Laurie Woolever and Joe Rogan revisit Anthony Bourdain’s legacy, from his early cookbook work in the 2000s—translating restaurant shorthand into home-friendly recipes—to his unscripted No Reservations charm and relentless jiu-jitsu discipline. Woolever highlights his cultural curiosity, like debating Icelandic shark meat or Vietnam’s lack of anti-American sentiment, and his rare ability to engage with opposing views without condescension. Bourdain’s shift from food-focused travel in Parts Unknown to deeper human stories left a void in cultural commentary, Woolever notes, while Rogan reflects on his tragic death as both a cautionary tale and romantic myth. Her upcoming books—Bourdain (Sept. 28) and World Travel—aim to preserve his voice, blending history, self-care insights, and irreverent travel wisdom. [Automatically generated summary]
I knew exactly where one of the places was, that it was the AI, but the vast majority of that film is Tony's actual voice, and I think that really got lost in the discussion around the film.
There was some stuff in the media with him and his girlfriend that was, you know, not great.
You know, he was very, very in love.
And I think there was some, I mean, I'm not saying anything that isn't public record.
And I'm always hesitant to talk too much about all of that.
But it's, you know, it's out there.
It was in the Italian press and maybe the French press that his girlfriend had been maybe or maybe not with another guy.
There were a lot of pictures that made it look not great.
And I think that was really hard for him.
And you'll see they talk about it.
It gets talked about in the film.
It gets talked about in my book.
You know, I think he was he was deeply in love.
And I think he was realizing that this relationship maybe wasn't what he thought it was or that it just I think he felt humiliated, honestly, you know.
And I mean, that's a hard that's a hard thing for a private person to metabolize.
And then, you know, your extremely public person who has been extremely public about this relationship, I think it was a lot for him to handle in that week.
I don't know that a normal reaction to romantic trouble is to take your own life.
Clearly, there are plenty of people who have trouble in their relationships who stay alive.
You know, he was a really complicated guy.
He was a really, I think as public as he was and as much as he shared about the way that his mind and his heart worked, I think there was a lot that he didn't share.
And I think he was more troubled and more lonely and sad than I think any of us knew at the time.
You know, in the intervening three years, I've learned a lot.
And I thought I knew him inside and out.
I was his assistant for 10 years.
You know, we wrote a book together.
I had done some traveling with him, not extensively, but I did a handful of trips over the years.
You know, we were in contact every day.
And, you know, when I started to talk to people after he died, there was just a lot, a lot more to him, a lot more to his story.
I've said a couple of real stupid things to him, too, and I'll just never forget.
We were standing in the telephone store trying to upgrade my phone, and I was kind of new to the job and nervous, and I was like, what are we going to talk about for 10 minutes?
So I just said, how do you decide who to respond to on Twitter?
And he just gave me this look like, you're the fucking stupidest person I've ever met in my life.
You know, and I know he respected me, and I know he liked me, but I was just like, oh, God.
But it's not like, it's very intimate, where someone is literally practicing killing you, and you're trying to resist that.
And so to watch him get really into it, and then to watch him watch his personality sort of like shift, Into that, there's sort of a jujitsu mindset that you get when you start doing it all the time.
You start training, you start building confidence, and you start getting really into it.
Like he was fucking into it.
I was demonstrating shit on him in the dirt.
Like, we were in the dirt, and I'm like, when you're in this position, and we're, like, going over stuff, like, on the ground.
Yeah, it was, I think, you know, Mo Fallon, I think, said this to you, and he said it in the film and in the book as well, but, you know, if you weren't, like, I was not into jiu-jitsu, It did not matter.
Like, Tony would just talk to you about it anyway.
You know, you just have to be like, uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
you know, like either feign interest or, you know, like feign an emergency and get out of there.
'Cause it's just, at a certain point, you know, then he's trying to get you recruiting everyone.
He was successful.
He got a lot of his crew into it.
He's like, do you think you would ever do it?
After he's telling me about, like, you know, your nose is basically in somebody's asshole and you've got, like, blood under your nails, you know, and it's disgusting.
And I'm like, "Hmm, sounds great.
I'm gonna stick to yoga and weight training." Thank you.
But I did make my kid do it.
And it was totally because of Tony.
I was like, well, I'm not going to do it, but I will get the eight-year-old involved.
I made him do it for like, I don't know, six months.
And then it was clear that like, I mean, he didn't hate it to the point where he was like crying, but like he did have a couple of like anxiety stomach aches in the car and I'm like, suck it up.
Yeah, I think it's very bad to force anything on kids.
I don't force anything on kids.
