To honor Anthony Bourdain, go to Houston's Chinatown

The beef noodle soup at Golden Dumpling House, $5.50 The beef noodle soup at Golden Dumpling House, $5.50 Photo: Wei-Huan Chen | Houston Chronicle Photo: Wei-Huan Chen | Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close To honor Anthony Bourdain, go to Houston's Chinatown 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

The best meal you can have in Houston is a bowl of noodles in Chinatown. It costs $5.50. Cash only. For obvious reasons, the beef noodle soup, or “niu rou mian,” is not the main attraction at Golden Dumpling House (9896 Bellaire Blvd). But apply a generous dollop of chili pepper sauce on the dish, grab a spoon and chopsticks, and start slurping away to realize quickly why every Taiwanese kid like me thinks of beef noodle soup the same way American kids think of mac and cheese. It’s so good you’ll forget the word mayonnaise.

Anthony Bourdain — who prodded at the myopic Eurocentrism of American restaurant culture as a chef, writer and TV personality, challenging the nation to expand its definition of delicious — would have loved the homemade quality of the niu rou mian at Golden Dumping House, maybe even complained that the meal didn’t also include octopus, chicken feet or beef tongue. He died today at 61, just two years after he helped put Houston’s world-class ethnic food scene on the map with a Houston episode of “Parts Unknown.”

In 1999, he stunned the restaurant world with one of the most eye-opening and provocative accounts of the food business, published in the New Yorker. The piece begins with this sentence: “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay.” Who knew it was even possible to write about food like that?

That literary punkiness, mixed in with a bone-deep love of global food, informed the ensuing two decades of stardom. He wasn’t just a rebel. He was a relentless inamorato of an entire genre of cuisine that most Americans consider too exotic for their taste. From my perspective as a Taiwanese-American immigrant, who grew up eating cold jellyfish, stir-fried chicken gizzard, pork blood soup and Century eggs, Bourdain was an ambassador. Here was a white American showing other white Americans that what we eat, our versions of mac and cheese, was not that weird.

READ MORE: Anthony Bourdain's history with Houston

To honor Bourdain’s life, go to Chinatown this weekend. Choose gua bao and Chinese broccoli slathered in oyster sauce. Walk around H-Mart (9896 Bellaire Blvd.) and buy a couple of snacks or fruits you’ve never seen before. For dessert, get some mango shaved ice at Nu Cafe (9889 Bellaire Blvd #112a).

I am appalled to this day whenever I meet longtime Houstonians who rarely go to Chinatown. Perhaps this is because many of Bourdain’s counterparts, such as Andrew Zimmern, hosted shows that implied adventure was synonymous with a far-flung dive into the jungle, that enjoying non-Western food was akin to Simba from “The Lion King” sucking grubs from a log.

Bourdain’s recent “Parts Unknown” episode showed us the opposite. This loud-mouthed New Yorker challenged Houstonians to be better Houstonians. He brought the cliché “the world is at our doorstep” out of high-minded abstraction and into practice, on a widely-viewed television program. He showed us and the rest of the world that, in Houston, adventure had always been just a 15-minute drive away.