Anthony Bourdain: A Hero

Nick Digilio
1 day ago
8 min read

I love Anthony Bourdain. I should probably just say that right up front.

There are certain people you admire because they're talented, certain people whose work entertains you, and then occasionally there are people who genuinely change the way you look at the world. Anthony Bourdain was one of those people for me.

I thought he was funny, brilliant, profane, adventurous, incredibly well-read, brutally honest and completely original. He was a chef, an author, a traveler, a television host, a cultural commentator, a storyteller and, in a strange way, something of a philosopher.

He became this towering figure in the culinary world without ever really behaving like somebody who wanted to be a towering figure in the culinary world.

And with the release of the outstanding new film Tony, co-written and directed by Matt Johnson and starring Dominic Sessa as a young Anthony Bourdain, I've been thinking about him again, a lot. I think Tony is the best movie I've seen so far in 2026.

It takes liberties with the facts and isn't intended to be some completely literal biography, but it captures the spirit of Bourdain beautifully: the hunger, the anger, the humor, the recklessness, the curiosity, the punk-rock attitude and that overwhelming desire to experience everything.

Dominic Sessa is remarkable, and Antonio Banderas gives one of my favorite supporting performances of the year as a composite character representing some of the chefs and mentors who helped shape Bourdain. The movie reminded me all over again why this guy meant so much to me.

Anthony Michael Bourdain was born in Manhattan in 1956 and grew up mostly in New Jersey. His first real awakening to food happened during childhood trips to France. He wrote beautifully about tasting cold vichyssoise for the first time and, later, eating a raw oyster directly from the water. Those weren't just meals to him. They were discoveries.

Food suddenly became something larger, it became something tied to place, culture, danger, pleasure and memory. That idea would eventually become the foundation of practically everything he did.

He attended Vassar briefly, dropped out, worked in seafood restaurants in Provincetown and eventually graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978.

Then came years and years of restaurant kitchens. Not glamorous television kitchens. Real kitchens. Hot, crowded, filthy, exhausting, sometimes drug-fueled kitchens filled with cooks, dishwashers, addicts, lunatics, geniuses and people just desperately trying to survive another dinner service.

He worked his way through restaurants around New York before eventually becoming executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan. And all of that became material.

Before the television fame, before the travel, before CNN and Emmy Awards and sitting down with Barack Obama over beer and bun cha in Hanoi, Anthony Bourdain was a writer.

That's incredibly important. He wasn't a celebrity chef who eventually decided to publish a book. He was a real writer who happened to be a chef. He had published fiction before anybody knew who he was, including Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo, but everything changed when The New Yorker published his essay "Don't Eat Before Reading This" in 1999.

That became Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, and if you've never read that book, read it. I've read it three times. I absolutely love it. It is one of the funniest, dirtiest, most honest and revealing books ever written about the restaurant business.

Bourdain didn't romanticize professional kitchens. He wrote about the drugs, the egos, the bad behavior, the terrible working conditions, the insanity and the strange camaraderie that develops between people working brutal hours together. He made kitchen life sound dangerous, exhausting and unbelievably exciting.

And he wrote the way he talked. That voice was everything.

He could sound literary and poetic one second and like some guy sitting next to you at a bar telling a filthy story the next. He could reference Joseph Conrad, punk rock, French cuisine and some disgusting thing he ate beside a road somewhere without sounding like he was showing off. There was an authenticity to him that simply couldn't be manufactured.

I read A Cook's Tour. I loved The Nasty Bits. I loved Medium Raw. I read the essays, the stories, the travel writing. He wrote about food, but what he was really writing about was people. That became even clearer when television entered the picture.

A Cook's Tour on the Food Network was when I really became obsessed with Anthony Bourdain. I had read Kitchen Confidential and knew who he was, but suddenly I was watching this guy actually travel into the world he had been describing.

He wasn't standing behind some beautifully lit counter showing you how to prepare a chicken breast in twenty minutes. He was getting on airplanes, going into neighborhoods tourists normally ignored, drinking with strangers, eating things most Americans wouldn't go anywhere near and asking people about their lives.

That led to No Reservations, which I think is one of the greatest travel programs ever made.

Then came The Layover and eventually Parts Unknown on CNN, where the scope became even larger.

The food was still there, obviously, but increasingly the programs became about culture, politics, history, war, poverty, music and human beings trying to understand one another. He could travel to Vietnam, Libya, Tokyo, Beirut, Ethiopia, Jamaica or some tiny community most television viewers had never heard of and somehow make the place feel immediate and alive.

His 2006 trip to Beirut became something completely different when war suddenly broke out while he and his crew were filming No Reservations. They found themselves trapped there waiting to be evacuated, and the resulting episode became one of the clearest examples of what made his television different.

The travel show suddenly became journalism. The clever narration disappeared when it needed to disappear. The circumstances were allowed to speak for themselves. That's what Bourdain understood better than almost anyone who ever hosted a travel show: food is never just food.

