Kitchen Confidential wasn’t the first book to dissect a chef, peeling back the skin to reveal the intelligence and destructiveness of the creative personality, its blistered ego and addictions. In White Heat (1990), ten years before Bourdain’s book, Marco Pierre White thrashed like Sid Vicious with a brooding streak, showing off the kitchen as a place where violence and self-inflicted wounds could seem beautiful.

But White was British and mostly obscure, except to chefs. Americans in the ‘90s were opening their newspaper food sections to find chefs pursuing trends and wholesome passions, nice guys or noble perfectionists. In Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain flipped that ideal on its head, instead presenting a picture of the restaurant cook as a personally troubled maker of food with the power of pure, animal joy. Cooks were fuck-ups with heart, sometimes dicks, sometimes generous and self-effacing, but always both transcendent and defeated, subverting almost everything else in their lives to the craft of cooking. They were the compromised agents of uncompromised pleasure.

Getting Bourdain to acknowledge that he broke the code on rendering the chef as a complex being is like trying to turn a doorknob using a hand slicked with Astroglide: It doesn’t happen with the ease or the grace you’d expect. It makes me think of something Lucky Peach editor Peter Meehan told me about Bourdain, about how thinking of himself as an outsider fuels Bourdain. “He feels fortunate to be there and tries to do the good work to keep his place at the table,” Meehan said, “and that sets him apart. There is a moment in most people’s careers that’s like, ‘I belong here.’ I’ve never gotten that from Tony.”

Everything any serious food writer now is trying to do, you accomplished in Kitchen Confidential, and later in Medium Raw. Where did that come from?

I had an empathy for my subjects which most food writers don’t have. Most food writers despise their subjects; they don’t want to be food writers. They’re either over it; they’re pissed off; they never liked these dirty chefs in the first place—all of that attention and all of that pussy. They don’t fucking like it and it shows. You smell it on their prose. They just don’t like [chefs] doing well, and they will hurt them if they feel they’ve overstepped. And to be fair, if you’re writing about describing meals, year after year, it ruins people. I’ve described it jokingly as like writing the Penthouse letters for 20 years. I sympathize.

I was asked to roast Alan Richman and the expectation was I would go up there and destroy him. I don’t find that interesting at all. No, I went after his editors: These bastards who’ve taken this very accomplished, very distinguished food reviewer—we may have had some major differences on things he’s written*, but this is a distinguished food writer and they put him on top ten lists and “Get Out to Brooklyn!” and hipster fucking diner trend pieces on the next big thing. So I went after them. But that's where we are now, the age of listicles and ten bests. People ask me, “Where would you eat in New York if you came back after a long time?” And I name five restaurants and it’s like Tony’s Five Best Restaurants in New York! How the fuck did we get from there to here?

*Bourdain wrote an essay for Medium Raw titled “Alan Richman Is a Douchebag.” Since then, Bourdain says, they’ve reconciled.

On Challenging Food Media “I think one of the reasons that we initially bonded is that he called bullshit on food media early on—when I left the New York Times early on I realized that. It’s all lying to promote the next hot restaurant and the next trend. It was never what food was really about.” Regina Schrambling, former New York Times Food Deputy Editor

Do you feel you changed the voice of food writing? Shifted the point of view?

I don’t feel that I’ve accomplished that. I feel that I’m working in an existing tradition. People before me have written about the things that interest me in a similar style, a similar point of view, a similar attitude. George Orwell, Down and Out. Nicolas Freeling in The Kitchen. Bemelmans. They were all there earlier, better, and I don’t feel I broke any ground. I’m not reinventing the wheel here. I wrote Kitchen Confidential very quickly. It reads like I talked at the time; it’s what I do. It’s often hyperbolic. I like language. It’s pleasurable to me to listen to somebody: a dialect, a jargon, colloquialisms. Action Bronson and Eddie Huang, they’re not following in my footsteps. That’s who they are and they sound like that. That’s not a style I came up with.

When you have this machine-pounding of people on laptops in Starbucks all over town to come up with content, you’re not going to get a lot of A. J. Lieblings, people just passionate about life and eating. It’s not all about food. Food in and of itself is pretty fucking uninteresting after a certain point. Who’s cooking this is much more interesting to me than what’s cooking. Who’s cooking and why are they cooking it this way? Who are they reading? What’s on the radio? Is there a dog? Those are the things that make a meal interesting, and this is why Liebling is so awesome. Any good writer who really wants to bring home the pleasure of a meal is going to picture the room.

