The shock, surprise, and sorrow continue to flood across the internet today, June 8th, the day it was reported Anthony Bourdain was found dead of a suicide in France.
In the same week that designer Kate Spade died in the same way, it made Bourdain’s death just that more dreadful.
Much has been written today of Bourdain’s legacy as a writer, chef, alt-culture pioneer, and television explorer.
Much more will be written in the years to come. Much more. For many of us, he was the sometimes jaded but always genuine host who opened the wide world to us. Those of us who were happy to follow him from the Congo to Iceland to the South Pole did so from the relative comfort of the worn upholstery of our recliners – free from the weather, the noise, and the traffic that it took to get there.
Bourdain probed genocide in Armenia, toured post-Gaddafi Libya, sat in robot restaurants in Tokyo.
While food was the focus of his television series on the Travel Channel, and later on CNN, he was just as much, even more so, about the culture of a place, about the humanity of it.
We watched, we learned.
He wrote – memoirs in the best-selling Kitchen Confidential and in hard-boiled fiction like the rich food before him — in vivid, rushing bursts. His documentary voice-overs of his television shows No Reservations and Parts Unknown had the ring of a detective novel meeting beat poetry – a kind of Mickey Spillane meets Kerouac. And more.
Matt Schudel, today in the Washington Post, said “he was more of a Hunter S. Thompson of the food world.”
TV Worth Watching has been a long-time fan and much has been written here over the years about how Bourdain unlocked the meaning of a place, through its food and, most of all, its people.
He showed us in so many ways, in so many locations, that maybe politics make a country but it’s the people that make a place… and they regularly seemed to have more in common with us here in America rather than a difference.
Bourdain not only saw and reported the world, but for a decade or so of television shows, seemed to unite it.