Missing Anthony Bourdain

I miss Anthony Bourdain. I miss him a lot. I know I’m just one of his legion—probably millions—of fans. But I need him. I need him here and now.

He told the truth. He told the truth uncompromisingly. And he told it with brio, guts and passion. With humor, that’s for sure. With wry gusto. And with doubt, anger, regret and yearning.

All his shows, in all their forms and configurations, had, at their core, a quest. It wasn’t simply a quest for good food. In fact, no show of his was ever just about food. It was a quest for understanding and for connecting—especially connecting—laced with a sense of adventure.

He was casual and companionable. He was opinionated and curious and, ultimately, the best guy to sit next to at a bar, have a beer with and talk about life, love and good food. His shows are incredibly fun to watch. And who doesn’t love good food? If you don’t, you are suspect to me.

His talking was profane, exhilarating and singular. It was a baritone as recognizable as Pavarotti’s voice. His vocabulary, his choice of words, was arresting and exact. The English language was his ally. He treated it well. He spoke with care. He used words judiciously and sharply, like cutting with a honed kitchen knife.

He spoke, during a visit with the poet and writer Jim Harrison, about the country where Harrison lived, “It is a place where some must follow the heart’s affection, as to do otherwise would be unthinkable. Where others can pursue with uncommon vigor the truth of the imagination. Where people can hear their own inner voices with great clearness and live by what they hear.” How can you write better than that? What food writer but Bourdain writes about those matters so stirringly?

What did he stand for? Despite his pirate background, his druggy days—the hard stuff, too, heroin—his down-and-out past—which he often went into unabashedly—his at times rebellious, fuck-you attitude, he stood for some pretty traditional values.

He was for decency, for example. The worst thing you could do, in his mind, was to stiff a server, to mistreat the wait staff. “Because there is really no lower person in the world than someone who ends up stiffing waiters,” he said during a late night romp around Manhattan with his crew. “There is a 10th circle of hell for them.” He meant it.

“It’s a very weird place,” he said during an interview, “where I get paid to be myself.” That was part of his appeal. He was absolutely himself. What we all long to be. Genuinely ourselves. But that requires ignoring fear. And we often give in to fear and compromise—at least I do. We often conceal ourselves. Not Bourdain.

He was, despite his bravado, humble when he encountered a foreign place and a new culture. He was a guest. We took those rides with him to Vietnam—his favorite country and that he returned to many times—to Lebanon, to Argentina, to Haiti, to India, to the Congo, to, well, everywhere. He looked at his shows as stories.

“I detest competent, workmanlike storytelling,” he said. “I’d rather fail.” (Listen to the whole Bourdain philosophy here in an interview. Listen to his speech, to his choice of words.) And on occasion, by his own account, he did fail. You could see when he spoke about that, it bothered him greatly.

He did several shows about southern Louisiana, where we live, Cajun country. He liked being here and loved the cooking, especially a crawfish bisque he ate one evening. In fact, one of the cooks he spoke with during that visit we will see this weekend when we go to a local boucherie.

I can’t talk about Anthony Bourdain without giving you a link to one of his episodes about Vietnam, a country he had deep affection for and felt uncommonly close to. In this episode, he laments the loss of a woman who owned a restaurant he loved and who, in Bourdain’s words, was like a mother to him and to his crew. Bourdain’s encounters stayed with him, gave him solace and joy and sometimes haunted him. He was, you could see, a man of deep feeling.

There are some others who have tried to fill his place, but the shows I’ve seen are drab, spiritless. The hosts go to the foreign places, and the shows are competent, workmanlike. And bloodless. Manufactured enthusiasm without risk and without giving of themselves, without leaving something of themselves, as Bourdain always did. One host always sounds to me like he’s giving elocution lessons while he’s instructing you how to cook.

I can’t begin to properly cite even one-tenth of those television episodes Anthony Bourdain made. (Or his various obsessions outside of food.) Which is a good thing, because we have them to watch again and again, a huge store of brilliance and learning and pure pleasure. After you spend an hour with Anthony Bourdain traipsing in a country you’d never visit yourself or that you wouldn’t see as he did, you feel, well, happy. He has a good time, and you do, too. You’ve had the most appealing enlightenment.

I need his fearless honesty, his down-to-earthness, his humanity, his joie de vivre, his thirst for knowledge and connection, the singularity of his personality. His truth. I need it now.