Anthony Bourdain
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Categories: 1956 births | American atheists | American chefs | American food writers | American television chefs | Culinary Institute of America alumni | French Americans | Living people | People from New York City
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.
BiographyBourdain was born in New York City but grew up in Leonia, New Jersey.[2][3] On his Travel Channel television show, No Reservations, Bourdain claims that his love of food was kindled in France. Bourdain tried his first oyster on an oyster fisherman's boat as a youth while on a family vacation. 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 after her birth on April 20.[4] Bourdain was divorced from his first wife, Nancy Putkoski, in 2005.[5] [6] CareerBourdain 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 and the fermented shark he ate in Iceland as among 'the worst meals 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 of his expereince in a trendy SoHo restaurant in 1981: "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 four 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 again in Season 3 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. Mostly recently, Bourdain appeared as a guest judge for the opening episode of Season 4, in which pairs of chefs competed head-to-head in the preparation of various classic dishes. Bibliography
References
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