I don’t remember the exact day Anthony Bourdain died. I do remember that shortly thereafter I was at one of my favorite pizza places and noticed a portrait of him hanging in the kitchen, above one of the hoods.
I had never worked in a kitchen. I had never wanted to work in a kitchen. At that point, I hadn’t even read Bourdain’s book, Kitchen Confidential. But I understood why his picture was there.
Bourdain was a patron saint to the culinary world because he spoke honestly about the people doing the hot, difficult, insufficiently-celebrated work of feeding everyone else. After years of watching him on television, and after recently reading Kitchen Confidential, I think he was something else, too.
For me, Anthony Bourdain was the patron saint of appreciators. He appreciated the humanity in food. The people, the places, the culture. The conversations that are ignited by sharing a simple meal with someone you don’t know.
He was someone willing to leave a little room for the unplanned, the unfamiliar, and the possibility that the best thing might not be on the itinerary. I felt a kinship with that approach to travel. I’d learned that sense of appreciation when traveling with my godfather, where we were equally happy sipping drinks at the nicest bar in Paris or slurping gumbo at the dingiest seafood shack on the southernmost tip of Louisiana.
When I hit play on Kitchen Confidential–narrated by Bourdain himself–I expected the same type of storytelling that I knew from dozens of episodes of No Reservations and Parts Unknown. Instead I found the raw spirit beneath it. It was the same delivery, but it was the hard-earned, funny, observant voice of someone who knew a particular world from the inside.
Kitchen Confidential is an insider’s view of the restaurant world, or, as Bourdain puts it: “Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.” While it is an interesting look–for better or worse–into that world, what struck me most was seeing the storyteller I knew from television taking shape on the page.
He makes the reader feel the pressure and momentum of a professional kitchen without pausing to translate every technical term or broken-Spanish insult. You understand the stakes because he makes you feel them.
That gift is everywhere in the book, but the scene I kept returning to was from Bourdain’s first trip to Tokyo. Bourdain’s bosses at Les Halles, the New York brasserie where he was executive chef, sent him to the Tokyo outpost to provide some constructive criticism and the appropriate amount of cheerleading.
There’s a particular kind of fear in arriving alone in a place that doesn’t offer you an easy way in.
Bourdain wakes at 5 a.m. on his first day, hungover, jet-lagged, and with a tension headache that will hover over him like a halo for the rest of the trip. He stumbles outdoors, determined to find an authentic Japanese breakfast. But as he wanders past the different soba noodle shops, he finds himself strangely intimidated at the thought of bumbling into one of these shops as an ogre-ish outsider, trying to decipher the menu and order in his nonexistent Japanese.
And so Bourdain finds himself ashamedly pulling open the doors to a Starbucks, ordering a latte, and licking his wounds. After a little self-reflection and self-flagellation, he decides to leave the Starbucks, damn the torpedoes, and order breakfast at the next soba shop he passes.
Sometimes the bravest travel decision may be to walk back out of the Starbucks.
Bourdain then turns down the narrowest alley he can find, pulls open the door of the first soba shop, plops down on a stool at the counter, points to the person next to him and says, “I’ll have what he’s having.”
That was the moment when the Bourdain I knew from television began to take shape: a hungover, jet-lagged American, alone in Tokyo, deciding that discomfort was not a reason to retreat. He would spend years showing us that openness to the world is not the absence of discomfort. It’s what happens after discomfort has punched you in the face.
A number of years ago, while thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, I met Le, a fellow hiker who was from South Korea and spoke almost no English. He was hiking the entire trail to raise money for charity, something we learned only from the English-language pamphlet he carried.
Every few days, the trail would spill a group of us hikers into a small town, where a cozy diner felt like the height of civilization. That was where Le had one indispensable English phrase.
When it came time to order, he would point to the person next to him and say, “I’ll have what he’s having.”
After dinner, we’d all sit around a campfire, drinking beers and exchanging stories with Le through charades and tone of voice. We would have each other doubled over with laughter, and at other times be listening intently to Le talking fondly of his homeland. Against all odds, we understood one another.
I’m a strong believer that food and story are two of the great connectors of humans. Through them, Bourdain taught us about appreciating the world we live in and the people we live alongside.
Plenty of travel shows visit extraordinary places and eat with locals. Very few could tell the story of the shared experience, the connection, and the fellowship with strangers in the way Bourdain could.
In the end, Bourdain reminded me that a life can seem to shrink as you get older, and that curiosity can make it larger again. And when the world does feel smaller than it ought to, the answer may not be a grand reinvention. It may just be the courage to pull up a chair, point to the person next to you, and say, “I’ll have what he’s having.”