Anthony Bourdain
American chef, writer and television presenter
Biography
Anthony Michael Bourdain (New York, 1956 – Kaysersberg-Vignoble, France, 2018) was an American chef, writer and television presenter. He is remembered for treating food as a way into the histories, cultures and conflicts of the places where it is eaten. His blunt, unpolished voice shaped a generation of cooks and food writers, and at the turn of the century he became one of the first kitchen professionals to speak to a mass audience with real candour about the trade.
Born in Manhattan on June 25, 1956, he grew up mostly in Leonia, New Jersey, the older of two brothers. His father worked in the record industry, eventually as a classical music executive at Columbia Records, and his mother was an editor at the New York Times. His paternal side was French: his father had spent childhood summers in France and grew up speaking the language, and Bourdain himself spent many summers in Europe as a child. By his own account, his first real food revelation came in La Teste-de-Buch, on the Atlantic coast, when a fisherman handed him a freshly harvested oyster. After two years at Vassar College, where he worked in a seafood restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he left university and enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America, graduating in 1978.
He then moved through a series of New York kitchens, including the one run by the Italian American chef Pino Luongo, and rose to executive chef at places such as Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue and Sullivan's. In 1998 he took charge of the kitchen at Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan, a brand with branches in Miami, Washington and Tokyo. Although he soon stepped away from the stove, he kept a connection with the restaurant until it closed in 2017.
His literary career began with two crime novels, Bone in the Throat (1995) and Gone Bamboo (1997), which sold modestly at the time. His breakthrough came in 1999, when The New Yorker published his essay «Don't Eat Before Reading This», an unsparing look at the darker side of restaurant work. Expanded into the memoir Kitchen Confidential (2000), it became a bestseller and gave him a readership well beyond the trade. A decade later came the follow-up Medium Raw (2010). He also published A Cook's Tour (2002), tied to his first series, the essay collection The Nasty Bits (2006) and Typhoid Mary (2004), a historical account of the cook linked to a typhoid outbreak. He tried comics too, co-writing the graphic novel Get Jiro! with Joel Rose.
Television made him a global name. Food Network launched A Cook's Tour in 2002, a travel series of 35 episodes that ran through 2003. From 2005 he hosted Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations on the Travel Channel, which ran until 2012 and produced 142 episodes. Its Beirut episode, filmed as fighting broke out during the 2006 Israel–Lebanon conflict, earned him his first Emmy nomination. Between 2011 and 2013 he presented The Layover, about cities visited during short stopovers. In 2013 he moved to CNN for Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, a more reporting-led series on politics, history and food, which ran for 89 episodes over eleven seasons. He also judged the competition The Taste and worked as executive producer and narrator of The Mind of a Chef on PBS.
His work earned a Peabody Award in 2014 and six Primetime Emmy Awards. The Fox sitcom Kitchen Confidential, which premiered in 2005, was loosely based on his memoir and persona, though it lasted only one season. He appeared as himself in the film The Big Short (2015), and a biographical film, Tony, directed by Matt Johnson, was released in 2026.
He married twice and had a daughter, Ariane, born in 2007. In his fifties he took up Brazilian jiu-jitsu and earned a blue belt. In his books he had written candidly about his youth, including drug use and his later recovery.
He died on June 8, 2018, at a hotel in Kaysersberg-Vignoble, in Alsace, where he was filming an episode of Parts Unknown. His friend and frequent collaborator, the chef Éric Ripert, found him dead in his room. Investigators concluded that he had taken his own life, and depression was suggested as a likely factor. His death shook the food world, and tributes came from cooks across the globe. His legacy endures in several forms: in 2019 Ripert and José Andrés proclaimed the first Bourdain Day, the Culinary Institute of America established a scholarship in his name, and the documentary Roadrunner, directed by Morgan Neville, premiered in 2021. His work remains a record of how a restaurant professional looked outward at the world, with its contradictions and its restless curiosity.
Key contributions
- Kitchen Confidential (2000): a memoir that exposed the routines and hardships of professional kitchens and brought him to a wide readership.
- A Cook's Tour (2002): an early food-travel series that showed local cooking through the people who make it.
- Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (2005-2012): a travel series of 142 episodes that made street food and local eating a subject of cultural conversation.
- Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown (2013-2018): a reporting-led travel series on politics, history and cuisine, with 89 episodes.
- Medium Raw (2010): a follow-up memoir that reassessed his career and the restaurant industry with a critical eye.
- A journalistic approach to food: his work helped establish food as a lens for understanding societies, an influence visible in many later programmes and writers.