Anthony Bourdain: a troubled talent so worthy of respect
I didn’t much like him but, hell, I really respected Anthony Bourdain.
He had, quite possibly, the best job in the world. Was almost certainly making good money. Television and books had made him famous way beyond the food world from which he had sprung. And he was in a newish relationship with Italian actress Asia Argento who, apparently, adored him.
Anthony Bourdain’s life seemed pretty good.
His second, ever-so-public career had come at a time that his first — as a merely competent chef — had stalled, and it had been quite a rollercoaster. But clearly even someone who has risen from the abyss of serious drug dependency to a glittering international life can’t easily shake the demons that took them down that path in the first place.
I barely knew the man; certainly many Australians — mostly chefs — knew Bourdain considerably better. Yet the news of his suicide last Friday didn’t strike me as entirely out of left field.
By my reckoning, Bourdain was a complex, introspective and highly intelligent individual who had made an entire new life for himself during his 40s in the public eye, and that’s not always a comfortable place to live when you set very high personal standards, as I believe he did.
Privately, we know Bourdain’s rather unconventional second marriage to Ottavia Busia had broken down in 2016 and constant travelling would hardly have been conducive to parenting. Yet, on the face of his last book, Appetites, late parenthood — daughter Ariane was born in 2007 as Bourdain approached his 52nd birthday — had produced in the notorious hard-liver a soft centre that possibly surprised him as much as it did his fans. Appetites is nothing if not a tribute to Ariane and, a little awkwardly, Busia.
We also know that a $US350 million food market on New York’s Hudson River — a project Bourdain had worked on for years — had fallen apart late last year with the withdrawal of a partner and myriad other complications the aspiring businessman failed to anticipate. It was undoubtedly a huge disappointment.
His passing is that of a born communicator who talked what he knew: kitchens, chefs, food and the cultures surrounding it all.
The memory of reading his name for the first time is crystal clear; editing the food section of a Melbourne daily back in 1999, a syndicated piece from a British paper became available. It was a breathtaking piece of insider writing from a chef with the attitude and phrasing of Hunter S. Thompson — another suicide — with the kind of New York street smarts of the 1970s rockers he admired and referenced so much.
The Lester Bangs of food had arrived.
We published the piece — at great expense — and before too long, in 2000, Kitchen Confidential surfaced. It was a seminal tell-all, and suddenly every hardworking, non-celebrity chef in the world had a new hero.
Television followed and, to the amazement of his fans, Bourdain the presenter was exactly the same guy who wrote the books. Urbane yet strangely familiar with life’s underbelly.
I worked for Bourdain in 2003 as a fixer when his low-budget crew arrived in Melbourne to shoot an episode of A Cook’s Tour. I found Tony aloof. Brooding. Except when the camera was on. I wrote a piece about the experience, which, I heard, he didn’t like. Maybe it was the headline: “A week with psycho chef”. We never spoke again. I guess we never will.
I didn’t much like him but, hell, I really respected him. Vale Anthony Bourdain.
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