Dream Dinner Guest, Dead or Alive

An Ode to Anthony Bourdain

Very recently, my girlfriend asked me who, dead or alive, would be my dream dinner guest. I am a Virgo, which means I oscillate between and delay choice fairly often. But this was a rapid response, one I came to within seconds and uttered with great confidence: Anthony Bourdain.

I’ve always had a tenuous relationship with parasociality. Hyperfixation of certain celebrities is not an uncommon phenomenon for many kids who grew up in the age of the internet. Parasocial relationship to comfort YouTubers; tweets abound on stan Twitter. I am not immune to developing my own parasocial relationships. In the sixth grade, I became obsessed with Pentatonix – all five of them. Starting high school, I found solace in Bo Burnham’s stand-up specials. As a fledgling film fan, I watched every Greta Gerwig interview. These are people who were consistently putting out new content; new songs, new comedy specials, new director’s cuts.

In my most recent case, however, I cannot expect new output. Still, I am left with seasons upon seasons of travel shows and memoirs. I am left watching episodes of No Reservations and Parts Unknown, re-reading the same chapters of Kitchen Confidential that detail drug-crazed, unending nights in the kitchen. Admittedly, I have watched one too many TikTok edits set to sad music, said to honor this man’s life. But there is an undercurrent to all the media I consume – a certain ephemeralness I am trying to capture in the left-behind footage and words of a man who took his own life.

I am left with a grief I am working very hard to understand.

My first memory of Bourdain was in the summer of 2018, in Italy with my family on vacation. My brother and dad mourned over pasta and wine about ‘Tony’: how sad they were he was gone, how wonderful he was. Looking back, it makes complete sense they referred to him on a first-name basis; Bourdain’s work invites its viewers and readers in. But it also powerfully keeps us at arm’s length: constantly reminding us that what we are watching is television – that the man behind the screen is an unreliable narrator.

Little did I know that this man I had never heard of ended his life seven hours away from me. I had no inkling that just a few years later, his work would remain an endless source of comfort; his life would become a puzzle I am eager to piece together. Anthony remained in my periphery; he was a figure whose work I was not fully familiar with, but who I venerated because of father and brother’s glowing endorsements.

I picked up Kitchen Confidential as my year abroad at Oxford came to an end. I was dealing with a lot of grief over the best year of my life coming to a close. I wanted to read something wise, something that pointed me in a direction through sardonic humor and bone-deep storytelling. I also was at the peak of my self-proclaimed chef era – a month out from perfecting my kimchi stew recipe and experimenting with my second-hand air fryer.

From the first page, I was hooked.

In 1999, a moderately successful New York City chef made waves with an essay published in the New Yorker called ‘Don’t Eat Before Reading This.’ Anthony ‘Tony’ Bourdain wrote about the industry’s trade secrets with a candidness and dry wit that many readers of the prestige magazine had never encountered. This honest and acerbic humor would eventually become the hallmark of Tony’s writing. I had not encountered the essay until about halfway through reading Kitchen Confidential, the book that Bourdain cranked out after the immense success of the New Yorker essay.

I listened to a narration of the essay recently, believing Bourdain was the individual reading it aloud. When the narrator reads out ‘written by Anthony Bourdain, read by an automated voice’, I had to rewind to make sure I had heard the last part correctly. I had, at that point, become so accustomed to Tony’s idiosyncratic and staccato narration — so much so that I was convinced that the automated voice, sharing the same intonation and cadence, was Tony himself.

The past month of my life has been filled with immense uncertainty and stress. Waiting to hear back about graduate school, writing a thesis (famously, a daunting task), and coming to the end of my four-year college career. I returned to Bourdain one night wanting to hear a familiar voice and be transported to a familiar place: so naturally, I began with his Bangkok episode. My hometown of eighteen years was the logical location to begin my deep dive into Tony’s work.

I watched episodes upon episodes of his first two shows, a Cook’s Tour and Kitchen Confidential. Chicago, Malaysia, Iceland, Quebec. In the Tokyo episode, after a decadent plate of unagi (eel) sushi and ceremoniously popping open some sake, Bourdain proclaims: “I could die just about now.” This line – said in complete earnestness at the very start of his career – made me instantly burst into tears.

Anthony Bourdain committed suicide on June 8th, 2018; he was filming Parts Unknown in Alsace, France when his assistant found his body. This is a fact I have thought about every day for the past few weeks; a fact that has made me cry an alarming amount. It has created an overwhelming sense of grief for a man I never knew, a grief I – through writing this piece – am hoping to understand. A grief that is shared by many people who were moved by his work; who were inspired by his words to pick up a knife and learn to perfectly julienne an onion; to travel the world and share a meal with a stranger after watching his show.

In attempting to find a vessel for this sadness, I called a friend who was also a fan of Bourdain. I tried to articulate why his death had made me so incredibly sad and came to something along the lines of this: Anthony Bourdain lived what I consider a dream life. He traveled the world and shared meals with presidents and locals alike. He wrote and made TV, giving him the unique ability to be his own boss and tell his story, without pretense or intervention. To me, the pinnacle of existence is a decadent plate of food or walking around a foreign town late at night. Tony did both of these things for a living. He led a life that many envied.

But he was still deeply unhappy.

