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Wikipedia Summary for Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Michael Bourdain (June 25, 1956 – June 8, 2018) was an American celebrity chef, author, and travel documentarian, who starred in programs focusing on the exploration of international culture, cuisine, and the human condition. Bourdain was a 1978 graduate of The Culinary Institute of America and a veteran of a number of professional kitchens during his career, which included many years spent as an executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan. He first became known for his bestselling 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. Though best known for his culinary writings and television presentations, along with several books on food and cooking and travel adventures, Bourdain also wrote both fiction and historical nonfiction. On June 8, 2018, Bourdain died by suicide via hanging himself while on location in France for Parts Unknown.

If there was such a thing as building porn, it would be this. Just looking out the window as your drive or trolley by you think, 'I want that. Who lives there? Who lived there? What's it like inside? And where did they go?'

--Anthony Bourdain

It's beautiful here. They said that of course, that Budapest is beautiful. But it is in fact almost ludicrously beautiful.

--Anthony Bourdain

You'd have a hard time finding anything better than Barcelona for food, as far as being a hub.

--Anthony Bourdain

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.

--Anthony Bourdain

I've long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we're talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime associates, food, for me, has always been an adventure.

--Anthony Bourdain

For those with restless, curious minds, fascinated by layer upon layer of things, flavors, tastes and customs, which we will never fully be able to understand, Tokyo is deliciously unknowable. I'm sure I could spend the rest of my life there, learn the language, and still die happily ignorant.

--Anthony Bourdain

The journey is part of the experience -- an expression of the seriousness of one's intent.

--Anthony Bourdain


I'm not looking to freak people out-eating rodents or bugs. I don't do that anymore.

--Anthony Bourdain

There is no final resting place of the mind.

--Anthony Bourdain

People's choice to become vegan, from people I've spoken to, seems motivated by fear.

--Anthony Bourdain

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

--Anthony Bourdain

I think that if all kids aspire to reach a point where they could feed themselves and a few of their friends, this would be good for the world surely.

--Anthony Bourdain

Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

--Anthony Bourdain

Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.

--Anthony Bourdain

Even on the Serengeti, it ain't a barbecue if there ain't some kind of beer.

--Anthony Bourdain

If you're training in a combat sport, deliciousness takes a backseat.

--Anthony Bourdain

I'd like to play bass like Bootsy Collins. I'm serious. That would be my dream.

--Anthony Bourdain

It was not a pretty sight, all these pale, gangly, pimpled youths, in a frenzy of hunger and sexual frustration, shredding bread.

--Anthony Bourdain

I think it's important if you're going to write a cookbook, it should sound like you talking -- it should be things you actually believe, otherwise I'm not interested.

--Anthony Bourdain

The cookbooks I value the most in my collection are the ones where you hear the author's voice and point-of-view in every recipe.

--Anthony Bourdain

Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable, and satisfying. And I'll generally take a stand-up mercenary who takes pride in his professionalism over an artist any day.

--Anthony Bourdain

Just because we are not Italian, does not mean we cannot appreciate Michelangelo, it is the same with cuisine.

--Anthony Bourdain

Food, it appeared, could be important. It could be an event. It had secrets.

--Anthony Bourdain

America's most dangerous export was, is and always will be our fast-food outlets.

--Anthony Bourdain

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

--Anthony Bourdain

I won't eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. This isn't a hard call. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can't be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.

--Anthony Bourdain

Free time is my enemy. I recognized early on I'm not a guy who should have a lot of time to contemplate the mysteries of the universe. I need to stay busy... That's just the nature of my demons.

--Anthony Bourdain

I'm not afraid to look like an idiot on TV.

--Anthony Bourdain

I think we should increase the minimum wage and I think $15 is a good beginning.

--Anthony Bourdain

The whole concept of 'the perfect meal' is ludicrous.

I knew already that the best meal in the world, the perfect meal, is very rarely the most sophisticated or expensive one....Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one's life.