I try to make them finish what they start, just so that they have this thing, like, okay, I started this, I'm going to finish it, I committed to being at these practices, I'm going to show up, but then when it's over, it's over.
That's a good policy.
You just get a kid that's resentful, and then whatever this thing that you're trying to get them to do that might have some real benefit to them, they're never going to realize that benefit, or it's going to be harder for them to realize that benefit.
it's like it's hard for people to realize that other people appreciate them I think especially people that are genuinely humble He was a genuinely humble person.
He really didn't buy into his own bullshit at all.
So when you would talk to him about it, he was like, this could fucking end terribly at any moment.
Yeah, I remember being with him in the green room.
He did a book tour for the cookbook Appetites that we wrote together in 2016. And he did a series of lectures, basically like a one-hour stand-up routine in these theaters and then book signings.
So we were at the last one at BAM, Brooklyn, in the green room.
And he was just like, oh, God, I fucking hate this.
I feel like such a, what was the word he used?
Such a fraud.
And I was like, what are you talking about?
You just had like 13 sold-out shows.
The book is doing amazing.
Like, you're literally Tony Bourdain.
He was like, yeah, it's all bullshit.
I'm embarrassed that people have paid money to come and see me talk.
You know, it was really illustrative to me to hear him talk like that, you know, to realize like he doesn't he doesn't think he's as great as we know he is.
That's a common thing amongst, at least my people, amongst comedians.
It's in many successful people, it's called imposter syndrome.
And it exists because you have a certain sort of a set perception of who you were just going through life sort of anonymously and then it radically changes and it doesn't feel real.
And so to other people who've just discovered you, they love your show, they love your writing, they love your take on the world as you travel and eat everywhere.
You know, you think, like, I'm the same fucking idiot that I was, you know, he's probably thinking he's the same guy he was in 95, and now here all these people love him.
But that's also why he was so interesting, is because, like, the people that are, like, legitimately fool themselves and really think everything they're doing is great are gross.
And it's such the opposite of what anybody ever wants to hear, you know?
And maybe you could say it in jest and, you know, people think it's funny, but for the most part, the people that are really enamored with themselves and their work are just not nearly as interesting as the people that are tortured by it.
It's such a conundrum, right?
It's like a guy like Tony, who is such an interesting, fascinating person just to talk to, just to have a conversation with, because he had such a clear perspective on things, the way he looked at things.
He was very aesthetic.
He enjoyed a certain style of communication and of hanging out.
There was an art to just conversation with the guy.
So it makes sense that he hated himself.
In the most fucked up way possible, it makes sense.
I think, too, there was this disconnect between the guy that he was before he got famous and the guy after.
And I think he always thought about how the old guy probably would have made fun of the new guy.
Or he and all his buddies who were cooks stuck in the kitchen would sort of hate this guy with the expensive shoes and the nice apartment and flying first class.
You want to be punk rock and then all of a sudden you have a million dollars in the bank and you're like, hey.
I think I'm going to eat in a nice place tonight.
I think I want to buy a watch.
You really can feel like a fraud.
It's fascinating because so many people are really They're haunted in a lot of ways by the past.
And there's sort of like this rebellious, rigid attitude that you develop when you're struggling, when you're coming up.
You know it becomes like the structure of where your attitude comes from and then when that structure is sort of removed by success in Tony's case and then you're left with Okay, I'm not even like in his eyes He had done all these hours of being in the kitchen, the real work, those long days and long nights, and there was something noble about that.
And then, all of a sudden, he's just going to visit these guys, and he's not in the game anymore.
And, you know, he's going to visit these incredible cooks and seeing these amazing dishes and these insane restaurants.
And I think part of that he felt like a little bit of a fraud because of that.
He was always very careful to say, I was not a great chef.
You know, I think it's very, people kind of just, in the same way that people thought that, you know, the whole, with the AI thing, that it was all of the movie versus 45 seconds.
There's just a glossing over kind of sloppiness of recollection.
And so because he was a chef, everyone would say, oh, he was a great chef or a celebrity chef or a famous chef.
And he was always really careful to say, I wasn't.
I was good at leading a kitchen.
I was good at getting food out on time, but I was not in any way a world-famous creative chef.
I was a leader of men, you know, and there was, I think, a lot of insecurity, but just a recognition that he wasn't the kind of chef like Eric Repair, his good friend or any of these guys that he really admired, you know, and he wanted everyone to know that he knew that, too.
And it's just his take on all kinds of things, on music and culture, and it just made for, you know, if he maybe, I don't know how good of a chef he was, but man, he was a fucking amazing host of a television show.
I mean, that's really what broke him through out of the kitchen.
