We got there right as the restaurant opened. And it took a fair amount of Google sleuthing to find the location, as he never mentioned the restaurant’s name on the show (he said it was so good he was calling it Restaurant X). I had recalled that, eight years earlier, he had remarked about his favorite cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper pasta) in Rome. The best way I can quantify his influence is to impart the story of a lunch we had in Rome.

I think Bourdain helped us do just that in a way that connected different people as one. That’s because he answered simple questions like, “What is it like there?” and “What should I eat there?” with depth about who people are and why.Īnd being open and understanding to others, and learning about others, are good things. It comes down to this: when I want to know what a place is like, I check for a Bourdain television episode before I ever check Google or Yelp. We can agree to disagree, and that’s a-ok. Anthony Bourdainīut, that’s exactly what makes his presence so exceptional to me and his absence so heavy. Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans … are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit. How could this uniquely relatable being who so poetically connects people, food, and cultures into a woven tapestry of human stories be gone? How could he have made the choice to go? And of course, why?Īs someone who mostly eats vegan and is afraid of mostly everything, the ever-carnivorous and adventurous Bourdain has not been the most likely source of inspiration for me.

The news of Anthony Bourdain’s death hit me like a brick - an unexpected and heavy blast of concrete from the sky, straight in my face.

Good food is very often, even most often, simple food. On the anniversary of Anthony Bourdain’s death, I wanted to share my Kitchen Confidential review, which I wrote shortly after his passing (but before I had a blog… in those days, my writing lived on way too many notes on my phone).

Kitchen confidential audible