Anthony Michael Bourdain was an American celebrity chef, author, and travel documentarian who starred in programs focusing on the exploration of international culture, cuisine, and the human condition.
72 Facts About Anthony Bourdain
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Anthony Bourdain first became known for his bestselling book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.
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On June 8,2018, Anthony Bourdain died while on location in France, filming for Parts Unknown, of an apparent suicide by hanging.
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Anthony Michael Bourdain was born in Manhattan on June 25,1956.
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Anthony Bourdain's mother was Gladys, and his father was Pierre Bourdain.
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Anthony Bourdain's younger brother, Christopher, was born a few years later.
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At the time of Anthony Bourdain's birth, Pierre was a salesman at a New York City camera store, as well as a floor manager at a record store.
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Anthony Bourdain later became an executive for Columbia Records, and Gladys was a staff editor at The New York Times.
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Bourdain's paternal grandparents were French ; his paternal grandfather Pierre Michel Bourdain emigrated from Arcachon to New York following World War I Bourdain's father spent summers in France as a boy and grew up speaking French.
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Anthony Bourdain spent most of his childhood in Leonia, New Jersey.
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Anthony Bourdain felt jealous of the lack of parental supervision of his classmates and the freedom they had in their homes.
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Anthony Bourdain worked at seafood restaurants in Provincetown, Massachusetts, including the Lobster Pot, while attending Vassar, which inspired his decision to pursue cooking as a career.
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Anthony Bourdain attended The Culinary Institute of America, graduating in 1978.
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In 1998, Anthony Bourdain became an executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles.
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Anthony Bourdain remained an executive chef there for many years and even when no longer formally employed at Les Halles, he maintained a relationship with the restaurant, which described him in January 2014 as their "chef at large".
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The magazine eventually published a piece that Anthony Bourdain had written about a chef who was trying to purchase heroin in the Lower East Side.
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In 1985, Anthony Bourdain signed up for a writing workshop with Gordon Lish.
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In 1990, Anthony Bourdain received a small book advance from Random House, after meeting a Random House editor.
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Anthony Bourdain paid for his own book tour, but he did not find success.
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Anthony Bourdain wrote two more bestselling nonfiction books: A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines, an account of his food and travel exploits around the world, written in conjunction with his first television series of the same title.
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In 2006, Anthony Bourdain published The Nasty Bits, a collection of 37 exotic, provocative, and humorous anecdotes and essays, many of them centered around food, and organized into sections named for each of the five traditional flavors, followed by a 30-page fiction piece.
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Anthony Bourdain published a hypothetical historical investigation, Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical, about Mary Mallon, an Irish-born cook believed to have infected 53 people with typhoid fever between 1907 and 1938.
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In 2007, Anthony Bourdain published No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach, covering the experiences of filming and photographs of the first three seasons of the show and his crew at work while filming the series.
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Anthony Bourdain hosted many food and travel series, including his first show, A Cook's Tour.
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Anthony Bourdain worked for The Travel Channel from 2005 to 2013.
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Nigella Lawson noted that Anthony Bourdain had an "incredibly beautiful style when he talks that ranges from erudite to brilliantly slangy".
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Anthony Bourdain's producers compiled behind-the-scenes footage of him and his production staff, including not only their initial attempts to film the episode, but their firsthand encounters with Hezbollah supporters, their days of waiting for news with other expatriates in a Beirut hotel, and their eventual escape aided by a fixer, whom Bourdain dubbed Mr Wolf after Harvey Keitel's character in Pulp Fiction.
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In July 2011, the Travel Channel announced adding a second one-hour, 10-episode Anthony Bourdain show to be titled The Layover, which premiered November 21,2011.
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Anthony Bourdain executive produced a similar show hosted by celebrities called The Getaway, which lasted two seasons on Esquire Network.
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In May 2012, Anthony Bourdain announced that he was leaving the Travel Channel.
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Anthony Bourdain went on to host Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown for CNN.
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Anthony Bourdain appeared five times as guest judge on Bravo's Top Chef reality cooking competition program.
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Anthony Bourdain wrote weekly blog commentaries for many of the Season 3 episodes, filling in as a guest blogger while Top Chef judge Tom Colicchio was busy opening a new restaurant.
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Anthony Bourdain next appeared as a guest judge for the opening episode of Season 4, in which pairs of chefs competed head-to-head in the preparation of various classic dishes, and again in the Season 4 Restaurant Wars episode, temporarily taking the place of head judge Tom Colicchio, who was at a charity event.
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Anthony Bourdain appeared as a guest judge in episode 12 of Top Chef: DC, where he judged the cheftestants' meals they made for NASA.
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Anthony Bourdain was one of the main judges on Top Chef All-Stars.