It was not his television presence, which was a little clunky at first.
You know, I mean, he didn't spring fully formed as the, you know, confident guy that we saw in later years.
If you go back and when you're ready to watch the film or you'll see in the book, too, you know, he was a little awkward and quite more than a little hesitant on television at first.
But what he always was was a fucking fantastic writer, you know, from very, very young age and worked really hard at that to develop that craft.
And that's – I mean that's what comes through on television too is all that voiceover.
He wrote that, you know, and the way that he could speak off the cuff like it was something that was written and edited and perfective.
Well, that clunkiness, to me, came off as authenticity.
That's the thing.
I don't like polished, like, top 40 DJ voices.
You know what I mean?
Like, hey, coming up next.
It's like, there's a way that a person can behave.
Whether they're the host of a show or a radio host, whatever the fuck they're doing, there's a way that we know what a professional sounds like.
This is Tom with the weather.
There's a way we know, and that way is boring.
Because you've heard it too many times and you know that's not really who that person is.
This is a really funny video, I don't know if you've ever seen it, but there's this black guy who's working for a television station.
And he's doing the news somewhere on location and a bug gets on him and he switches and goes full ghetto in the middle.
So he's in the middle of his talking like this, like this motherfucker and like this bug is on him and it's hilarious.
And I'm like, man, if someone could talk to that guy and say, man, we got to figure out a way to let you be who you really are because that was hilarious once the bug was on you.
But when the bug wasn't on you, then you're just like this normal, bullshit, cookie-cutter, programmed robot.
And, you know, the thing about No Reservations was it was who he actually was.
So if he was clunky or if, you know, or if he was fascinated by something, it came across as being genuine.
It was very obvious that he wrote everything, too.
It was very obvious that he wrote the monologues.
You're not going to get some TV hack to write that kind of shit, especially for the fucking Travel Channel.
I noticed, I watched the Montana episode of Parts Unknown that you guys were on together and there was that enthusiasm.
There's a scene where he goes down into the mines, copper mines, old copper mines, and they hook up all the wires and he gets to be the one to press the lever or whatever to make the shit explode.
And he's just got this...
He's like a 10-year-old boy.
He's so psyched and it's so genuine that he has had the most fun just like blowing shit up.
And that's like the best of Tony.
As many experiences around the world as he had and as smart as he was, he still loved the dumb shit.
It's hard to do and obviously himself there was a Because of the the drug abuse past the addiction past and then the the the what the end of his life the boozing in particular It's like there's obviously a lot going on there.
That wasn't that healthy and Yeah.
You know for whatever reason and whatever whatever it was a masking thing if it was a genetic addiction issue thing Yeah.
It's, you know, it's really hard to say, you know, and I always try to be very careful not to diagnose or to, you know, all we can do is speculate and think about what, you know, we knew when he was around.
I mean, he was very upfront about his heroin addiction and his, you know, heavy use of cocaine and crack later.
And then he kicked those things, you know.
But I think that As somebody who has been sober for a couple of years and has kind of myself dived into the whole exploration of the 12-step thing, I can see what it is to be an addict.
And I don't think it's talking out of turn to say that Tony was an addict.
He lived his life like an addict.
You know, whether it was drugs or drinking or smoking cigarettes or jujitsu or work or travel or, you know, romantic relationships.
I mean, he just, you know, just went after more and more and more stimulating experiences in a way that it didn't ever seem there was going to be enough of whatever it was to fill that that place, you know, that addicts are trying to fill.
Yeah, I think, you know, I mean, that kind of lifestyle, or the multiple lifestyles that he had, you know, working as a cook, doing a shitload of drugs, drinking, smoking, you know, a couple packs of cigarettes a day, all of that, you know, plus he was, there's some actually some funny stuff in the book about his addiction to tanning.
He was like, obsessed with tanning.
Not like going to a tan.
I don't know if he ever went to a tanning bed.
He probably did.
But he would get in these tanning competitions with his cooks in the 80s.
And he was really competitive about wanting to be the most tan.
And he was, you know, because he was super into his cardio, so he wasn't smoking.
There was a point where he was getting ready for a competition where he was like, you know, I'm sure you've done this too, right?
It's like no, like only basically like boiled chicken with no salt, you know, and maybe like some vegetable, but really just like the no salt boiled chicken.
You should have probably consulted with a nutritionist.
That's a terrible way to handle it.
You run into these guys at the gym, these sort of, like, bro scientists.
And some of them still have like 1990s knowledge where you're supposed to eat like just plain chicken with no skin and broccoli and they don't really do that anymore.
