Anthony Michael Bourdain ( ; June 25, 1956 – June 8, 2018) was an American celebrity chef, author, and travel documentarian. He starred in programs focusing on the exploration of international culture, cuisine, and the human condition.
Bourdain graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978. He worked in many professional kitchens, including several years as an executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan. In the late 1990s, The New Yorker published an essay by Bourdain, kickstarting Bourdain's writing career and legitimizing the point-blank tone that became his trademark. The success was followed a year later by the New York Times best-selling book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (2000).
Bourdain's first food and world-travel television show, A Cook's Tour, ran for 35 episodes on the Food Network in 2002 and 2003. In 2005, he began hosting the Travel Channel's culinary and cultural adventure programs Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (2005–2012) and The Layover (2011–2013). In 2013, he began a three-season run as a judge on The Taste and consequently switched his travelogue programming to CNN to host Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. Bourdain also wrote fiction and historical nonfiction. On June 8, 2018, Bourdain hanged himself while filming Parts Unknown in France.
Early life Anthony Michael Bourdain was born in Manhattan on June 25, 1956. His father, Pierre, was a salesman at a New York City camera store and a floor manager at a record store, and later became a classical music recording industry executive at Columbia Records. His mother, Gladys (née Sacksman), was a staff editor at the New York Times. Anthony's brother, Christopher, was a few years younger than him.
Anthony grew up living with both of his parents and described his childhood in one of his books: "I did not want for love or attention. My parents loved me. Neither of them drank to excess. Nobody beat me. God was never mentioned so I was annoyed by neither church nor any notion of sin or damnation."Bourdain, Anthony (2010). Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook. Ecco Press, chapter 2 His father was Catholic of French descent and his mother was Jewish. Bourdain stated that, although he was considered Jewish by halacha's definition, "I've never been in a synagogue. I don't believe in a higher power. But that doesn't make me any less Jewish, I don't think." His family was not religious.
Bourdain's paternal grandparents were French (his great-grandfather Aurélien Bourdain was born in Brazil to French parents) and his paternal grandfather Pierre Michel Bourdain emigrated from Arcachon to New York following World War I.A Cook's Tour, episode 1.9: "Childhood Flavors"; 2000Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, episode 5.4: "Uruguay"; July 28, 2008 Bourdain's father spent summers in France as a boy and grew up speaking French. Bourdain spent most of his childhood in Leonia, New Jersey. He felt jealous of the lack of parental supervision of his classmates and the freedom they had in their homes. In his youth, Bourdain was a member of the Boy Scouts of America.
Culinary training and career Bourdain's love of food was kindled in his youth while on a family vacation in France. He first experienced two "pre-epiphanies" with the first being the vichyssoise served cold on the voyage to France on the Queen Mary, and the second was the realization that French children were allowed to have a cigarette on Sunday and allowed to drink vin ordinaire at dinner. The vichyssoise was an eye-opener to him because he had previously only experienced hot soup made from condensed canned soups. He described it in Kitchen Confidential as the "first food I really noticed. It was the first food I enjoyed and, more important, remembered enjoying."Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, paperback, 2001, pp. 9–10 Later in the trip, while staying with his aunt in La Teste de Buch, his family went out on an oyster fisherman's boat. Bourdain had never eaten a raw oyster before, but the fisherman offered him one which he had just harvested. Bourdain described the experience as "Everything was different now. Everything.... This, I knew was the magic I had until now been only dimly and spitefully aware of. I was hooked."
He graduated from the Dwight-Englewood School, an independent coeducational college-preparatory day school in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1973, then enrolled at Vassar College but dropped out after two years. He worked at seafood restaurants in Provincetown, Massachusetts, including the Lobster Pot, while attending Vassar, which inspired his decision to pursue cooking as a career.
Bourdain attended the Culinary Institute of America, graduating in 1978. From there he went on to run various restaurant kitchens in New York City, including the Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue and Sullivan's.
In 1998 Bourdain became an executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles. Based in Manhattan, at the time the brand had additional restaurants in Miami; Washington, D.C.; and Tokyo. Bourdain remained an executive chef there for many years and even when no longer formally employed at Les Halles, he maintained a relationship with the restaurant, which described him in January 2014 as their "chef at large". Les Halles closed in 2017 after filing for bankruptcy.
Media career Writing In the mid-1980s Bourdain began submitting unsolicited work for publication to Between C & D, a literary magazine of the Lower East Side. The magazine eventually published a piece that Bourdain had written about a chef who was trying to purchase heroin on the Lower East Side. In 1985, Bourdain signed up for a writing workshop with Gordon Lish. In 1990, Bourdain received a small book advance from Random House, after meeting a Random House editor.