--Anthony Bourdain

I've been really fortunate in that I guess I was hired to do A Cook's Tour, I was already a known quantity, meaning I had written a really obnoxious book and nobody expected me to be anyone that I wasn't already.

--Anthony Bourdain

Everything was different now. Everything. I'd not only survived -- I'd enjoyed.

--Anthony Bourdain

Good food and good eating are about risk. Every once in a while an oyster, for instance, will make you sick to your stomach. Does this mean you should stop eating oysters? No way.

--Anthony Bourdain

I am very much enjoying the fatherhood phase of my life.

--Anthony Bourdain

We learn as professionals by repetition, by getting it wrong, getting yelled at and doing it again.

--Anthony Bourdain

If people are working only rice and beans for much of their diet, it says something.

--Anthony Bourdain

My daughter takes pride in showing up with stuff that other kids envy or are freaked out by, so I send her to school with grilled octopus.

--Anthony Bourdain

Just because I like sushi, doesn't mean I can make sushi. I've come to well understand how many years just to get sushi rice correct. It's a discipline that takes years and years and years. So, I leave that to the experts.

--Anthony Bourdain

Really annoys me any time I see Asian fusion too. Asia is a big place; which Asian are you talking about? You notice it's never Uzbek or Tajik food. It's Thai, and it's generally insulting.

--Anthony Bourdain

There's something not normal about you if you're writing a book about yourself, or about anything. And if you're the kind of person who can deal with being recognized by strangers and if that's tolerable or pleasing to you, and not immediately terrifying, that's not normal either.

--Anthony Bourdain

Being on television, being recognizable, this is unnatural.

--Anthony Bourdain

Most of the time, I'm fighting guys who are 22 years old, former college wrestlers, athletes, kids who are in much better shape than me. Often people who are much bigger and wider than me. It can be dispiriting at first.

--Anthony Bourdain

I do not have a merchandise line. I don't sell knives or apparel. Though I have been approached to endorse various products from liquor to airlines to automobiles to pharmaceuticals dozens of times, I have managed to resist the temptation.

--Anthony Bourdain

I'm certainly dismayed by what I'm seeing now. There's a lot of ugliness of a kind I've never seen in my lifetime, or heard in my lifetime. But, look, I'm a romantic. I'm hopeful.

--Anthony Bourdain

Anything that improves people's expectations of a meal is good for the world. Anything that weans even one kid or one adult away from Chili's or T.G.I. Friday's is definitely a win for the good guys.

--Anthony Bourdain

I would frankly be shocked if Donald Trump even knows how to use chopsticks or is even able to manipulate them with those tiny little fingers.

--Anthony Bourdain

I'm a control freak. If you're going to slap my name on something, I would like to control it.

--Anthony Bourdain

It's been about a week without alcohol of any kind. I'm enjoying my new, clean-living lifestyle.

--Anthony Bourdain

Thinking of getting into the leg-breaking business, so I can profitably sell crutches later.

--Anthony Bourdain

I am a delightfully evangelical guy about things I love. I am that annoying guy who sits everyone down and forces them to read some book I like. I'm looking across the full spectrum of genres.

--Anthony Bourdain

I'm a radical environmentalist; I think the sooner we asphyxiate in our own filth, the better. The world will do better without us. Maybe some fuzzy animals will go with us, but there'll be plenty of other animals, and they'll be back.

--Anthony Bourdain

Good food does lead to sex. As it should. And in a perfect world, good music does too.

--Anthony Bourdain

In Italy, kids are taken to restaurants very early, they're welcome there, and they learn how to behave. You don't see a lot of screaming crying kids acting out in a restaurant in Italy. They don't put up with that.

--Anthony Bourdain

I need the anesthetic qualities of the local fire water.

--Anthony Bourdain

Those places I don't understand, just doing bad food. It takes some doing. Making good pasta is so much easier than making bad stuff. It actually takes quite an effort to make poor linguine pomodora.

--Anthony Bourdain

I eat strategically. If I know I'm having a big Chinese banquet tomorrow, I'm not eating a big dinner tonight, and I'm not having breakfast.

