(Courtesy GQ Magazine)

“Bullshit!”

Such was the first word rendered on the very first episode of Anthony Bourdain’s 2005 culinary adventure cable TV program, No Reservations. Talk about hooked. I was head-over-heels for the show from that moment on. Or should I say, heels-over-head. As an adventure traveler who loved food, but didn’t know much about preparing it, that’s how much I loved it.

I’d known of the former top chef peripherally in crime lit circles in the mid-1990s since he used to write paperback mass market mysteries. He’s even published at the same imprint as I am in Japan. It’s possible if not probable I met him once or twice at an awards ceremony or publisher’s dinner in NY (I was always running into Mario Batali. Super nice guy BTW) I never gave much thought to his day job as a cook, until his hugely successful 1999 memoir burst onto the scene, Kitchen Confidential, and entire generations of foodies stopped eating fish on Mondays due to it’s signature essay of the same title. It’s a pisser, let me tell you.

Mine and my then wife, Laura’s favorite NYC restaurant became Les Halles on the corner of 28th and Park, back when it was still a small bistro where you could get sweet breads, steak frit, eat at its small bar, and smoke cigarettes right outside the door and nobody gave a shit. The restaurant was expanded later on but it was never the same and more recently it has closed forever. That’s sad enough, but to lose its chef forever…now that’s disconcerting. But Bourdain would break the bonds of NYC to become something of a phenom. A culinary adventurer who, and I quote, “… will risk everything…I’ve got nothing to lose.” That risk earned him millions of dollars and world adoration.



After all, back in the early 90’s he was a heroin addict reduced to selling used CDs on the inner city streets for food and beer money. He had a love affair with alcohol which lasted up until the end. His favorite music was punk rock…New York bands like The Ramones, Patti Smith, Richard Hell and ummm, Suicide. He cut the sleeves off his black CBGBs t-shirt and he adored his Marlboro cigs so much that a chef bud of his invented a custard dish that featured the vague flavor of a Marlboro Red cigarette. Yup, you can’t make this shit up.



When he began his first low budget show, A Cook’s Tour, back in the very early 2000s his heart was breaking while his long time partner and wife Nancy Putkowski and he were breaking up. Some of the early episodes demonstrates his desperation (he jumps off a cliff into the sea at one point). But he had a searing wit, wasn’t afraid to call out his fellow Food Network culinary pros on being suckups or just plain sucking (he was particularly tough on Emerald and Rachael Rey…it pains me to even type the latter’s name). After all, Tony was authentic. He was the real deal. He hated the commercialization of anything, especially when it came to food and words.



He would eventually inspire me as a writer, so much so that back in the mid-2000s I wrote a non-fiction proposal for a book called Construction Confidential, an insiders look at the building business (He, no doubt, would have laughed at it). It was rep’d by the William Morris Agency but went no where (Thank God!). Food is way more romantic and emotional than banging boards together or pouring a concrete footing.

A youngish Tony outside Les Halles in NYC (courtesy The Times)

But when I started traveling not occasionally, but often enough to lose yet another wife, Tony Bourdain was never far from my thoughts. I never travel without looking at his essays and videos first. Just last night I was once again YouTubing his many visits to Cambodia and his favorite place on God’s earth, Vietnam. Here’s a little taste of his foodie adventures in the ‘Nam.

Last year I made my way to So. East Asia on a research trip for my novel, Tunnel Rats. The month long excursion occurred not long after his suicide — a trip that included sleeping on the floor of a boiling hot wood shack over a rice paddy in Cambodia. Something Bourdain, ever the authentic, would have been proud of. I ended up dedicating more than a few cold beers and whiskey chasers to Tony. In truth, I was searching for his ghost to be bellied up to a bar right beside me. Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam were not only his self-professed favorite places on earth, they were his idea of heaven.

Whenever a literary hero of mine dies by suicide it rattles me to my core. Brautigan and Hunter Thompson come to mind. And naturally, Hemingway. The late, Jim Harrison, another lit hero of mine who also considered suicide at one time over financial worries, said that when he saw his daughter’s red bathrobe hanging on the door knob, he knew that he couldn’t go through with it.

The tragedy: Tony Bourdain leaves behind a little girl from his failed second marriage and that’s the saddest thing of all. Jim Harrison, who was a gourmand in his own right, also added that the next meal is also worth waiting for.

Too bad Tony Bourdain didn’t wait for one more great meal. And one more after that, and one more after that. Eventually, he might have changed his mind. Okay, maybe he would have changed his mind. Like another great writer who also took his own life during his middle-aged years once wrote, Isn’t it pretty to think so.