His first book, a culinary mystery called Bone in the Throat, was published in 1995. He paid for his own book tour, but he did not find success. His second mystery book, Gone Bamboo, also performed poorly in sales. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, a 2000 New York Times bestseller, was an expansion of his 1999 New Yorker article "Don't Eat Before Reading This".
In 2010 he published Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, a memoir and follow-up to the book Kitchen Confidential.
He wrote two more bestselling nonfiction books: A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines (2001), an account of his food and travel exploits around the world, written in conjunction with his first television series of the same title, and 2006's The Nasty Bits, a collection of 37 exotic, provocative, and humorous anecdotes and essays, many of them centered around food, and organized into sections named for each of the five traditional flavors, followed by a 30-page fiction piece ("A Chef's Christmas").
Bourdain later published a hypothetical historical investigation, Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical, about Mary Mallon, an Irish-born cook believed to have infected 53 people with typhoid fever between 1907 and 1938. In 2007, Bourdain published No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach, covering the experiences of filming and photographs of the first three seasons of the show and his crew at work while filming the series.
His articles and essays appeared in many publications, including in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Observer, Gourmet, Maxim, Esquire, Scotland on Sunday, The Face, Food Arts, Limb by Limb, BlackBook, The Independent, Best Life, the Financial Times, and Town & Country. His blog for the third season of Top Chef was nominated for a Webby Award for Best Blog (in the Cultural/Personal category) in 2008.
In 2012 Bourdain co-wrote the graphic novel Get Jiro! with Joel Rose and illustrations by Langdon Foss. It is set to receive an adult animated television series adaptation produced by Warner Bros. Animation and DC Studios, airing on Adult Swim in October 2026.
In 2015 Bourdain joined the travel, food, and politics publication Roads & Kingdoms, as the site's sole investor and editor-at-large. Over the next few years, Bourdain contributed to the site and edited the Dispatched By Bourdain series. Bourdain and Roads & Kingdoms also partnered on the digital series Explore Parts Unknown, which launched in 2017 and won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Short Form Nonfiction or Reality Series in 2018.
Television Bourdain hosted many food and travel series, including his first show, A Cook's Tour (2002 to 2003). He worked for The Travel Channel from 2005 to 2013. He also worked for CNN from 2013 to 2018. Bourdain described the concept as, "I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do whatever the fuck I want." His programs focused on the exploration of international culture, cuisine, and the human condition. Nigella Lawson noted that Bourdain had an "incredibly beautiful style when he talks that ranges from erudite to brilliantly slangy".
The acclaim surrounding Bourdain's memoir Kitchen Confidential led to an offer by the Food Network for him to host his own food and world-travel show, A Cook's Tour, which premiered in January 2002. It ran for 35 episodes, through 2003.
In July 2005 he premiered a new, somewhat similar television series, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, on the Travel Channel. As a further result of the immense popularity of Kitchen Confidential, the Fox sitcom Kitchen Confidential aired in 2005, in which the character Jack Bourdain is based loosely on Anthony Bourdain's biography and persona.
In July 2006 he and his crew were in Beirut filming an episode of No Reservations when the Israel–Lebanon conflict broke out unexpectedly after the crew had filmed only a few hours of footage. His producers compiled behind-the-scenes footage of him and his production staff, including 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 fixer (unseen in the footage), whom Bourdain dubbed Mr. Wolf after Harvey Keitel's character in Pulp Fiction. Bourdain and his crew were finally evacuated with other American citizens, on the morning of July 20, by the United States Marine Corps. The Beirut No Reservations episode, which aired on August 21, 2006, was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2007.
In July 2011 the Travel Channel announced adding a second one-hour, 10-episode Bourdain show to be titled The Layover, which premiered November 21, 2011. Each episode featured an exploration of a city that can be undertaken within an air travel layover of 24 to 48 hours. The series ran for 20 episodes, through February 2013. Bourdain executive produced a similar show hosted by celebrities called The Getaway, which lasted two seasons on Esquire Network.
In May 2012 Bourdain announced that he was leaving the Travel Channel. In December, he explained on his blog that his departure was due to his frustration with the channel's new ownership using his voice and image to make it seem as if he were endorsing a car brand, and the channel's creating three "special episodes" consisting solely of clips from the seven official episodes of that season. He went on to host Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown for CNN. The program focused on other cuisines, cultures and politics and premiered on April 14, 2013.
President Barack Obama was featured on the program in an episode filmed in Vietnam that aired in September 2016; the two talked over a beer and bun cha at a small restaurant in Hanoi. The show was filmed and is set in places as diverse as Libya, Tokyo, the Punjab region, Jamaica, Turkey, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Far West Texas and Armenia.