Behind every bite of Moroccan sheep testicle or sip of high-octane Georgian chacha that Anthony Bourdain took on-screen was a fixer like Zentoh. Before the start of any shoot, from Reykjavík to Congo, the chef turned television star’s production company, Zero Point Zero, hired a local—usually a freelance journalist, or producer—to suggest segment ideas, set up shoots, get permissions, act as Bourdain’s interpreter, and occasionally appear on camera. These fixers may not have written the scripts or edited the footage, but they ultimately played a significant role in what viewers saw on-screen. And because, for the few days or weeks that a shoot lasted, most were also thrust into this suddenly intimate relationship with someone they knew only from TV, they possess a view onto the man that few share.

When news spread in early June that Bourdain had committed suicide at age 61, the shock, rippling across social media, felt seismic. It wasn’t just that he was so influential a figure, though countless viewers learned to eat—lustfully and catholically—from him, and there are legions of chefs today who were drawn to the profession, for better and for worse, by the pirate-ship approach to the kitchen he so vividly described. Nor was it simply the fact of his celebrity, though after nearly two decades spent crisscrossing the globe for his television series, he was recognized on the street everywhere from Beijing to Buenos Aires. It wasn’t even the confounding tragedy of his suicide, that he might choose to end a life so seemingly enviable. Rather, the thing that made his death so terribly traumatic to so many was the loss of connection. It was the loss of a real, if fleeting, sense that Bourdain somehow found time and space for an actual human moment with every person who ever cooked him a meal or even interrupted one to ask for a selfie.

For those who fixed for him, it was so often more than just a moment. Fixing is among the lowest jobs on the production hierarchy, and yet Bourdain not only treated his fixers well, but engaged with them, soliciting their insight into whatever place and people he had landed among that week and gradually coming to call several of them friends. Though most of them never met one another, they formed a sort of unspoken international network, these people who helped Bourdain know the world more deeply and who, in turn, were shaped by his way of experiencing it.

When Matt Walsh began working for No Reservations in 2005, Bourdain’s enthusiasm and curiosity were the first qualities the fixer noticed. An American journalist living in Hong Kong, Walsh had seen A Cook’s Tour, recognized the similarities between the emerging star’s New Jersey heritage and his Long Island own, and decided he wanted to have the kind of fun Bourdain seemed to be having. He pitched himself to No Reservations’ producers and was soon leading Bourdain to a roast-duck restaurant in Beijing and a family meal in Chengdu. “It was all new to him, and he was really hungry,” says Walsh. “He wanted to see it all, do it all, taste it all.”

And imbibe it all. Bourdain made no secret of his predilections. “The Tony we used to work with back then was always laughing and drinking. We got loaded all the time,” says Walsh. “By the end of some nights we were all a little slurry.”

His fixers from those early years recall Bourdain as especially happy when he was having the kind of experience that allowed him to connect with a place and its people. After the Khmer Rouge largely destroyed Cambodia’s train system, locals used what they called lorries or norries—basically a platform on wheels, outfitted with a rudimentary engine and a hand brake—to travel the rails in areas where there were no roads. On a shoot there in 2010, the crew took one out for a meal with a family in the rice fields. “It was pouring rain, but it didn’t matter,” Walsh recalls. After “riding back through those electric-green rice paddies, having smoked a lot of weed, with the wind [from] going 30 kilometers an hour—the sensation of all that. I looked at Tony and the expression on his face was exactly what I was feeling: it doesn’t get better than this.”