--Anthony Bourdain

I have the best job in the world.

--Anthony Bourdain

I'm not going anywhere. I hope. It's been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

--Anthony Bourdain

A burger is something anyone can do, just follow the rules.

--Anthony Bourdain

Cooking breakfast and brunch professionally really kind of ruined breakfast service for me for a long time.

--Anthony Bourdain

We knew well how much these people were paying for cocaine -- and that the more coke cost, the more people wanted it. We applied the same market plan to our budding catering operation, along with a similar pricing structure, and business was suddenly very, very, good.

--Anthony Bourdain

I think of street food as the antidote to fast food; it's the clear alternative to the king, the clown and the colonel.

--Anthony Bourdain

If I'm training I'm cutting weight for a competition. I'm hard. I'm pretty much eating animal protein and that's it. No rice, no beans, certainly no sweets.

--Anthony Bourdain

When do you stop to de-douche?

--Anthony Bourdain

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.

--Anthony Bourdain

The older I get, and the more I travel in particular, the less I care about what exactly is in the dish than who's cooking it and why.

--Anthony Bourdain

Anyone who's a chef, who loves food, ultimately knows that all that matters is: Is it good? Does it give pleasure?

--Anthony Bourdain

Look at your waiter's face. He knows. It's another reason to be polite to your waiter: he could save your life with a raised eyebrow or a sigh.

--Anthony Bourdain

A proper saute pan should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone else's skull. If you have any doubts about which will dent, the victim's head or your pan, then throw that pan right in the trash.

--Anthony Bourdain

I can't do exercises regularly because my schedule changes from day to day. I'm okay with hurting myself, like I'll lift something until it hurts, but I don't want to pass out or vomit in front of people.

--Anthony Bourdain

I love New York. I'm a guy for whom a New York accent is a comforting thing.

--Anthony Bourdain

I'd like to make a show with Keith Richards.

--Anthony Bourdain

Never try to get your kid to eat anything she doesn't already want to eat. Just eat interesting stuff in front of her while completely ignoring her. Never, ever suggest try it. Never say those dreaded words try it, it's good. Or worse, It's good for you. That'll poison the well.

--Anthony Bourdain

Cream rises. Excellence does have its rewards.

--Anthony Bourdain

Good food and good eating are about risk.

--Anthony Bourdain

I don't have to agree with you to like you or respect you.

--Anthony Bourdain

Don't lie about it. You made a mistake. Admit it and move on. Just don't do it again. Ever.

--Anthony Bourdain

Margarine? That's not food. I Can't Believe It's Not Butter? I can. If you're planning on using margarine in anything, you can stop reading now, because I won't be able to help you.

--Anthony Bourdain

Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don't have.

--Anthony Bourdain

I'm sure one of the frustrations of being a Western enthusiast of Japanese food and culture is you're confronted every day with the absolute certainty that you will die ignorant.

--Anthony Bourdain

If I were trapped in one city and had to eat one nation's cuisine for the rest of my life, I would not mind eating Japanese. I adore Japanese food. I love it.

--Anthony Bourdain

When you're training for jiu-jitsu, particularly if you're training for a competition, you have to be pretty prescribed in the variety of what you eat.

--Anthony Bourdain

The bible of cooking. The all-time argument ender. Early in my cooking career, I wielded my Larousse like a weapon and it never let me down.

--Anthony Bourdain

When I die, I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantages squandered.

--Anthony Bourdain

Naturally, I'm misanthropic. But the Negronis are helping considerably.

--Anthony Bourdain

As Americans, we tend to look at Mexican food as nachos, which is not Mexican food really -- they don't eat them.

--Anthony Bourdain

I, a product of the New Frontier and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed me a living -- all I had to do was wait around in order to live better than my parents.

--Anthony Bourdain

One of my few virtues -- I don't have a lot of them -- would be a deep sense of curiosity. I'm interested in how other people live in other places; I'm interested in other cultures.

--Anthony Bourdain

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