Insatiable, unknowable

The legacy of Anthony Bourdain

In this Sept. 11, 2016, file photo, Anthony Bourdain, winner of the award for outstanding informational series or special for Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, attends the Governors Ball during night two of the Creative Arts Emmy Awards at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. Bourdain was found dead of an apparent sucicide in his hotel room in France on June 8, 2018, while working on his CNN series on culinary traditions around the world.
In this Sept. 11, 2016, file photo, Anthony Bourdain, winner of the award for outstanding informational series or special for Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, attends the Governors Ball during night two of the Creative Arts Emmy Awards at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. Bourdain was found dead of an apparent sucicide in his hotel room in France on June 8, 2018, while working on his CNN series on culinary traditions around the world.

Anthony Bourdain devoured the world. There was no place that he wasn't curious to explore, no food he wasn't determined to try, no cap on his hunger and no ceiling, or so it always seemed, on his joy.

In his writing and especially on his TV shows, most recently CNN's Parts Unknown, he exhorted the rest of us to follow his lead and open our eyes and our guts to the wondrous smorgasbord of life. He insisted that we savor every last morsel of it.

It turns out that he himself could not. Bourdain, 61, was found dead on June 8 in a hotel room near Strasbourg, France, where he was shooting an episode of that CNN show. The cause, according to the network, was suicide.

His death ends a blazing career that contributed as much as anybody else's to Americans' increased fascination with and knowledge about food in all its multiethnic splendor. If we're savvier to the

ways of banh mi, bo ssam and dim sum than we were two decades ago, we have Bourdain in large measure to thank. With television cameras in tow, he showed us Asia, Australia, Africa--and tasted all of them for us.

But his death, coming just days after the suicide of beloved fashion designer Kate Spade, is at least as noteworthy for another reason: how powerfully it speaks to the discrepancy between what we see of people on the outside and what they're experiencing on the inside, between their public faces and their private realities, between their visible swagger and invisible pain. Parts unknown: That was true of Anthony Bourdain. That was true of Kate Spade. That's true of every one of us.

Bourdain's and Spade's deaths happened in a week when newly released government statistics revealed a staggering increase in suicides by Americans of more than 25 percent from 1999 to 2016, when nearly 45,000 Americans took their own lives. Experts worry that this trajectory reflects a breakdown in social bonds, in community, and the faultiness of our assumptions, the deceptiveness of appearances and the complexities of the soul.

One of my first bits of business after I was chosen to be the New York Times' restaurant critic in 2004 was to reread his best-selling book Kitchen Confidential about his culinary coming of age, including his randy years as the executive chef of Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan.

One of my perks after leaving that job in 2009 was to be invited by Bourdain to join him on a show that he was doing for the Travel Channel, No Reservations. I met him in downtown Manhattan one afternoon at chef Daniel Boulud's former restaurant DBGB, and we drank beer and ate an array of sausages on camera. He sauntered away afterward with a bounce in his step. I poured myself into a taxi and went home to nap for two hours.

He had few rivals when it came to spontaneous verbal dexterity. "Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit," he wrote in Kitchen Confidential, and that was gentle in comparison with how, in the same paragraph, he described vegans. He called them vegetarians' "Hezbollah-like splinter faction."

His attitude about eating was captured in another of his riffs. "Your body is not a temple," he said. "It's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride." He seemed to.

Spade's image, as conveyed through her signature handbags and other designs, wove together threads of whimsy, optimism and merry mischief. She was color. She was brightness.

Bourdain's image, as conveyed through his epicurean odysseys, combined flavors of daring, irreverence and supreme confidence. He was appetite incarnate. He was wanderlust with a lavishly stamped passport and an impish grin.

"If I am an advocate for anything, it is to move," he once mused. "As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. Walk in someone else's shoes, or at least eat their food. It's a plus for everybody."

He had so many meals, strange and sumptuous, ahead of him. We'd do his memory justice to relish the ones on our plates.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at (800) 273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

photo

AP file photo

This Dec. 19, 2001, file photo shows Anthony Bourdain, at that time the chef of Les Halles restaurant, sitting at one of the tables in New York.

Editorial on 06/17/2018

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