How Anthony Bourdain's Made His Demons Part of His Raw Appeal

Tony Star Dominic Sessa Shares Biggest Surprise About Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain was famous for bristling at things. But perhaps he bristled at nothing more than being called a "bad-boy chef." Or even, eventually, "chef."

"I've reached the point where I'm not the bad-boy chef," the author, TV star and globetrotting culinary ambassador— who died by suicide in 2018 when he was 61—told Toronto's Globe & Mail in 2010. "I'm not a chef. I'm not bad. And I'm not a boy."

But reputations are hard to shake, especially when they're self-inflicted. And after spending years as a restaurant journeyman and then executive chef at New York's Les Halles, Bourdain bolted into the zeitgeist with his unsparing 2000 bestseller Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.

The book inspired a short-lived sitcom starring Bradley Cooper and established Bourdain as both an expert (if you're still ordering fish stew on a Monday, we can't help you) and a delightfully candid escapee from the kitchen confines whose demons somehow gave him even more gravitas.

“I didn't realize that, early on, his focus was writing and he really had a passion for that,” the Holdovers actor told E! News. “That was the thing that he saw himself doing and believed was his destiny.”

And it was, Sessa added, “but it wasn't possible unless he had the experience he had in the kitchen and those years of his life as a chef and in New York and before that.”

But Bourdain had no reservations about telling it as he saw it, which led to feuds with more than a few people over the years. His contempt for what he thought were the more gimmicky aspects of the celebrity chef world and other culinary embarrassments was also no secret.

At the same time, he became a President Barack Obama-interviewing revered authority on what and where to eat, as well as an explorer of far-flung cultures around the world—shared humanity delivered by the universal act of breaking bread.

"I'm not a journalist. I consider myself an enthusiast," he told E! News in 2014. "By my way of thinking, given the opportunity, who wouldn't do what I do? I mean, to get to go to cool places and make self-indulgent television about it? Who wouldn't do that?"

His friends readily acknowledged that Bourdain would always be the first to marvel over where he had eventually landed in life, decades after a chance sighting of a bride having a tryst with the chef in the middle of her wedding set him racing to the nearest kitchen.

"Traditionally, we were the losers in the family," Bourdain said in 2009 on a CT Forum panel, discussing the phenomenon of celebrity chefdom. "It has traditionally been a profession that is welcoming to misfits through history."

"All of us who got into the business because we presumably had bad communication skills, unlovely personal habits, couldn't get along with anybody—why, suddenly do we all have TV shows?" he mused. "For better or worse, and I say this as someone who's milking this celebrity chef s--t for everything I can get, very happily. It's the new pornography, OK? It's people seeing things on TV, make things on TV, that they're not going to be doing themselves any time soon, just like porn."

In that case, Bourdain became the Playboy, Hustler and grainy celebrity sex tape all rolled into one. 

As Bourdain assured Oprah Winfrey on her talk show in 2001, "I am the easiest [restaurant] customer. I'm just so grateful to be sitting down, having someone else cook for me. I over-tip, I almost never complain—unless the waiter has really insulted my intelligence."

The seasoned judgment he passed on food and the people who make it, sell it and write about it was embraced all the more because of the unsparing eye he turned toward himself. He was astonishingly frank about his many failings, both professional and personal, and his dark side became an inextricable part of his own mythology, the expert whom you could trust because he had already cut himself down to the bone and spilled his own guts for the world to see.

"Somebody called me the elder statesman of food the other day," Bourdain lamented to the Globe & Mail in 2010. "I found it deeply terrifying. I don't want to be one of them, because I see them as moribund, corrupt, tragic, angry for the most part."

Eventually, "vanity saved me from drugs," Bourdain told Maron. "I was just embarrassed and humiliated by what I'd see in the mirror every day." He kept working, luckily, because "there's always a job for somebody who can cook brunch."

To get off heroin, he was on methadone for eight years, he said, then quit that cold turkey in 1987 but kept using cocaine for several more years before he "just bottomed out on crack."

But after TV put him on the map, his marriage imploded. "There were things that I wanted," Bourdain acknowledged, "and I was willing to really hurt somebody to have them." 

Ripert then introduced Bourdain to Ottavia Busia, a restaurant general manager and fellow workaholic who would become his second wife. He took her to an $1,800 sushi dinner at Masa for their first date. On their second date they got matching chef's knife tattoos. They married in 2007, 11 days after their daughter, Ariane, was born. 

"I don't know exactly when the possibility of changing presented itself," Bourdain wrote in Medium Raw. "But some time, I guess, after having made every mistake...having realized that I'd had enough cocaine, that no amount was going to make me any happier."

Though becoming a father was the kick in the ass his physical health needed (he drank alcohol "very strategically," and, as he said on WTF, he only occasionally smoked pot because "I might need my brain at any moment"), his innate restlessness didn't subside. 

Bourdain started dating Asia Argento, who served as his guide in Rome on an episode of Parts Unknown shot in 2017. Their last appearance together was at the 2018 Women In The World Summit in April, two months before his death.

He had told the New Yorker in February 2016 that he would continue doing Parts Unknown "until it's not fun." He added that September, "I have the best job in the world. If I'm unhappy, it's a failure of imagination."

But there was a reason why he never slowed down, was incapable of slowing down—why he feared slowing down.

"If I have leisure time, I start thinking bad thoughts," he told the Globe & Mail in 2010. "I doubt myself. I get paralyzed." 

"Am I searching, am I seeking, am I always looking for something more?" Bourdain told the Wall Street Journal less than three months before his death. "Yes! I do this for no other reason."

Asked if he planned to seek more balance, he quipped, "Too late for that. I think about it. I aspire to it. I feel guilty about it. I yearn for it. Balance? I f--king wish."

He marveled over his daughter Ariane's disposition, telling the New Yorker, "I'm shocked by how happy my daughter is. I don't think I'm deluding myself. I know I'm a loving father...Do I wish sometimes that, in an alternative universe, I could be the patriarch, always there? Tons of kids? Grandkids running around? Yes. And it looks good to me. But I'm pretty sure I'm incapable of it."

See more scenes from Bourdain's inimitable life in photos: