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Anthony Bourdain

Bourdain in June 2006
Born	June 25, 1956 (1956-06-25) (age 51) New York City, New York
Cooking style	French
Education	Vassar College; Culinary Institute of America
Restaurants	Les Halles (New York City)
TV show(s)	A Cook's Tour; Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations

Anthony Michael "Tony" Bourdain (born June 25, 1956) is an American author and the "Chef-at-Large" of Brasserie Les Halles, based in New York City with locations in Miami, Florida, and Washington, D.C.^[1] Bourdain is also host of the Travel Channel's culinary and cultural adventure program, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Career 3 Quotes 4 Bibliography 5 References 6 External links

Bourdain was born in New York City but grew up in Leonia, New Jersey.^[2][3] It was as a youth on vacation in France with his family that his love of food was kindled. He was on an oyster fisherman's boat and tried his first oyster; ever since, he has traveled the world in search of food, good and bad, and has shared his results with the public.

He studied at Vassar College, worked for some time in the seafood restaurants of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and graduated from the Culinary Institute of America before running kitchens at New York City's Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue and Sullivan's. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Times, The Observer, Scotland on Sunday, The Face, Limb by Limb, Black Book, and The Independent, and he is a contributing authority for Food Arts magazine. He was the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles.

Bourdain lives in Manhattan with his wife, Ottavia Busia. Together, they have one daughter, Ariane, born on April 9, 2007. The couple were wed eleven days later on April 20.^[4] Bourdain was divorced from his first wife, Nancy Putkoski, in 2005.^{[5] [6]}

Bourdain gained popularity from his New York Times bestselling book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, released in 2000. Kitchen Confidential describes the darker side of the culinary world, and serves as a memoir of Bourdain's life as well. He is also author of the culinary mysteries Gone Bamboo and A Bone in the Throat, the popular history Typhoid Mary (An Urban Historical), and the cookbook, Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. In addition there is A Cook's Tour, which was made in conjunction with a TV series of the same name on the Food Network. In July 2005, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations premiered on the Travel Channel.

Among his many epicurean exploits, Bourdain is famous for consuming sheep testicles in Morocco, ant eggs in Puebla, Mexico, a raw seal eyeball as part of a traditional Inuit seal hunt, and a whole cobra — beating heart, blood, bile, and meat — in Vietnam. According to Bourdain, the most disgusting thing he has ever eaten is a Chicken McNugget, though he did declare the warthog rectum he ate in Namibia "the worst meal of [his] life". The FOX Network produced a short-lived sitcom adaptation of Kitchen Confidential, which aired in the fall of 2005. The character "Jack Bourdain" was based loosely on the biography and persona of Anthony Bourdain.

Bourdain has been an unrepentant smoker and drinker. However, because of the birth of his daughter, he states that he has now stopped smoking.^[7]

Bourdain is a former user of cocaine, heroin, and LSD. In Kitchen Confidential he writes: "We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in [refrigerator] at every opportunity to 'conceptualize.' Hardly a decision was made without drugs. Pot, quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey and used to sweeten tea, Seconal, Tuinal, speed, codeine and, increasingly, heroin, which we'd send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to Alphabet City to get."^[8] In a nod to Bourdain's two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, renowned chef Thomas Keller once served him a 20-course tasting menu including a mid-meal "coffee and cigarettes" dish of foie gras with tobacco-infused custard.^[9] Because of his liberal use of light profanity and sexual references in No Reservations, the network has prepended viewer discretion advisories to each segment.

Bourdain is also noted for his not-so-subtle put downs of celebrity chefs like Emeril Lagasse (though he has since warmed up a little to Lagasse, whom he frequently described as "Ewok-like"), Sandra Lee, and Rachael Ray (who is the butt of many jokes on No Reservations). Bourdain fully expressed his feelings about certain Food Network personalities in a popular blog entry from February 2007[1]. Bourdain has recognized the irony of his transformation into a celebrity chef and has, to some extent, begun to qualify his insults. He has been consistently outspoken in his praise for chefs he admires, particularly Thomas Keller, Masa Takayama, Gordon Ramsay, Eric Ripert, Ferran Adrià, Fergus Henderson, Marco Pierre White, and Mario Batali.^[10]

His book, The Nasty Bits, is dedicated to "Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee" of the Ramones. Bourdain has declared fond appreciation for their music, as well as other early punk bands such as Dead Boys, Television and The Voidoids. Additionally, Bourdain writes in Kitchen Confidential that the playing of music by Billy Joel in his kitchen was grounds for immediate firing. In a Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations episode in Sweden, Bourdain proclaimed that his all time favorite album (his "desert island disc") is the groundbreaking punk record Fun House by The Stooges while revealing that he despises Swedish pop supergroup ABBA.