Like most people, even if they're trying to lose some weight, they eat a lot of healthy fat.
Like you have to have a certain amount of glucose.
It's like it's even in like there's certain hydration supplements that are electrolyte supplements and they have sugar in them because that's the best way your body absorbs all the different electrolytes.
I mean, there was definitely, in my job as his assistant, which I did for about 10 years, there was definitely a lot of, I got very familiar with all the doctors.
So there was, you know, there was the occasional draining or the chiropractor or the, you know, the skin doctor because there would be a weird staph infection from, you know, filthy mats or, you know, he really, yeah, he went really, really hard on the jujitsu.
But he was, you know, he was mentally, I mean, he was He was really happy.
You know, he was, I mean, he was, it was insufferable sometimes to listen to, like I said, but he was like, he had so much energy.
And he just was like, you know, the guys that would shoot on the show with him said it made such a difference.
If he would train in the morning, he would be Yeah.
And he really respected, I mean, anybody that had an expertise in anything, you know, he was really, like, just very teachable, very willing to listen.
You know, he was really always about, you know, the more I know, the more I realize I don't know.
He had a great respect for people that were really doing whatever the fuck it was that they were doing.
People that were really committed to anything.
Really passionate about it.
He wanted to talk to me and Joey Diaz.
We did a show in Vegas.
And he came to the show with his then wife at the time.
And then afterwards we were talking because he was doing these book shows.
And he was like, "How often do you turn over material?" "If I come to a town, when do you think I should, how long I should take?" And I was like, "We generally do it like this." And I was explaining, you don't want to come to a town with the same material that you were at six months ago.
You have to write new stuff.
Otherwise, don't come back.
Unless you have such an audience that more people are going to come to see you that haven't seen you before.
So we talked about the whole idea of stand-up, because he was kind of doing stand-up.
And I didn't go, I mean, he didn't tell anybody, you know, which is smart.
It sounds like he did okay.
I think he really enjoyed it, you know, but it's like he really respected the craft of comedy, you know, and he understood that it was something you had to work at and develop just as much as anything else.
That is a thing that happens with people that get really, really, really good at things.
There's a guy named BJ Penn, and he's one of the greatest UFC fighters of all time.
He won the Mundiales, which is the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Championships, three years into training, which is unheard of.
Nobody's ever done that before.
Not only to get a black belt in three years is crazy, but to win the Mundialis in three years is even crazier.
And he and I were talking about this on the phone, and he was saying that he met this guy, and this guy was getting really good at jiu-jitsu, and he's like, man, that's incredible, you know, you're training hard.
And the guy suddenly goes, man, he goes, I'm addicted, just like you!
He goes, and then I realized, yeah, fuck, that's what it is.
I'm addicted.
But it's just a good thing.
It's being addicted to something that's actually beneficial as opposed to heroin.
I mean, I will say that I found a lot of the way that he lived to be very romantic and very inspiring.
And, you know, I was kind of a mess.
And I thought, well, you know, this is Tony would approve.
Or, you know, I talked to him about whatever kind of messy shit was going on in my life.
And, you know, because I knew he would think it was funny or he could relate or, you know, I think.
So again, I don't want to blame him because it was on me, but for sure it was very much okay to be a little bit of a mess and to work for him.
As long as you got your shit done and you showed up on time and you were good at your job.
I don't think it was a problem.
I mean, certainly, you know, you saw there's a lot of drinking on those shoots.
Yeah.
So definitely, the way that he lived seemed very, very appealing to me.
Less so now, you know, obviously.
But yeah, I think it was hard for me as someone who identifies as an addict of a kind, it was hard for me to see him as an addict until I really sort of saw myself and what my own behaviors were.
Like, oh, that's why, you know, he did this or that or, you know.
Because he kind of goes into the depths of his addiction and the love he has for his family, and pulls him out of that, and how he got back on the horse and figured it out again, but his best stuff was when he was fucked up.
I mean, if he died at 50 and left behind all those great books that he wrote when he was fucked up, he would probably be even more romantic, unfortunately.
You can do some pretty amazing things in your body as you age in 2021. When you're writing these books, did you take notes while you were working with him?
Did you have to go back and re-envision these moments in your mind?
Well, so the biography, the full title is Bourdain the Definitive Oral Biography.
So what that means is that this is not the strict, the biography that, you know, where the writer interviews a bunch of people and then writes their own thing.
This is, I did about 100 interviews with people who knew Tony from all aspects of his life.
And by and large, I let them tell their own story.
So this narrative, it starts at the beginning of his life and goes all the way to the end.
So it's pieces of those interviews sort of stitched together in a narrative.
