MANY people thought Anthony Bourdain had the most enviable career in existence. He didn’t deny it.
“I have the best job in the world,” the globe-trotting food-taster and culinary storyteller once told the New Yorker magazine, stating the rather obvious. “If I’m unhappy, it’s a failure of imagination.”
Bourdain’s stunned fans were mourning the loss of that singular imagination on Friday following his death from an apparent suicide, recalling everything from his fearless consumption of a beating cobra’s heart or a sheep testicle—“like any other testicle,” he remarked—to his outspoken support of the #MeToo movement, to his blissful paean to syrup-soaked pecan waffles at Waffle House.
“I want it all,” he wrote in his breakthrough 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential.” ″I want to try everything once.” And it seemed that he pretty much accomplished that, traveling the globe some 200 days a year for his TV shows, reveling not in fancy tasting menus—which he scorned—but in simple pleasures like a cold beer and spicy noodles in Hanoi, which he once shared with former President Barack Obama. For him, food, though a huge pleasure, was more importantly a storytelling tool, and a passport to the world at large.
It was a lifestyle that, while undeniably glamorous, took a toll, he suggested in a 2017 New Yorker profile. “I change location every two weeks,” he said. “I’m not going to remember your birthday. I’m not going to be there for the important moments in your life.”
Not surprisingly, it was on the road, in eastern France, that Bourdain, 61, was found unresponsive Friday morning by good friend and chef Eric Ripert. He’d been working on an episode for the 12th season of his CNN show, “Parts Unknown.”
A prosecutor said he had apparently killed himself in a luxury hotel in the ancient village of Kaysersberg. He left behind an 11-year-old daughter, Ariane, from his second marriage. In a 2008 interview with The Associated Press, Bourdain had said his daughter’s birth had changed his outlook on life: “I feel obliged to at least do the best I can and not do anything really stupidly self-destructive if I can avoid it.”
At the time of his death, his girlfriend was Asia Argento, the Italian actress who has accused Harvey Weinstein of rape. In an essay written after fellow chef Mario Batali was accused of sexual assault, Bourdain wrote that “one must pick a side ...I stand unhesitatingly and unwaveringly with the women.”
Argento wrote on Twitter Friday that Bourdain “was my love, my rock, my protector.”
Bourdain’s own mother, Gladys Bourdain, a longtime editor at The New York Times, said she had no indication that her son might have been thinking of suicide.
“He is absolutely the last person in the world I would have ever dreamed would do something like this,” she told the Times. “He had everything. Success beyond his wildest dreams. Money beyond his wildest dreams.”
When he wasn’t traveling, Bourdain lived in New York. (AP)