Anthony Bourdain was one of the most beloved foodies on the planet. But his projects were
less about food and more about the human experience, with his unique brand of storytelling made
possible from honestly living a life marred with darkness. These are the tragic details
about Anthony Bourdain.
Much like the never-ending Jersey-ite battle between Taylor ham and pork roll, food was
a form of rebellion for Anthony Bourdain. The chef had a rather traditional upbringing
in Leonia, one that involved spending summers at the Jersey Shore and hanging out in diner
parking lots. He only developed his adventurous palate as a way to rebel against his parents.
In a 2017 interview with The Guardian, the chef admitted that it all began on a family
vacation to France, his first time ever in the country. On that trip, both he and his
brother were allowed to drink watered-down wine and smoke cigarettes on Sundays. One
day, his parents left both of them in the car while they ate at a restaurant, and he
pushed back by ordering oysters and various other dishes his parents found repulsive.
Bourdain later admitted,
"It wasn't about the food but about getting a reaction."
In his 2000 Kitchen Confidential memoir, Bourdain revealed that eating that raw oyster was the
thing that scarred him for life. He wrote in the memoir,
"The food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive search for the next thing, whether it was
sex or drugs or some other new sensation, would all stem from this moment."
Bourdain was teased in high school. As his childhood friend, Sam Goldman, told GQ, the
world traveler was tiny, and his classmates once made him ride in the luggage rack on
a ski-club trip. Bourdain eventually graduated and went to Vassar, a private liberal arts
college in New York that floats just under the Ivy League. But Bourdain was miserable
at the school.
His brother, Chris, told GQ that the chef didn't like college and, quote, "didn't care."
Ultimately, Bourdain never went back to the school. Instead, he searched for a new purpose,
later telling The Guardian that he only became happy when he started washing dishes at a
restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Bourdain was eventually promoted to dunking
fries, which pleased him.
He soon decided that he wanted to pursue a culinary career after witnessing one of the
chefs in an intimately awkward - but thrilling - moment. The chef was actively having an
affair with a bride by the trash bins while, quote, "her wedding party dined inside." Bourdain
later attended the Culinary Institute of America.
Bourdain's memoir, Kitchen Confidential, certainly sheds light on the hedonistic side of New
York's 1980s restaurant scene. In his early 20s, the chef worked in SoHo at a restaurant
that nurtured the celeb's budding drug addiction - so much so that he'd send a busboy out to
Alphabet City to score. Page Six reports that the chef regularly used speed and cocaine
during his shifts before eventually graduating to heroin.
He even dabbled in crack and LSD during late nights after work, watching punk bands and
hanging out at after-hours clubs. As Bourdain explained in his memoir,
"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."
It was undoubtedly a reckless lifestyle - one where Bourdain ran himself ragged to the point
that, as he told The New Yorker in a 2017 profile,
"I didn't like what I saw in the mirror. [...] [I] ended up on methadone [...] unable to leave
town without permission, waiting in line to pee in a cup."
He eventually quit heroin "cold turkey" in 1987, but spent several more years in the
throes of cocaine addiction.
Bourdain didn't find success until he was nearing middle age, and spent his life in
kitchens completely broke. In an op-ed written for Wealthsimple in 2017, the chef admitted
that he didn't have a savings account until he was 44 years old and didn't have health
insurance until around 2001.
"And I mean, the next day I get a call saying, you know, we'll give you 50 grand to write
a book. I'm no dummy, I'm dunking french fries at age 44. I'll write the damn book."
After graduating from culinary school and jumping full-time into kitchen work, Bourdain
found himself struggling with grueling 12-hour shifts, during which he made only about $120
after taxes. Around this time, he also spent, quote, "a few hundred dollars a week" on weed
and often owed money to one of the chefs for cocaine. He was, quote, "always a paycheck
behind," but that changed after Kitchen Confidential came out in 2000. As Bourdain recalled,
"When Kitchen Confidential was published, I hadn't filed taxes in about 10 years. I
was seriously behind on rent. [...] In my daily life, the goal was to muffle the anxiety
that I'd feel as I tried to drift off to sleep knowing that, at any point, what little money
I had in my bank account could be garnished by the IRS or the credit card company [...] That
was my reality for many years."
Bourdain's addiction escalated beyond what he could've ever imagined. In 2017, he admitted
to The New Yorker that he, quote, "bottomed out on crack." One of his lowest moments,
which he rehashed during a Reddit AMA, was when he was so desperate to get a fix that
he started digging out white paint chips from the shag rug in his apartment, hoping they
were actually bits of crack, and ended up smoking them anyway.
Though viewers saw Bourdain regularly drink throughout his series, when he quit drugs,
he quit for good and never looked back. During his Reddit AMA, the celeb chef revealed that
he had, quote, "never been tempted to relapse."
Bourdain's battle with depression is something that plagued him throughout his life. In an
interview with The Guardian, he admitted that during his restaurant years, he was a, quote,
"unhappy soul," with a drug problem. He carried a lot of shame and regret regarding the people
he disappointed and offended during that phase of his life, but darkness followed him well
into adulthood, even after he managed to kick drugs.