A meal tells you about history. It tells you about religion, migration, poverty, class, politics and family. Sitting across a table from somebody and eating what they eat can tell you more about them than standing in front of a monument while somebody reads historical facts into a camera.

Bourdain believed that sharing food and sharing drinks with people was one of the most intimate and honest ways human beings could connect with one another.

Watching him made me want to travel in a way that almost nothing else ever has. I've watched countless travel shows. I've watched the Food Network forever. I love cooking and the culinary world. But nobody made me want to actually go somewhere the way Anthony Bourdain did.

I would watch an episode and suddenly think, I want to go there. I want to sit at that plastic table. I want to eat that thing. I want to drink with those people. I want to hear that story.

And he would eat anything. Blood sausage. Ant eggs. Raw seal eyeballs. Cobra. Fermented shark. Things that would cause most television hosts to immediately call their agent and renegotiate their contracts.

And yet one of the funniest things about Bourdain was that he could consume some impossibly challenging delicacy in a remote corner of the world and then turn around and confess his affection for something completely ordinary like Popeyes.

That's part of why people connected with him. He had opinions. Oh, did he have opinions.

Bourdain openly mocked celebrity chefs, commercialized food culture, culinary pretension and people he thought were full of crap. He famously took shots at Paula Deen, Guy Fieri, Sandra Lee, Rachael Ray and plenty of others.

Sometimes he later reconsidered those opinions. Sometimes he apologized. Sometimes he absolutely did not. But you never got the feeling that Anthony Bourdain was saying something because a publicist had handed him talking points.

He loved chefs too, and when he loved them he was incredibly generous. Eric Ripert became one of his closest friends and one of the people he admired most. He championed José Andrés, Thomas Keller, Fergus Henderson, Ferran Adrià, Marco Pierre White and so many others. He adored Julia Child. He respected cooks. Not celebrity. Not branding. Cooking.

He also loved music, particularly punk rock, and that sensibility ran through everything he did. The Ramones, Iggy Pop, the Dead Boys, the Voidoids, Queens of the Stone Age, those weren't decorative soundtrack choices. That music represented something he genuinely believed in: authenticity, danger, volume, imperfection and not asking permission.

And whenever Bourdain came to Chicago, I loved seeing where he went because he understood this city. He didn't just hit the obvious tourist stops and pretend he had discovered Chicago food.

He ate hot dogs. He had deep-dish pizza. He drank at the Old Town Ale House. He found the places where actual Chicagoans eat, drink, argue and hang out. Watching him walk into places I knew made those episodes even more special to me.

Bourdain also became a terrific television personality outside his own shows. His appearances on Top Chef were always highlights. Put him on a talk show and I watched it. Put him on somebody else's food program and I watched it.

He was quick, sarcastic, hilariously blunt and almost always more interesting than whoever was interviewing him. I used to record his appearances because I knew there would be something worth hearing.

But beneath all the swagger, tattoos, drinking, cigarettes and rock-star image was a remarkably sensitive guy.

That's one of the things that sometimes gets lost when people remember him simply as the culinary bad boy. His best work is incredibly compassionate. He cared deeply about people who were ignored, places that Americans misunderstood, immigrants, cooks, workers and cultures frequently reduced to stereotypes. He traveled partly because he wanted to know what was beyond the stereotype.

He was also painfully honest about his own failures. He wrote about addiction, heroin, cocaine, bad relationships, terrible decisions and periods of his life when things were very dark. He never turned his past into some inspirational Hallmark story where everything became perfect after he got famous. He understood that people remain complicated.

His death on June 8, 2018, while filming Parts Unknown in France, was devastating. He was 61 years old, and I still find it difficult to think about. It still hurts because Anthony Bourdain was somebody who seemed to represent curiosity about life itself.

This was a guy who constantly told us to go somewhere new, taste something unfamiliar, talk to somebody different, sit down at the table, order another plate, have another conversation.

And then he was suddenly gone.

I don't think his ending erases any of those lessons. If anything, it makes his work even more haunting and valuable. He left behind an enormous body of writing and television about curiosity, empathy, food, travel, friendship and the complicated business of being alive.

That's why Tony affected me so deeply. It doesn't try to explain Anthony Bourdain. I don't think anyone movie could. But it reminds us of the fire that was there and the weird, winding road that eventually took a struggling young cook and turned him into one of the most recognizable and influential cultural figures in the world.

So I've put together ten clips of Anthony Bourdain doing what Anthony Bourdain did better than anybody: traveling, eating, drinking, talking, listening and connecting with people.

There are hundreds of hours I could have chosen. These are simply ten favorites, presented in random order, including a couple from right here in Chicago. They're little snapshots of why Anthony Bourdain was so special and why, all these years later, I still miss him.

Watch the clips. Read Kitchen Confidential. Watch No Reservations and Parts Unknown. And definitely see Tony.

Then go someplace you've never been, eat something you've never tried, sit down with somebody you don't know and listen to what they have to say.

I think Anthony Bourdain would've liked that.