In 1999, Anthony Bourdain, then a chef at Les Halles brasserie, published “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” an essay that chronicled his days and nights as a Manhattan cook. The piece, his first for The New Yorker, heralded the arrival of a singular new voice in food writing. With crackling precision, Bourdain gave us a peek behind the curtain at the high-energy yet opaque world of professional cooking. “Good food, good eating,” he observes, “is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay.” Bourdain writes as if he were seated right next to you, about to dig into a delicious plate of Vietnamese bún chả or Jamaican jerk chicken; in other words, his essays are truly great jaunts. The piece quickly became a phenomenon, launching the chef’s writing career and shaking up the global culinary industry; it was later expanded into his best-selling memoir “Kitchen Confidential.”
Bourdain began his ascent as a writer and public personality when his mother sent a manuscript to me more than twenty years ago. Like any editor, I receive many unsolicited manuscripts, and each one carries a message: ignore this at your peril; brilliance could await. I read Bourdain’s piece and started laughing almost immediately. The essay took us behind the scenes of a restaurant kitchen, and did so with a cool eye and warm sense of the absurd. I called Bourdain that day and said that I hoped we could publish the piece right away. A couple of weeks later, there were TV trucks parked outside his restaurant.
Sign up for Classics, a twice-weekly newsletter featuring notable pieces from the past.
This week, we remember Tony, who had friends everywhere. “Roadrunner,” a documentary about the late chef and his life, directed by the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville, premières across the country on Friday. To honor Tony, his integrity, and his taste for life, we’re bringing you a selection of pieces by and about him. In “Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast,” Patrick Radden Keefe profiles the author, exploring his love of street food and accompanying him as he films his food show “Parts Unknown.” (“To viewers who complain that the show has become too focussed on politics, Bourdain responds that food is politics: most cuisines reflect an amalgamation of influences and tell a story of migration and conquest, each flavor representing a sedimentary layer of history.”) In “Anthony Bourdain and the Power of Telling the Truth,” Helen Rosner writes about Bourdain’s evolution from a “bad-boy chef” into a travelling culinary gourmand, and considers his surprising late turn as a #MeToo activist. Finally, in a New Yorker Radio Hour special, from 2017, we hear from Bourdain himself on his revelatory treks across the globe and why our relationships with food and its attendant pleasures continue to matter.
—David Remnick
In his final years, Bourdain attained a new sort of celebrity as an activist and an overt and uncompromising figure of moral authority.