In July 2006 Bourdain was in Beirut filming an episode of No Reservations when the Israel-Lebanon conflict broke out. Bourdain and his crew were evacuated with other American citizens on the morning of July 20 by the U.S. Marines.^[11] Despite having filmed only one restaurant before fighting began, Bourdain's producers compiled the Beirut footage into a No Reservations episode which aired on August 21, 2006. Uncharacteristically, the episode included footage of both Bourdain and his production staff, and included not only their initial attempts to film the episode, but also 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 "cleaner" (unseen in the footage) who Bourdain dubbed "Mister Wolfe", presumably in reference to the self-proclaimed problem-solver of the movie Pulp Fiction. The episode was nominated for an Emmy Award on July 18, 2007.

Bourdain also appeared in an episode of TLC's reality show Miami Ink which originally aired August 28, 2006. Artist Chris Garver tattooed a skull on Bourdain's right shoulder, who noted it was his fourth tattoo. Among other reasons, he wished to balance the ouroboros tattoo he had done on this opposite shoulder in Malaysia while filming Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.

Bourdain has appeared three times as guest judge on Bravo's Top Chef reality cooking competition program; first in November 2006, "Thanksgiving" episode of Season 2, again in June 2007 in the first episode of Season 3 to judge the "exotic surf and turf" featuring ingredients including abalone, alligator, black chicken, geoduck and eel, and most recently, as a near expert of air travel, judging the competitors airplane meals. He also 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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• "Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone ... Bad food is fake food ... food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people’s ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives. Food that’s too safe, too pasteurized, too healthy – it’s bad! There should be some risk, like unpasteurized cheese. Food is about rot, and decay, and fermentation….as much as it is also about freshness." Interview with Chris Tan

• "Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It's healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I've worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I'll accommodate them, I'll rummage around for something to feed them, for a 'vegetarian plate', if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine." From Kitchen Confidential, p. 70.

• "I don't like to see animals in pain. That was very uncomfortable to me. I don't like factory farming. I'm not an advocate for the meat industry." Interview with Dave Weich

• "I have exactly the same work ethic. I don't see writing as anything more important than cooking. In fact, I'm a little queasier on the writing. There's an element of shame, because it's so easy. I can't believe that people give me money for this shit. The TV, too. It's not work. At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It's a gift. A few months ago, I was sitting cross-legged in the mountains of Vietnam with a bunch of Thai tribesman as a guest of honor drinking rice whiskey. Three years ago I never, ever in a million years thought that I would ever live to see any of that. So I know that I'm a lucky man." Interview with Jessica Bennett

• "Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself."^[12]

Fiction

• Bourdain, Anthony (1995). Bone in the Throat. New York: Villard Books. ISBN 0679435522. 
• Bourdain, Anthony (1997). Gone Bamboo. New York: Villard Books. ISBN 0679448802. 
• Bourdain, Anthony (2001). Bobby Gold. Edinburgh: Canongate Crime. ISBN 1841951455. 

Non-Fiction

• Bourdain, Anthony (2000). Kitchen Confidential. New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 158234082X. 
• Bourdain, Anthony (2001). A Cook's Tour. New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 1582341400. 
• Bourdain, Anthony (2001). Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical. New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 1582341339. 
• Bourdain, Anthony (2004). Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781582341804. 
• Bourdain, Anthony (2006). The Nasty Bits. New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1596913608. 
• Bourdain, Anthony (2007). No Reservations. New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781596914476. 

• Anthony Bourdain official website
• Anthony Bourdain at the Internet Movie Database
• Travel Channel: No Reservations official website for No Reservations
• Audio Interview at Commonwealthclub.org (2006)
• Audio Interview at Commonwealthclub.org (2002)
• Audio Interview at Offthebroiler.com (2006)
• Audio Interview at The Restaurant Guys (2006)
• Bourdain's Blog at Top Chef at Bravotv.com (2007)
• Bourdain's Blog at Ruhlman at Ruhlman.com (2007)
• Bourdain Speaks at the Commonwealth Club of California (2007)
• Bourdain's Blog Entry about Food Network Personalities at Ruhlman.com (2007)
• Interview at Salon.com (2006)
• Interview at Powells.com (2002)
• Interview at Powells.com (2006)
• Interview at Bookslut.com (2006)
• Interview from The Institute of Culinary Education (2005)
• Review, The Bobby Gold Stories at The Open Critic
• Island Delights: Pigtail Soup With the Chef NYT by Anthony Bourdain
• Off the Eatin' Path NYT by Anthony Bourdain
• Bourdain's favorite books about food at The Guardian Unlimited U.K.
• Article on Bourdain at The Guardian Unlimited U.K.
• Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations Music Mix at Real Rhapsody