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Anthony Bourdain made a guest appearance on the August 6,2007 New York City episode of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, and Zimmern himself appeared as a guest on the New York City episode of Bourdain's No Reservations airing the same day.
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Anthony Bourdain appeared in an episode of TLC's reality show Miami Ink, aired on August 28,2006, in which artist Chris Garver tattooed a skull on his right shoulder.
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Anthony Bourdain was a consultant and writer for the television series Treme.
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Anthony Bourdain appeared in a 2013 episode of the animated series Archer, voicing chef Lance Casteau, a parody of himself.
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From 2015 to 2017, Anthony Bourdain hosted Raw Craft, a series of short videos released on YouTube.
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Anthony Bourdain announced plans to publish a book by Marilyn Hagerty.
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Anthony Bourdain appeared as himself in the 2015 film The Big Short, in which he used seafood stew as an analogy for a collateralized debt obligation.
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Anthony Bourdain was quoted as saying that a Chicken McNugget was the most disgusting thing he ever ate, but he was fond of Popeyes chicken.
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Anthony Bourdain declared that the unwashed warthog rectum he ate in Namibia was "the worst meal of [his] life", along with the fermented shark he ate in Iceland.
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Anthony Bourdain was noted for his put-downs of celebrity chefs, such as Paula Deen, Bobby Flay, Guy Fieri, Sandra Lee, and Rachael Ray, and appeared irritated by both the overt commercialism of the celebrity cooking industry and its lack of culinary authenticity.
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Anthony Bourdain later wrote more favourably of Lagasse in the preface of the 2013 edition.
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Anthony Bourdain was outspoken in his praise for chefs he admired, particularly Ferran Adria, Juan Mari Arzak, Fergus Henderson, Jose Andres, Thomas Keller, Martin Picard, Eric Ripert, and Marco Pierre White, as well as his former protege and colleagues at Brasserie Les Halles.
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Anthony Bourdain spoke very highly of Julia Child's influence on him.
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Anthony Bourdain was known for his sarcastic comments about vegan and vegetarian activists, considering their lifestyle "rude" to the inhabitants of many countries he visited.
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Anthony Bourdain considered vegetarianism, except in the case of religious exemptions, a "First World luxury".
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Anthony Bourdain declared fond appreciation for their music, as well that of other early punk bands such as Dead Boys and The Voidoids.
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Anthony Bourdain said that the playing of music by Billy Joel, Elton John, or the Grateful Dead in his kitchen was grounds for firing.
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Anthony Bourdain featured contemporary band Queens of the Stone Age on No Reservations several times, and they composed and performed the theme song for Parts Unknown.
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Anthony Bourdain described her as "a bad girl", older than him and "part of a druggy crowd".
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Anthony Bourdain was a year above him, and Bourdain graduated one year early in order to follow Putkoski to Vassar College since they had just started admitting men.
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Anthony Bourdain studied there between the ages of 17 and 19.
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Anthony Bourdain then attended the Culinary Institute of America, a 15-minute drive from Vassar.
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Anthony Bourdain said having to be away from his family for 250 days a year working on his television shows put strain on the relationship.
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Anthony Bourdain met Italian actress Asia Argento in 2016 while filming the Rome episode of Parts Unknown.
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On June 3,2018, Anthony Bourdain tweeted a video where the team was celebrating during the production of the show with Argento as director, him and Chris Doyle.
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Anthony Bourdain practiced the martial art Brazilian jiu-jitsu, earning a blue belt in August 2015.
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Anthony Bourdain won gold at the IBJJF New York Spring International Open Championship in 2016, in the Middleweight Master 5 division.
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Anthony Bourdain stopped smoking in 2007 for his daughter, but restarted towards the end of his life.
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Anthony Bourdain said drugs influenced his decisions, and that he would send a busboy to Alphabet City to obtain cannabis, methaqualone, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, secobarbital, tuinal, amphetamine, codeine, and heroin.
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In early June 2018, Anthony Bourdain was working on an episode of Parts Unknown in Strasbourg, with his frequent collaborator and friend Eric Ripert.
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Anthony Bourdain subsequently found Bourdain dead of an apparent suicide by hanging in his room at Le Chambard hotel in Kaysersberg near Colmar.
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Anthony Bourdain's body bore no signs of violence and the suicide appeared to be an impulsive act.
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Anthony Bourdain's body was cremated in France on June 13,2018, and his ashes were returned to the United States two days later.
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In June 2021, a documentary film directed by Morgan Neville and produced by CNN Films and HBO Max titled Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.
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Anthony Bourdain advocated for communicating the value of traditional or peasant foods, including all of the varietal bits and unused animal parts not usually eaten by affluent, 21st-century Americans.
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Anthony Bourdain considered them talented chefs and invaluable cooks, underpaid and unrecognized even though they have become the backbone of the US restaurant industry.