So it starts with his mom and his brother talking about early life.
And I've got his high school buddies.
So the research that I did was to, you know, figure out who the people were that were important in his life that I needed to speak to.
And then, you know, learn as much about them as I could before we talked and then talk to them.
And then, you know, figure out what was what's juicy, what's usable of those interviews and and then fit it into fit it into a narrative.
Tony told a lot of his story already in Kitchen Confidential.
You know, he started from early childhood memories to about age 40.
So a lot of that story is already out there, but it's, you know, Tony was a storyteller and he was not averse to kind of sanding down the edges of a story or embellishing something or, you know, as you do to make it like a really good story that you can tell and that has good beats and lands well.
So even the stuff that we know about from Kitchen Confidential, there's a lot more nuance there.
People that were there with him in the bad old days of the 80s in kitchens and in Provincetown as a teenager.
So all of that is in the book.
So it was it was about, you know, asking the right questions and listening to people, letting them really tell their stories and helping them to really remember as much as they could about him.
I started shortly after he died, as much as I could.
I mean, you know, the few months after he died were pretty rough.
There was not much getting done.
but at least to have the book started, to have something to work on was really valuable to me, just to kind of keep moving forward in life.
So this one took about two years, And then the one that came out in the spring called World Travel, I was working on it simultaneously, but a little quicker because it was due, the manuscript was due before the biography.
And World Travel is a book that we actually started working on together, Tony and I, before he died.
We didn't get too far into it, but we did start and it was intended to be co-authored with a living author.
And of course, that changed quite a bit after he died.
But I did want to Make something of it.
So it's a version of the book that we had intended to write together.
So world travel is basically an atlas of the world according to Tony Bourdain.
So it's not every place that he went in the world because there are just too many of them, but it was all the places that he truly loved that he wanted to recommend that you go to.
So it's a It's like a little travel guide, but it's got tons of his writing in it.
So I ended up taking a lot of stuff from his television voiceover or stuff that he had written in books or stuff that he had said in interviews and kind of wove it into this travel book format.
I mean, it's not like your typical voters or, you know, whatever the travel books Lonely Planet, but it has aspects of that.
It has a lot of practical information, but it has Tony, you know, talking about getting the shits in Brazil after eating the Dende oil or, you know, stuff that's very specific to him and his voice.
Well, you know, he was super interested in Graham Greene, The Quiet American, and Heart of Darkness, and Apocalypse Now.
I mean, Apocalypse Now was sort of a seminal film, you know?
And, you know, being of the age that he was, I mean, kind of growing up with the Vietnam War going on when he was in his adolescence, I think it made a big difference.
But yeah, then he got there and it was, you know, and it is an extraordinary place.
I mean, it really, I was lucky.
I went with him once to Hue, right in the center of the country.
And I got it.
I understood, you know, it's like, it's just so the pace of life is different.
The smells, all the scooters on the street.
I mean, it truly, you feel like you are.
I mean, there's a lot of places in the world you can go now and it's like, Am I in Austin?
Am I in Beijing?
Am I in, you know, wherever?
Like, it's all, everything looks somewhat similar.
Every place has got a, you know, au bon pan and a Starbucks, you know?
But Vietnam, by and large, has not succumbed to that level of kind of homogenization yet.
But, you know, in talking to him, one of the things that he was really interested in is just the authentic way people existed wherever you went.
They varied so much.
And to really understand people, to really get an appreciation of all the amazing things this world has to offer, you kind of have to go to all these different places.
To see.
And every time you go, it's like it removes a little layer of the onion.
You just get a little bit better understanding of what it means to be a human being on Earth.
And that there isn't just this one set sort of culture that we're so accustomed to, particularly in America, where we're kind of arrogant about our culture.
Like, this is the shit.
We're America.
Fuck you.
And, you know, then you go to other places and you go, oh, okay.
Why are they so happy in Thailand?
You know, like, like what's going on?
Like, why are they so, why are they celebrate so much in Brazil?
You know, as you do visit all these different places, I think he had this almost bottomless appetite for that sort of exposure to new cultures and meeting new people.
And was really good at listening and being able to hear and engage with an argument or a point of view that didn't match his, which I think, you know, I mean, there's a million reasons why I wish he were still here.
But that is one of the, you know, right at the top is this capacity that he had to have a conversation with people who disagreed with him, you know, without just trying to shut them down.
I mean, he had very strong opinions about things, but it didn't stop him from just communicating with people, which is, you know, it's not easy.
I'm sure you know this.
You know, people get real riled up and then don't even want to just have a discussion about whatever it is that's, you know, that they disagree about.