Writers just writing about the food, you can only eroticize it so long. It’s all about other stuff. And I don’t think you can properly appreciate food if you’re not having some kind of sex, you know—occasionally. It doesn’t even have to be acrobatic, but other pleasures are important. It’s counterproductive, in fact: creepy food writing by people who are not having any sex, that can barely remember having sex.

In order to write well about food you need to eat well, and you cannot eat well if you’re analyzing the food. It’s not fun for the people you’re eating with and I don’t see how it can be fun for you. I spent 30 years in the restaurant business and I do not want to be thinking about if the bus boy’s doing his job. I don’t want to hear the bell in the kitchen. I don’t want to be thinking about what’s in that dressing. I want to be lost in the meal. I want to be a romantic fool.

By picking at the scabs of his psyche in Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain opened up a raw and sometimes ugly place in the terrain of food. In the new Bourdain era, writers and editors seemed to champion the culture of misogyny and homophobia that lurked in the shadow of dude drinking and extreme-food stunts, chewing goat testicles or dare-downing ghost peppers.

In 2012, The New Yorker published Tamar E. Adler’s “When Meals Get Macho,” an essay in decorous prose that recoils from Bourdain’s dick-lugging swagger. Adler writes, “Anthony Bourdain has turned a sort of belligerent gluttony into a talisman for insecure men.”

“Kitchen Confidential changed both food writing and food culture,” Adler says. And while Bourdain himself seems perfectly smart and charming, “the problem,” she says, “is when the behavior is enacted by somebody less smart and less charming you get aggression: Guy Fieri's hugeness and loudness, the entire idea of 'bizarre foods,' the exoticizing of that which is normal to much of the world, which is a kind of cultural aggressiveness.”

Once Bourdain discovered travel for A Cook’s Tour, his two-season Food Network series that premiered in 2002, TV changed him. His point of view expanded, from the kitchen of the subterranean prep hole and crowded pass, to the hazy view down Dong Khoi Street in Ho Chi Minh City, where he navigated past scooters and cyclos to find release in a bowl of pho.

In his TV work, from A Cook’s Tour through season seven of Parts Unknown, Bourdain replays this single act of discovery, over and over again. It’s the shiver of innocence reprised hundreds of times, a single assertion of delight with the replay button clicked, never getting old.

Do you ever feel guilt for being a white male gatekeeping the food of other cultures?

I’m aware of the sort of destructive aspects of what I do. I understand I’m altering the world by putting it on TV. I’m aware that I am fetishizing what is seen as a birthright to millions of people around the world. Do I feel guilty? I am who I am. I’m a white boy from New Jersey in the suburbs. I can live with that. I’m not conflicted about it.

Eddie [Huang], he’s someone who grew up in that generation. The kids at school would make fun of his lunches. That’s something I really respond to: Guys like Eddie who find themselves in this weird place where no one wanted their food when they were a kid and now everyone wants it, the cultural appropriation issue. Even when Eddie is wrong—his article on Marcus* was as wrong as it could be, but it was a valuable, painful—unfair, but valuable—discussion, he always knows how to put his thumb in the wound: What is cultural appropriation, what is authentic? That’s interesting to me. We've all been having sex with each other and mashing up cultures for centuries.

*In 2012, Huang blasted Marcus Samuelsson for appropriating African-American food culture at Red Rooster, his restaurant in Harlem, and for being patronizing about it in his memoir Yes, Chef.

Do you write as well as you’d like?

No. When I’m writing, most of the writers I love I will not read. I will keep away from fissionable material. So no. I wish I could write like Don DeLillo, Nabokov, Martin Amis—I mean, if I read those guys when I’m writing I will just crawl under the bed and curl into a fetal ball and be blocked for a month. So no. But on the other hand, I can live with that. Clint Eastwood said a man should be aware of his limitations, and I’m aware of my limitations. Once I tell people something, it’s not the content that's embarrassing to me. If I write bad sentences, that's embarrassing to me. Bad sentences are mortifying. And there are plenty of examples. But look, I talk about everything. My dick has been on TMZ, so what’s left?