Coming to this conclusion has made me deeply existential. Here I was, jealous of a man who did everything I wanted to do – but he was so unhappy while doing it. I have read essays and watched videos of other fans lamenting as I attempt to find community in my grief. I was struck by a comment on the Solotraveller subreddit (a notoriously reliable source, I’m sure) that simply said this:

“Travel is not a solution to your problems or a solution to you. Travel will not fix your broken heart. It will not pick you up when you’re down, patch you up, and lovingly set you back down in the world with everything set to rights. It is not a solution for your mental health problems, and it is not an alternative to therapy and medication.” Tony, himself, famously said that “travel isn’t always pretty. you go away — scarred, marked, changed in the process. It even breaks your heart.”

My recent endeavor into Tony-related media sent me to Roadrunner, a 2021 documentary about him. In all honesty, the film left me feeling uneasy and icky – it felt exploitative of Tony’s last few days and generally, I wish I got my two hours back… that’s three full episodes of No Reservations!

However, the film offered invaluable insights into Tony via interviews with his co-workers, friends, and family. In one scene, his ex-wife Ottavia shared that he became obsessed with Jiu-Jitsu. Like, his whole life revolved around it. She reveals that Tony always had an addictive personality. In his early days, starting as a chef in Provincetown and Manhattan, it was heroin. Beginning his career as a host and author, his vice was travel. In his fifties, Jiu Jitsu. And per Roadrunner’s gross ending, right before he took his own life, it was a woman.

In attempting to parse through Tony’s last days in search for answers (and in lieu of a suicide note), fans point to his torrid love affair with Italian actress, Asia Argento, as a lethal relationship. A few days before he committed suicide, tabloids shared photos of Argento traipsing around with a new lover… who was a minor. The doc showed loved ones pontificating on how he became obsessed with this woman, how she had taken over his life. These people hypothesized that she was, likely, a large factor behind his suicide. This fact has haunted me. Tony had been to Palestine, He interviewed asylum seekers in Hong Kong. He visited Haiti, in the aftermath of the 2010 Earthquake. He had seen and experienced so deeply, and to think that all went away because of a romance gone wrong really, deeply affected me.

So, instead of trying to intellectualize my grief, it is more productive I reflect on what made me fall in love with Tony.

Anthony Bourdain was a chef, a traveler, but above all else, a damn good person. I reflect often on the empathy he afforded the disenfranchised, the empathy that is sorely missing in today’s political climate.

I think about how he was an unnerving advocate for immigrants in the kitchen, recognizing them as the backbone of the restaurant industry. He says about Mexicans:

“Americans love Mexican food. We consume nachos, tacos, burritos, tortas, enchiladas, tamales, and anything resembling Mexican in enormous quantities… We love Mexican people — we sure employ a lot of them. Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes towards immigration, we demand that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes, and look after our children… Some, of course, like to claim that Mexicans are “stealing American jobs.” But in two decades as a chef and employer, I never had ONE American kid walk in my door and apply for a dishwashing job, a porter’s position — or even a job as a prep cook. Mexicans do much of the work in this country that Americans, probably, simply won’t do.”

I think of the generosity and beauty with which he captured the places he visited, like his visceral writing from The Nasty Bits detailing what it was like to visit Vietnam for the first time:

“I love Việt Nam. Maybe it’s a pheromonic thing. Like when you meet the love of your life for the first time, and she just, somehow, inexplicably smells and feels right. You sense that given the opportunity, this is the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with.”

I think of the poignant and honest nuggets of wisdom he had to offer at the end of his life, like these words from his last recorded interview with Fast Company:

“Be open to experience. Be willing to try new things. Don’t have a rigid plan. Accept random acts of hospitality without judgment or fear. Don’t be afraid to wander. Don’t be afraid to eat a bad meal. If you don’t risk the bad meal, you’ll never get the magical one. Be humble. Be grateful. Be aware of the fact you are probably the stupidest person in the room.”

Bourdain had an unparalleled level of insight and empathy. Every member of the kitchen is integral, every person you meet has a lesson to teach you. This way of seeing the world, I think, could do us all so much good. It is a view of the world I sorely miss, a view that Tony espoused in all of his writings and shows.

So, how do you mourn someone you never met?

How can I tend to a grief I am hyper-aware of? Reminding myself that this admiration is parasocial (that I never even knew the guy) has done me no good. The reason so many people loved and continue to love Tony is that we felt like we knew him. Bourdain is the uncle who throws dinner parties and gets a bit too wine-drunk, divulging intimate details you probably are better off never hearing. He is the creative writing professor who you attend all the office hours of, who tells you that writer’s block is a privilege. He is the friend who has seen the world and is bursting at the seams with niche recommendations, from the best Bún Chả in Hội An to Manhattan’s perfect hot dog.

I think, often, of how Tony is immortalized in popular culture. After news of his suicide broke in the summer of 2018 – fans flooded the New York City staple Les Halles – where Tony got his start, and the inspiration behind the New Yorker essay that catapulted him to fame. Letters, photos, and testimonials of the lives he touched were plastered all over the restaurant. Flowers left by many others who are tending to a grief that makes no sense to them. Still, this grief is nonetheless valid; it is pulsing, and bitter, and leaves us in stitches over a voice that is all too familiar, the presence of a man we grew up and saw the world with.

I am reminded of one particular ode left at the Les Halles memorial, the first and last lines of Jack Gilbert’s poem, “Failing and Flying”:

“Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew…

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.”

Thank you, Tony.