From bad-boy chef to globe-trotting CNN star, Anthony Bourdain has become a master of reinvention. Now can he bring a hyperambitious food hall to Manhattan’s waterfront?

Anthony Bourdain is already sitting in a corner booth when I walk into Sakagura, a Japanese bar in the basement of an office building in midtown Manhattan. Bourdain, I will come to learn, turns early arrivals into a competitive sport—no matter how well you plan, he will be there before you. This might seem like compulsively considerate behavior from a notorious hard-liver like Bourdain, a man whose public personality is tied up with late-night benders, foulmouthed frankness, and consuming such a staggering variety of food that he’s something like the Library of Congress of eating. If anybody is allowed to show up late for a night of sake and sashimi, it’s Bourdain.

Instead he’s pathologically prompt, which makes more sense when you pull back and take a wider view. Anthony Bourdain, the former head chef of Les Halles, a French steak house in New York that was well liked if not particularly influential, didn’t become Anthony Bourdain—the man who has been played by Bradley Cooper on television, the tastemaker whose name is set to be on a $60 million market hall on a pier in New York City, the CNN personality so broadly respected that President Obama will sit down with him in a fluorescent-lit noodle joint in Hanoi—on one-liners and being able to hold his liquor. Bourdain is indefatigable, and his unlikely rise to the top can be explained, in part, by his ability to marshal the energy and concentration needed to stick to an impossibly busy schedule filled with call times and production meetings and long-haul flights across the date line, and still look fresh when the cameras are rolling.

But being one of the hardest-working eaters in show business will get you only so far. What sets Bourdain apart is his honesty. When he finds something he loves, he smiles the toothy grin of an eleven-year-old boy. And when he comes across something he thinks is phony, he destroys his target with a few well-chosen words. “Agree with him or not, everyone knows his opinions come from a real place,” says the director Adam McKay, who gave Bourdain a cameo explaining collateralized debt obligations in his 2015 film, The Big Short. “So he was a perfect choice,” says McKay, for “cutting through mounds of banking bullshit and doublespeak.”