In 2016, Bourdain gave us a deeper glimpse of his struggle with mental health while visiting
Buenos Aires, Argentina during an episode of Parts Unknown. The chef sat down with a
psychologist and revealed that he felt, quote, "kind of isolated. He went on to explain that
he was often triggered by tiny, inconsequential things, such as looking at a hamburger he
just ordered in an airport. As Bourdain explained to the psychologist,
"Suddenly I look at the hamburger and I find myself in a spiral of depression that can
last for days."
Bourdain married his high school sweetheart, and in some respects, the pair brought the
worst out of each other. According to a profile in The New Yorker, Nancy Putkoski - an older
student - "ran with a druggie crowd," which attracted Bourdain, seeing as he liked, quote,
"dabbling in illicit substances."
When the chef graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, the couple moved into
a rent-stabilized apartment on Manhattan's Riverside Drive. Bourdain later compared the
couple's intense, but troubled, love for one another to the one portrayed in the film Drugstore
Cowboy. He told The New Yorker,
"That kind of love and codependency and sense of adventure - we were criminals together
[...] A lot of our life was built around that, and happily so."
At least until it wasn't. The pair divorced in 2005, which Bourdain called his life's,
quote, "great betrayal." He sunk into a frightening rough patch, which he described in his 2011
book, Medium Raw. After the split, he jet-set to the Caribbean, where he described himself
as, quote, "aimless and regularly suicidal." Things only eased up when he met a woman in London.
Bourdain's lifestyle ended up taking a toll on his second marriage to mixed martial artist
Ottavia Busia. In a 2016 interview with People, he said it was really tough constantly being
away from his family, estimating that he spent about 250 days a year on the road filming
his CNN series.
Though Busia and Bourdain share a daughter, they were living very separate lives in the
years before their divorce - so this breakup wasn't a huge lifestyle change. Bourdain told
People Magazine that he believed he and Busia did a really good job as a family and planned
to continue to co-parent their daughter.
According to Page Six, the former couple never actually finalized their divorce before Bourdain's
death in 2018, even though he started dating Italian actress Asia Argento shortly after
their split. However, People reports that this may have not been a top priority because
he never planned to marry again.
It may seem out of his lane, but Anthony Bourdain actually helped Ronan Farrow expose disgraced
movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, who's now serving 23 years in prison. The chef was a vocal supporter
of the #MeToo movement, and Asia Argento was one of the very first women to speak out in
2017.
"The backlash… it, it was fuel that they threw into my fire."
In Farrow's 2019 book, Catch and Kill, the journalist revealed that he was originally
reporting on Weinstein's sprawling sexual assault and harassment allegations for NBC,
but the network, quote, "derailed its publication," though NBC later claimed the story didn't
meet their standards. Bourdain, whose girlfriend was one of the women who opened up in the
piece, ended up contacting The New Yorker, the publication that first published his writing
in 1999.
Explaining Weinstein's abhorrent behavior to editor David Remnick, Bourdain reportedly
wrote,
"I am not a religious man, but I pray you have the strength to run this story."
When Farrow's exposé was finally published, Bourdain tweeted support for his girlfriend:
"I am proud and honored to know you. You just did the hardest thing in the world."
Farrow, meanwhile, ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize for his bombshell investigative piece.
Rose McGowan was close to both Bourdain and Argento, especially after the chef's role
in taking down Harvey Weinstein. After Bourdain's passing, the actress wrote an open letter
at the behest of his grieving girlfriend, where she revealed that Bourdain was struggling
prior to his death.
Per the letter, which was excerpted by People, McGowan claimed that both Argento and Bourdain
dealt with similar mental health issues. She wrote,
"Anthony told a mutual friend, 'He's never met anyone who wanted to die more than him.'"
The pair eventually both sought help, though McGowan claimed that Bourdain didn't, quote,
"take the doctor's advice." McGowan continued,
"Over their time together, thankfully, [Argento] did the work to get help, so she could stay
alive and live another day for her and her children. [...] Anthony's depression didn't
let him, he put down his armor, and that was very much his choice. His decision, not hers.
His depression won."
In June 2018, Bourdain was found unresponsive in his hotel room by his friend, chef Eric
Ripert, who was working with the chef on an episode of Parts Unknown in France. According
to CNN, the 61-year-old star had taken his own life. The chef's mother, who spoke to
The New York Times, revealed that Ripert admitted Bourdain had, quote, "been in a dark mood"
for a couple of days, but the act itself was perplexing.
Since the discovery of his passing, Bourdain's death has been mourned by more than just his
close family and colleagues. It's been mourned by an entire world, who watched the chef highlight
the strangest pleasures of our existence - from the radio cutting in and out during a solemn,
late-night drive through the west Texas desert to the fantastical costumed night clubs hidden
behind Tokyo's neon lights.
Those things will never be forgotten, and even among the darkness, Bourdain had a sardonic
optimism that remains infectious. As Bourdain acerbically mused in a 2016 interview with
Todd Aaron Jenson,
"I should've died in my 20s [...] I became successful in my 40s. I became a dad in my
50s. I feel like I've stolen a car - a really nice car - and I keep looking in the rear-view
mirror for flashing lights. But there's been nothing yet."
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).