher at Cape Cod restaurant the Flagship. It was where he tried his first oyster and subsequently fell in love with food, an experience he details in Kitchen Confidential. That initial trip to the French seaside was nonetheless life-changing for Bourdain. His father worked as an executive for Columbia Records and his mother was a copy editor at the New York Times.Īlthough Bourdain would go on to make a career out of traveling the world, as a child, his family limited their excursions to France, where his father had relatives. He grew up just outside the city in Leonia, New Jersey. What’s your life like? Tell me a story.”Īnthony Michael Bourdain was born June 25, 1956, in New York City. I’m not here to ask you specific questions, I’m here to ask general questions. “A journalist has to have an agenda - who-what-why-where - and I don’t want to ask those questions,” Bourdain said in a 2016 Eater interview. In CNN’s Parts Unknown, the show he was shooting at the time of his death, episodes reached outside pure travelogue and often tackled politics, contextualized war, and laid bare local struggles - although Bourdain was hesitant to call himself a journalist. In his popular shows, he become a proxy for at-home viewers wishing to experience far-flung parts of world as the locals did.
It also revealed the strength of his indelible voice - proudly disruptive, with a roguish charm - that would sweep food media.Īfter Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain would never work in a kitchen again: The book quickly led to TV deals with Travel Channel and later CNN, making Bourdain a household name. The best-selling book, published while Bourdain was a chef at New York City brasserie Les Halles, offered a window into the little-discussed goings-on behind restaurant kitchen doors, and inspired a new public fascination with kitchen life.
CNN, the network that produced his award-winning travel show Parts Unknown, announced the news and noted that the cause of death was suicide.īourdain rose to national fame in 2000 with the debut of his memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Anthony Bourdain, the author of Kitchen Confidential, star of numerous food and travel TV shows, and one of the food world’s most outspoken voices, died June 8.