Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Michael Bourdainis an American chef, author, and television personality. He is a 1978 graduate of The Culinary Institute of America and a veteran of numerous professional kitchens, including many years as executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles. Although Bourdain is no longer employed as a chef, he maintains a relationship with Les Halles in New York. He became widely known for his 2000 book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. His first food and world-travel television show was...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChef
Date of Birth25 June 1956
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
You have to love a town where you can both smoke and gamble in a pharmacy.
The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about - or as a ritual like filling up a car - but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.
Very few restaurant workers could even dream of eating in the restaurants they work in. Many do not make a living wage.
Cooking professionally is a dominant act, at all times about control. Eating well, on the other hand, is about submission. It's about giving up all vestiges of control, about entrusting your fate entirely to someone else. It's about turning off the mean, manipulative, calculating, and shrewd person inside you, and slipping heedlessly into a new experience as if it were a warm bath. It's about shutting down the radar and letting good things happen. Let it happen to you.
When I'm back in New York - and this is a terrible thing to complain about - I eat a lot more really, really good food than perhaps I'd like to. So many of my friends are really good chefs. It's kind of like being in the Mafia.
My house is run, essentially, by an adopted, fully clawed cat with a mean nature.
Assume the worst. About everybody. But don't let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn't prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining.
I think we should be honest about who is working in our kitchens.
Where once they used to say, 'Cocaine is God's way of saying you have too much money' - now, maybe EDM is. Come ye lords and princelings of douchedom.
I believe - to the best of my recollection, anyway - that I soon made the classic error of moving from margaritas to actual shots of straight tequila. It does make it easier to meet new people.
When dealing with complex transportation issues, the best thing to do is pull up with a cold beer and let somebody else figure it out.
On one hand we encourage and allow major pharmaceutical companies to openly hook vast sectors of our population on narcotics, and then we cut them off and throw them in jail, and moralize about it. It is clearly a huge, huge, and growing problem. It's devastating. We need to treat it as a health crisis, which it is, and stop moralizing.
Unlicensed hooch from a stranger in a parking lot. Good idea? Yes, of course it is.
I managed to reach a depth of self-loathing that usually takes a night of drinking to achieve.