Anthony Bourdain
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| Born | June 25, 1956 New York City |
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| Cooking style | French (currently) |
| Education | Vassar College, CIA |
| Restaurants | Les Halles (New York City) |
| TV Show(s) | A Cook's Tour, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations |
Anthony Michael (Tony) Bourdain (born June 25, 1956 in New York City) is an American author and executive chef of Brasserie Les Halles in New York City. Currently, Bourdain is the host of the Travel Channel's culinary and cultural adventure program, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.
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[edit] Background
Bourdain's love of food began at a young age, during a trip to France with his family. He was on an oyster fisherman's boat and tried his first oyster; 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, 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 The Independent, and he is a contributing authority for Food Arts magazine. He was the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles and currently lives in Manhattan.
Bourdain gained popularity from his New York Times bestselling book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Kitchen Confidential exposes the darker side of the culinary world and made him a legend in the working class of cooks. Bourdain has also written the culinary mysteries Gone Bamboo, 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 anus he ate in Namibia "the worst meal 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 is an unrepentant smoker and drinker, and a former user of both cocaine and heroin, as well as marijuana and LSD.[1] 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.[2]His liberal use of light profanity and sexual references in No Reservations has netted the show a viewer discretion advisory shown in the beginning and every time it returns from commercial breaks.
Bourdain is also noted for his not-so-subtle put downs of celebrity chefs like Emeril Lagasse and Rachael Ray (who is the butt of many jokes on No Reservations). Bourdain recognizes the irony of his transformation into a celebrity chef and has, to some extent, begun to qualify his insults. In any event, he is consistently outspoken in his praise for chefs he admires, particularly Thomas Keller, Gordon Ramsay, Eric Ripert, Fergus Henderson, and Mario Batali.[3]
His most recent 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 New York City punk bands such as Television and The Voidoids. Conversely, Bourdain stated 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. Expressing regret at the situation the Lebanese country and people were in [1][2], Bourdain and his crew were evacuated with other American citizens on the morning of July 20 by the U.S. military. 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.
Bourdain also made an appearance on the TLC reality show Miami Ink, in an episode 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.
In November 2006, Bourdain made an appearance as guest judge on Bravo's Top Chef reality cooking competition program.
[edit] Personal life
Bourdain is divorced from his first wife, Nancy. [3] He announced in a newspaper article that he is expecting his first child, a girl, with his Italian girlfriend. [4]
[edit] Books
[edit] Fiction
- Bone in the Throat, 1995.
- Gone Bamboo, 1997.
- The Bobby Gold Stories, 2003.
[edit] Non-Fiction
- Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, 2000.
- A Cook's Tour, 2001.
- Typhoid Mary (An Urban Historical), 2001.
- Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, 2004.
- The Nasty Bits, 2006.
[edit] Quotes
- "Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone ... Bad food is fake food ... food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people’s ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives. Food that’s too safe, too pasteurized, too healthy – it’s bad! There should be some risk, like unpasteurized cheese. Food is about rot, and decay, and fermentation….as much as it is also about freshness." Interview with Chris Tan
- "Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demiglace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living." From Kitchen Confidential, page 70.
- "I don't like to see animals in pain. That was very uncomfortable to me. I don't like factory farming. I'm not an advocate for the meat industry." Interview with Dave Weich
- "I have exactly the same work ethic. I don't see writing as anything more important than cooking. In fact, I'm a little queasier on the writing. There's an element of shame, because it's so easy. I can't believe that people give me money for this shit. The TV, too. It's not work. At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It's a gift. A few months ago, I was sitting cross-legged in the mountains of Vietnam with a bunch of Thai tribesman as a guest of honor drinking rice whiskey. Three years ago I never, ever in a million years thought that I would ever live to see any of that. So I know that I'm a lucky man." Interview with Jessica Bennett
- "Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself."[4]
[edit] External links
- Anthony Bourdain official website
- Anthony Bourdain at the Internet Movie Database
- Travel Channel: No Reservations official website for No Reservations
- Interview at Salon.com
- Interview at Powells.com
- Interview at Bookslut.com
- Interview from The Institute of Culinary Education
- Interview with the San Jose Mercury-News
- Review, The Bobby Gold Stories at The Open Critic
- Island Delights: Pigtail Soup With the Chef by Anthony Bourdain
- Bourdain's favorite books about food
- Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations Mix
[edit] Notes
- ^ "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." Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, page 123, New York: ECCO, 2000
- ^ A Cook's Tour, page 248-9. New York: Bloomsbury, 2001
- ^ http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/03/qa-anthony-bourdain.html
- ^ http://www.bookpage.com/0112bp/anthony_bourdain.html
