Shivana Sookdeo was in line at a food festival in Prospect Park several years ago, and turned to see Anthony Bourdain standing near her. “Hey kid, you hungry?” he asked.

From there, they struck up an easy conversation, she said in an interview, and eventually got to talking about her parents’ home country, Trinidad.

“It wasn’t like talking to a celebrity,” she said. “It was like talking to an old friend.”

After Mr. Bourdain was found dead on Friday, at the age of 61, Ms. Sookdeo described what he had meant to her. “I felt I could trust him to see what I saw in Trinidad, as if the heart of the country would be safe in his hands as a person and traveler,” she wrote on Twitter. “You trusted him with Your Heritage.”

Her tweets — shared and liked tens of thousands of times — struck a chord. To many people of color and members of marginalized communities, Mr. Bourdain was a rare traveler they trusted to get their cultures “right.” Through his writing and his television shows, the Travel Channel’s “No Reservations” and CNN’s “Parts Unknown,” Mr. Bourdain brought curiosity and empathy to parts of the world that were most likely unfamiliar to much of his audience.