Yeah, it's a very valuable thing if you can do it, to be able to just talk to people, even if you disagree with them.
And it's really rewarding to have a conversation with someone where you completely disagree with them, but you're very friendly.
And at the end, you really enjoy that person's company and you actually like them.
There's quite a few people I have on this podcast where I agree with very little of what they have to say.
But I like to talk to them, especially if they're kind, if they're nice people.
And then we sort of have this interesting relationship over the years of these kind of conversations, where they know that I'm very different than them, and I see things different, but we're nice to each other, and so we can talk about stuff.
And so I can find out what it's like to be this person who thinks about things politically, socially, religiously, sexually.
They think so different than me.
It's real valuable.
But people are so dogmatic in their perspectives.
And they're defending their position like they're defending themselves.
These ideas are themselves.
It's not just an idea.
And it's very unfortunate that we, you know, there's nothing wrong with shutting down morons.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It's fun.
I love watching it on YouTube.
There's nothing wrong with arguing your position.
But there's also a great benefit in listening to how other people see things.
And he definitely was really good at that.
And not just really good at that.
There was a genuine enthusiasm about these kind of conversations with people.
I had gotten into hunting because I had come to this sort of ideological impasse in my life where I was like, okay, you claim to be a person who thinks things through and you care about life and the world around you, but yeah, you're eating fucking jack-in-the-box, right?
What's in there?
And I would watch too many of those goddamn PETA videos and I was like, okay.
I'm either going to do one of two things, I decided.
I'm either going to become a hunter or I'm going to become a vegetarian.
Those are my two options.
And I had done vegetarianism when I was competing.
Back in my martial arts competing days, because I was trying to make a weight class that I was too big for, and I'd starve myself, and I was really fucked up.
I did it the wrong way, clearly.
But then when I went back to eating meat, I felt so much better.
And then it was like the best of my competition years were all I ate so much meat.
And then I was like, you know, an older person trying to think about what my place in the world is, And seeing these videos, I'm sure they don't represent most farming, but it was enough to know that that was out there and that perhaps I had participated in that.
So I got into hunting.
And that's actually how I met Mo Fallon.
I met Mo because Steve Rinella was the star of the show Meat Eater, and Mo was the director of the show, and that's how we met.
When, you know, he and I had talked about hunting, like, he had done some hunting with, um, what's that gentleman's name in England?
I think a lot of people, that was his form of friendship with a lot of people, was we gotta have a reason to be working together so that we can have a reason to hang out.
I grew up in a, my dad's a big hunter, still is a big hunter, so I, I always knew my parents were going to like that episode and not complain about it.
It was always interesting to see him, Tony.
He was almost like travel host Ken in a way.
You put him in the hunting gear and he hunts and then you put him in some other thing.
He was so adaptable in that way.
For somebody who didn't handle a gun very much in his life, he did all right.
And when you're enthusiastic about stuff, you can figure it out.
You do it.
He had a lot of horsepower.
He knew how to dig into things.
It was a fun experience.
I'd never been pheasant hunting before, and it's a fun experience, too, because you're just kind of walking through these fields hoping these birds freak out and fly away.
I mean, he also could get by on very little sleep.
I mean, when he was writing Kitchen Confidential, he would talk about how he would work until 11, go out, drink until 1, go home and sleep for a few hours and get up and write.
And whether or not that was sort of a little bit of self-mythologizing, maybe he didn't do that every day, but he did it enough to very quickly write a best-selling book.
I always love how he gave so much credit to the cooks that were working underneath him, too.
And he was like, the backbone of this city is these immigrant cooks that come in, and some of them can barely even speak English, and they're the people that are serving people and making these amazing meals in these incredible restaurants.
Yeah, call them out by name and really acknowledge that they're incredibly skilled, incredibly hard workers, cheerfully sweating 12 hours a day making beef bourguignon and french fries.
But it's also, it's like, it's a profession that is celebrating this sort of extravagance of dining, right?
Of consumption.
You're consuming these incredible meals and you want to have great wine and a great whiskey and, you know, there's something to all that that it kind of fits in together.
Yeah, it's hedonism as a product and hedonism as a lifestyle, but, you know, also as a way to sort of dull the pain of, you know, your aching body and your tiny paycheck and your busted up relationships.
I mean, it is, you know, it's really Island of the Misfit Toys.
I mean, I don't think anybody should work for too little pay, right?
But the ones who do are really amazing.
It's like, why is that?
Why is it that these people that do struggle and do have all these obstacles and all these problems and yet keep showing up every day, they're so exceptional.
So many of those people that I meet are so interesting.
