Name: My Archive No. 4: Kitchen Confidential
Item: Kitchen Confidential
Author: amf

Kitchen Confidential →

by Anthony Bourdain

My Archive No. 4: Kitchen Confidential

amf

Sep 15, 2025

It’s impossible to say anything original about the legacy of Anthony Bourdain. Like all early deaths, he’s been relegated to a symbol. His ethos and for that matter his very image has been much abused in the service of self-help. Because you’re supposed to be on a “journey,” and that’s like travel right? Right?

And the reason why I’m writing this is to grapple with that ugly disconnect, between the commercial-slash-social media legacy, a sort of Bourdain Inc., embodied in overwrought videos and captioned photos of the man, eyes behind sunglasses, smoking a cig on an Emirati dune or a Manhattan fire escape, which has an at-best tenuous connection to his literary and televisual output. Fandoms have a way of making one ashamed to admit one’s passions. The world is full of Rick and Morty fans who don’t want to say as much.

I can actually pretty distinctly remember the first time I watched No Reservations, in a dorm room in college. The general consensus was that if his job was to travel the world, eating dope shit, getting tipsy, and smoking Luckies, it was more or less ideal for us feckless youths. But actually, I got to know him much earlier, from the very first thing that got him attention in the publishing world, his piece that would later become , which I read because I was the worst kind of precocious tween that wanted desperately to understand the world of adults (read the comics first, maybe have a go at the prose). But from the very first paragraph, I realized that I didn’t need to be any different to read this. This was hormonal-boy writing, and I was a hormonal boy.

In other words, this very much wasn’t a motivational speech. It was a book that, in its overview of Bourdain’s life in food from being raised by Francophile New Yorkers to his position at Les Halles, both talked about everything that’s awesome about cuisine without any attempt at irony, just full-throated enthusiasm for the thing, particularly in its balls-to-the-wall classical French form (something that I dived into undertaking myself for years, and still am pretty into), and was also supposed to be a discussion of the dirty underbelly. And he knows how to put you in both worlds, throwing madeleines at ice skaters at Rockefeller Center from 80 stories up, and stalking the halls of long-gone Avenue C shooting galleries.

What I don’t think Bourdain knew at the time was that this underbelly, while full of genuine pain and stress for himself and his colleagues (addiction, labor exploitation, physical exhaustion), would constitute a nostalgie de la boue for the readership. And contrast that with the luxury, his very palpable romanticism, especially his passion for the culture and rhythms of mid-century New York. So the whole package becomes, for those of us who weren’t there at that time, and especially in my case for a middle schooler in the small-town Midwest who hadn’t touched a boob yet, something as entrancing as a Lou Reed album.