Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain was an American chef, author, and television host whose writing and programmes permanently changed how the public understood restaurant culture and world food.

Anthony Bourdain spent twenty-five years working in New York professional kitchens before writing Kitchen Confidential (2000), the memoir that made him famous. He had written an earlier novel and a magazine piece for The New Yorker about the realities of restaurant life — what happened behind kitchen doors, why you should avoid the fish on Mondays, the drug culture, the hierarchy, the camaraderie — but Kitchen Confidential was the book that captured a wide audience and launched a second career as the most recognisable food writer in America.

His television work — A Cook’s Tour, No Reservations, and finally Parts Unknown on CNN — extended his reach globally. Parts Unknown in particular was something unusual in food television: a programme genuinely curious about culture, politics, and people as much as cuisine, shot with the visual grammar of art cinema. It won multiple Emmy Awards.

Bourdain’s writing was characterised by honesty, generosity, technical precision, and a sardonic wit that never tipped into contempt. He was genuinely interested in food as a form of human connection — in what people eat and why, in what cooking says about identity and community — and that interest, across books and television, was his lasting contribution. He died in 2018.