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BOURDAIN, AND THE CHEF AS WITNESS
On Anthony Bourdain, twenty-five years of television and writing, and a public role that had not existed before.
Chef Anthony Bourdain at Les Halles for a 2000 New Yorker feature. Photo by Martin Schoeller
Bourdain built, over twenty-five years, a position in public life that had not existed before. He made the chef into a witness.
In the mornings, before his lunch shift at Les Halles on Park Avenue South, Anthony Bourdain wrote a book. He had been head chef at the brasserie since 1998. He was forty-two. The book, which he was writing on spec without an agent, was about what actually happened in the kitchens he had worked in for twenty-five years. It was called Kitchen Confidential. Before finding a publisher, he extracted a chapter and sent it to The New Yorker, which ran it on April 19, 1999, under the title Don't Eat Before Reading This. The essay did what nothing else he had written had done. It was read by people who did not work in restaurants. His agent called within days.
Kitchen Confidential: Insider's Edition : Bourdain, Anthony
The book was published the following year, in 2000, by Bloomsbury. Everyone in the restaurant industry read it, because no one from inside had ever published a book like it before. Everyone outside the restaurant industry read it too, because the writing was better than it needed to be. It was a New York Times bestseller by June. He left the kitchen the following year.
That is the conventional story of Bourdain's career, and it is accurate, but not the interesting part. What is interesting is what he did next and what he built over the following eighteen years, which became a public role that had not existed for a chef and has outlasted him.
He began on television in 2002 with a Food Network show called A Cook's Tour. It was food travel. He ate meals in other countries and described them. The show was competent but unremarkable. He then moved to the Travel Channel in 2005 to hostNo Reservations, which ran for nine seasons. The shift from Food Network to Travel Channel was more significant than it sounds. The frame was now travelling rather than cooking. The food was a reason to be somewhere, not the reason for the show. He started to notice on camera that when he sat down with local cooks, cab drivers, and shopkeepers, the conversation was often about more than the meal.
Chef Anthony Bourdain eating noodles in Vietnam,
Photo by Martin Schoeller for The New Yorker
Photo by Martin Schoeller for The New Yorker
In summer 2006, he was in Beirut filming an episode of No Reservations. The episode was supposed to be a standard food-travel hour in a city with a serious food culture. On July 12, Hezbollah crossed the Lebanese border into northern Israel and captured two Israeli soldiers. Israel began bombing Lebanon that afternoon. Bourdain and his crew were stuck in a hotel in Beirut for more than a week before evacuation by the US Marines. They finished the episode anyway, with footage of the bombing visible from their balcony and the food-travel frame abandoned. The episode, which aired that August under the title Beirut, was nominated for an Emmy. Bourdain has said in multiple interviews that it was the moment he realised what the show could actually be. He stopped pretending the food was the point.
The No Reservations episodes after 2006 were recognisably different from the ones before. There were episodes in post-Katrina New Orleans, Detroit, Cambodia, and rural West Virginia. The food was filmed and eaten, but it was now framing something else. He was reporting.
Chef Anthony Bourdain photographed in a kitchen pantry.
In 2013, he moved to
CNN and started Parts Unknown. The move to a news network was not
incidental. CNN would pay for film crews in places the Travel Channel would not
have gone, and CNN had the political weight to get them in. The show ran twelve
seasons until his death in 2018. He filmed in Myanmar a year after the country
had begun admitting journalists following five decades of military rule. He
filmed in Iran in 2014 and interviewed the Washington Post correspondent Jason
Rezaian, who was arrested by Iranian authorities a few months after the filming
and imprisoned for a year and a half. He filmed in the Congo, in Libya, and in
Colombia during the peace negotiations with the FARC. The 2013 episode covering
Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza was considered even-handed enough by both
sides that it won an unusual award from the Muslim Public Affairs Council.By that point, the show was not really about food, and almost no one pretended it was. Bourdain had created something that had not existed as a category before. He was a chef. He had worked the line for twenty-five years before publishing a book. He had the specific knowledge and the specific scars of professional kitchen labour, and this gave him a particular kind of credibility. But the credibility was being used for reporting. He went to places and talked to people, and he figured out that the quickest, honest entry point into a country, a city, or a conflict was to sit down and share a meal. The meal was how he got in. What he did after getting in was the actual work.
A still of Anthony Bourdain from the television show Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations
Before Bourdain, a chef in public was a technician, a restaurateur, a competition cook, or a branded personality. The chef, who was also a serious observer of politics, labour, geography, and class, was not an available category. Julia Child had been a cultural figure, but not through the authority of professional kitchen work. Jacques Pépin was a teacher. The chef-writers of the mid-century, James Beard and Craig Claiborne, wrote about recipes and restaurants, not about the places those restaurants were in. What Bourdain did was take his own biography as a working chef and turn it into a licence to report on whatever he wanted, which turned out to be almost anything.
Since his death on the 8th of June 2018, the role has continued to exist, and other chefs have taken it on in different ways. David Chang writes for The New Yorker and hosts a podcast on the global food system as a political subject. The Danish chef René Redzepi has become a serious voice on land use, foraging rights, and climate-era agriculture, partly through his work outside the restaurant at Noma and partly through the MAD symposium he runs in Copenhagen. Samin Nosrat, whose Netflix series drew on the cookbook she wrote while teaching cooking at Chez Panisse, now writes essays on grief, the immigrant experience, and cooking roughly in equal measure. None of these positions would have been available to a chef in 1995. They are all variants of the position Bourdain built, each one occupying a slightly different part of it.
A portrait of the late chef Anthony Bourdain
He did not invent food writing. He did not invent food television. What he invented, over twenty-five years of writing and broadcasting, was a specific category of public figure. The category is now crowded.
The chefs who occupy it have their own voices and their own subjects, and in many cases, they are addressing questions Bourdain never got to.
But the shape of the position they occupy, the permission to use professional cooking as a foundation for cultural reporting, is traceable to one writer who wrote a book in the mornings before his lunch shifts at a Park Avenue brasserie and then spent the next eighteen years using it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bourdain, Anthony. Kitchen Confidential, Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.New York, Bloomsbury, 2000
Bourdain, Anthony. Don't Eat Before Reading This. The New Yorker, 19 April 1999
Bourdain, Anthony. A Cook's Tour. New York, Bloomsbury, 2001.
No Reservations, Travel Channel, 2005-2012. Beirut, season 2 episode 15, aired August 2006
Parts Unknown, CNN, 2013 to 2018
Woolever, Laurie; Bourdain, Anthony. World Travel, An Irreverent Guide. New York, Ecco, 2021
Woolever, Laurie. Bourdain, The Definitive Oral Biography. New York, Ecco, 2022