I mean, it's a certain, maybe it's another form of addiction, or it's just, I mean, yeah, all the cooks and chefs that I know, it's just, it is who they are fundamentally.
I mean, you could leave the business and go sell used cars or whatever, but fundamentally, you're always going to be a cook and a chef and have that thing.
When you get into that flow state and, I mean, at the highest level or even just a chef of a, you know, mid-level steakhouse, I mean, they're Taking the tickets.
They're firing the plates.
They're watching this guy, that guy.
They see the garbage needs to go out.
They've got a manager and a waiter on their shoulder.
It's air traffic control.
It's very undersung, I think, the level of skill and concentration that goes into it.
So of course you want to drink 1,800 beers at the end of the night.
As a young man, he worked in some big, very punishing kitchens.
And labor conditions, not great in those eras, in those cities.
But after that, it was really not much.
And then Tony kind of broke down the door.
I had just started working as a food writer a little bit on the side when Kitchen Confidential came out.
And everything was about, you know, just smooth luxury.
Everything you were writing about was golf courses and big steaks and, you know, beautiful wines and nothing ever about the real dirty business of what, you know, what actually goes on in restaurants.
So I think he pissed off and scared a lot of people with that book.
I think there's a lot of reasons to not want That kind of information out there.
And after Kitchen Confidential, I think there were any number of other people that tried to do it, but there's only one.
There's almost no point in trying to write a kitchen memoir.
And same with travel TV. I mean, you know, and again, I talk about it a little bit in the biography that a number of people said, you know, people who work in television, they get all these pitches like, this is going to be the next Bourdain or the Bourdain of this or the Bourdain of that.
And they're like, you know, fuck you.
It's done.
There is no Bourdain of, you know, you can have a travel show or whatever, but like, don't try and replicate that.
It was, you know, writing about maybe talking to a chef who has something interesting going on using a new or interesting ingredient or, you know, I did a lot of like very just basic kind of service stuff like this, you know, new restaurant opened up in this place and here's 25 words about what their menu is and what the dining room looks like.
I did a lot of recipe writing.
I went to Sri Lanka, actually with Tony.
I went to Sri Lanka and spent a lot of time on my own learning about Sri Lankan home cooking and got recipes from these different women who would teach me what they were doing and then wrote a feature about Sri Lanka.
Obviously, you know, they're very close geographically, but it's a lot punchier.
There's a lot of roasted whole spices.
Very little dairy is used.
I mean, of course, you know, Indian cuisine is a huge, you know, it's varied, you know, it's such a big place.
Sri Lankan tends to be a lot of coconut meat and coconut milk, super intense spices, a lot of warm spices, not a ton of meat, you know, a lot of seafood, because they're a little island nation.
So it's, you know, it's obviously related to Indian, but it's really its own thing, too.
Now, how complicated is it to recreate dishes like that?
If you're a person who goes to Sri Lanka and you sort of learn from someone who's cooking specific dishes over there and then you write down the ingredients, can you even get most of the ingredients in America?
And putting it together in the way they cook, how specific is their implementation?
I'd say now with the internet, there were very few ingredients that I couldn't get back in the States.
There were a few things that I picked up in Sri Lanka because I knew I wouldn't be able to get that specific spice blend or certain preserved fruits and stuff.
But for the most part, anything you want, you can get it now, as long as you're willing to pay sometimes exorbitant shipping.
And you just do your best.
I mean, I'm not going to cook something exactly the way that this auntie taught me to do it, but I took a lot of notes, I took a lot of pictures, I took video in some cases, voice recording, to try and get as close to it as possible.
I mean, sometimes if it's a straightforward stew or something, it's like, well, you just follow the steps.
And, you know, if you know what you're doing and you've taken careful notes, then you can get pretty close.
Maybe not.
It's not always going to be as good or as exactly right, but you can get pretty close.
There were some things, though, like there's a dish called hoppers, which is a fermented rice flour pancake.
And it was just, I mean, it was a disaster trying to recreate that, you know?
It's just, I just couldn't do it.
It was gross, you know?
And I just, at some point I just gave up and was like, that's not something that, you know, if I can't replicate it myself at home, I'm not going to write this recipe and tell somebody that's reading the magazine to try it, you know?
Now that you're done with these books, obviously your main focus will now be promoting them and getting them out there, but what do you do with your life now?
I mean, the last real job I had was working for Tony, and I just don't see myself working as an assistant for anybody else.
I had already kind of aged out of the assistant gig, but when Tony came along, I was like, well, obviously, yes, I'll work for you, but I don't want to be a glorified secretary.
