Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain (born June 25, 1956, New York City, New York, U.S.—found dead June 8, 2018, Kaysersberg, France) was an American chef, author, traveler, storyteller, and television personality who championed indigenous foods and promoted cultural cuisine and traditions. Through his books, television programs, and endless curiosity, Bourdain helped popularize “foodie” culture in the early 21st century, encouraging readers and viewers to “eat the world.”

Early life and writing

Raised in Leonia, New Jersey, Bourdain was the eldest son of Pierre Bourdain, an executive at Columbia Records, and Gladys Bourdain, a copy editor at The New York Times. He had a younger brother, Christopher. Bourdain’s formative food memory occurred at the age of 10, when, on a family trip to France, he ate a freshly harvested oyster. He attended Vassar College for two years before ultimately graduating from the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in 1978.

Bourdain later moved to New York City, where he ran the kitchens at a series of respected restaurants, including the storied Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center. While working as a chef, he began to try his hand at writing, which resulted in two crime novels: Bone in the Throat (1995) and Gone Bamboo (1997).

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Kitchen Confidential

In 1998 Bourdain became the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles. The following year, he published an exposé of the restaurant industry in The New Yorker titled “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” Inspired by George Orwell’s depictions of chefs in his memoir Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), the article became something of a cause célèbre, as many of the ugly inner workings of the restaurant world were brought to light to the wider public for the first time via Bourdain’s caustically witty writing.

In 2000 Bourdain expanded his New Yorker article into the popular kiss-and-tell memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, which contained not only additional accounts of the inner workings of restaurant kitchens but intimate details of Bourdain’s personal life as well, including his long battle with heroin addiction (he quit heroin about 1987, became addicted to cocaine and crack, and stopped using drugs about 1990).

Television work and awards

Kitchen Confidential established Bourdain as one of the “bad boys” of gastronomic culture, and he parlayed his book’s success into a cable-television food and travel show called A Cook’s Tour (2002–03). Bourdain’s approach to food and travel could be summed up in a quote from Kitchen Confidential: “I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.”

Bourdain then took the basic concept of A Cook’s Tour—providing a humorous guide to a locale with a focus on local cuisine and offbeat cultural features—and developed it into an hour-long cable program, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (2005–12). Bourdain also saw his memoir adapted into a short-lived sitcom (2005–06).

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Bourdain’s newfound television fame led to frequent stints guest-judging the cooking reality show Top Chef as well as an appearance on The Simpsons. He later launched The Layover (2011–13), a spinoff of No Reservations, which centered on Bourdain spending between 24 and 48 hours in a select destination. In 2013–15 he was a judge on the cooking-competition program The Taste. Additionally, Bourdain worked as executive producer and narrator on the PBS program The Mind of a Chef (2012–17), which profiled noted chefs and restaurateurs.

Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown premiered in 2013 and won multiple Emmy Awards for outstanding informational series. Like in A Cook’s Tour, No Reservations, and The Layover, Bourdain traveled widely, often finding himself eating street food, visiting restaurants known only to locals, or dining in private homes. Fellow celebrity chef José Andrés appeared in multiple episodes with Bourdain, and sitting U.S. Pres. Barack Obama shared a meal with Bourdain while on a presidential visit to Vietnam in 2016. While filming the show’s 12th season in 2018, Bourdain died by suicide. Later that year he posthumously won an Emmy for outstanding writing for nonfiction programming.

The James Beard Foundation awarded Bourdain its Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America award in 2008, and he won James Beard awards for episodes of The Mind of a Chef in 2013, 2014, and 2015, in addition to numerous nominations between 2011 and 2018 and posthumous nods in 2019. Also in 2019, the CIA, Andrés, and chef Eric Ripert announced the formation of the Anthony Bourdain Legacy Scholarship in Bourdain’s honor.

Other writing

In addition to Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain published a number of food-related nonfiction works, including A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal (2001), The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006), Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (2010), and Appetites: A Cookbook (2016, with Laurie Woolever).

Bourdain returned to fiction writing with the crime novel The Bobby Gold Stories (2001) and co-wrote with Joel Rose Get Jiro! (2012) and Get Jiro!: Blood and Sushi (2015), a graphic novel series set in a future Los Angeles where master chefs are the new crime lords. He also wrote for numerous magazines, blogs, and newspapers.

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide (written with Woolever), which features essays by family and friends, was published posthumously in 2021.

Documentary and narrative films

The documentary Roadrunner, an exploration of his life and career, was released in 2021. In August 2026, A24 released Tony, a feature-length biopic exploration of the summer that Bourdain was 19 and working in a Provincetown, Massachusetts, kitchen. The film stars Dominic Sessa as Bourdain and Antonio Banderas as his kitchen mentor.