I mean, some places, you know, he went to Lyon, France, and that was, like, all about the food, you know, because it's so intrinsic to the culture.
In other places, it was like, well, what's the, you know, what's the specialty?
All right, we're going to shoot that, and then we're going to talk to, you know, this guy that was a political prisoner for 10 years, or, you know, something that, there were plenty of scenes toward the end that had nothing to do with food.
I think they were all sitting around eating a camel because I remember you had to eat it with your hands and there was very specific rules to where they did it.
I forget where he did it.
There's parts of the world where you wash your ass with your left hand and you eat your food with your right hand.
Is it when you're looking back on this time that you shared with him and then you put all this down in these books, do you feel like you've in some way closed the chapter?
I mean, I think there will be a time when both of these books, this one will be out in the world, the biography, the travel book is already out and the promotional period will end and that will be it.
And I think it will be a very sad time for me because I think I have kept some sense of Tony's memory alive by working on these books.
I don't know.
I feel like the more time that goes by, the less closure I have in some ways.
This morning watching the Montana episode, it was like just every time I see something that I haven't seen from him in a while, it kind of breaks my heart open again and just makes me realize how fucking incredible he was.
I think working for him, you kind of lose perspective when you're talking to somebody every day and you're working with them and you sort of forget that they're How great they are until they're gone.
So, yeah, you know, I mean, I think very early on after Tony died, I had to, and a lot of us that were close with him had to sort of tell ourselves right out of the gate, this is not our fault.
You know, this is not something that we could have prevented.
As much as I still to this day think about, like we said at the top of this conversation, what if I had said this or that?
What if I had, you know, alerted somebody?
What if, you know, all the what ifs.
And you have to believe that this is a decision that he made that didn't involve anyone else.
playing out the million scenarios that, you know, had things gone differently.
You know, I think about, God, if he were around right now, what he would, you know, A, he would be so, I would have this fantasy that he comes back and I'm like, dude, there's a pandemic, you know, and just how like, you know, like he would be in his sort of like nerdy enthusiast way he would be like, that's crazy.
You know, he would, I mean, as horrible as a pandemic is, he would be really excited.
He He would be really engaged with it.
He would have so much to say.
Who knows?
That's sort of like the daily heartbreak, is like all of these things that are happening, that the world has gone on, and he stopped in June of 2018, and he's not getting to see the way that the people that he lifted up are continuing to grow professionally, to see his daughter, all of these things.
I don't think there's ever any closure to that.
There's just peace, trying to make peace with it personally and somehow try to understand it.
And unfortunately, and I say this with all hesitation because I know it's a fucked up thing to say, there's a certain romantic aspect to even the way he died.
One day when people review the life of Anthony Bourdain, that will be a part of the legend.
Be a part of the chaos of who he was and the pain and suffering and then ultimately what he felt like was betrayal and humiliation and he takes his own life and he's missed so dearly by everyone.
It's just it's part of the romantic legend that is that person and this wild Unforeseen ride from writing that one book to becoming this person that affected so many people that became in a lot of ways a cultural icon for travel and for the exploration of different regions of the world and different people and different cultures.
You know, and he, I mean, you know, there's, it's not a surprise to say that, you know, he had, he made a million throwaway suicide references as a joke, you know, always all, there's a million of them, you know, in the TV show, in, in conversation.
I mean, this was just like breathing for him, you know.
But I don't know.
I just have to think that it was a spontaneous, shitty decision.
I've talked to people who are, air quotes, suicide experts.
And that's one of the things I say is that you'd be surprised at how many people commit suicide with literally an off-the-cuff, random thought, and they just fall through with it.
But, you know, I wish that he had made a different decision.
I hope that, you know, people who think that it's a romantic way to go out will listen to the voices of the people that he left behind and see that, you know, the tremendous amount of pain that that caused.
I don't mean to laugh.
It is what it is.
That it's...
I mean, he tapped out.
He's good.
But the rest of us are here kind of picking up the pieces.
We're left wondering what his take on the world at large today.
I mean, in so many ways, a lot of the facade of what we imagined was a rigid structure of government and And society has eroded so rapidly before our eyes over the last year and a half plus that it would have been fascinating to see his take on that because it really has revealed the true character of all these human beings grasping at straws,
trying to find relevance and it's weird weird time that we find ourselves in because it's it is unprecedented so for a voice like his which had been so sorely needed and in a time like now to not have him around so for every fucking shame for every reason but that's just another one mm-hmm mm-hmm he he would I Who's to say?
It didn't really matter what his actual formal education was.
He was interested in things and the pursuit of those things and trying to understand stuff, which also contributed greatly to his enthusiasm as a traveler.