The world of food and writing about food was upended on an ordinary Monday in 1999, when The New Yorker published a 2,600-word essay titled “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” by a then little-known New York chef, Anthony Bourdain.
Bourdain took readers through the swinging doors of the professional kitchen, explaining why Tuesday was a better night to order fish than Monday, confessing that diners who ordered meat well done might find chefs reserving their least desirable cuts for them, and lambasting brunch enthusiasts and vegetarians, vegans especially.
The essay caused a sensation. Beyond the restaurant secrets was a world most diners rarely saw: the people who cooked their food, the hierarchies they worked within, and the exhaustion, dysfunction and camaraderie of professional kitchens. It also offered readers their first glimpse of Bourdain’s wit, candour and self-deprecation, and the persona that would eventually make him the world’s most famous “bad boy” chef.
Bourdain expanded this world a year later in Kitchen Confidential, moving from his first encounters with food in France and renegade chef days in Provincetown to the gruelling rhythms of New York restaurant kitchens.
What followed was a remarkable expansion of Bourdain’s canvas. Over two decades of television, he went from writing about professional kitchens as an insider to travelling through places where he was very much an outsider. Food remained his way in, but increasingly became a means to talk about class, migration, politics, religion, war and place.
Tony, a biopic based on his Provincetown years, releases on Friday, August 21. The film, starring Dominic Sessa in the titular role alongside Antonio Banderas, is a fictionalised retelling of a relatively brief period in a much larger life. Its release, 26 years after Kitchen Confidential, raises a larger question: how did Bourdain change not just the way food and travel were talked about, but what a chef could credibly talk about at all?
Why did Kitchen Confidential stand out?
Anthony Bourdain in his New York apartment in 1997. (Jack Manning/The New York Times)
Bourdain had long wanted to be a writer, and had already published two novels. But it was Karen Rinaldi, his first publisher and editor at Bloomsbury, who recognised the possibility of Bourdain writing about a world he knew firsthand. She recalled reading his evocative emails from Tokyo, where he was helping to open a restaurant, and thinking that he should be writing nonfiction.
“It wasn’t any particularity so much as my desire as an editor to find great writers with day jobs or other expertise,” Rinaldi told The Indian Express. “I longed to find talented writers who were also experts in another world; someone who could open the door to that world for readers, not as a reporter or researcher or novelist but from firsthand expert experience.”
Bourdain’s authority in Kitchen Confidential came from more than two decades spent in professional kitchens. In “A Day in the Life”, he takes readers through a day at Les Halles, from deliveries and prep to the controlled frenzy of dinner service, all while drawing attention to the Ecuadorian, Mexican, Dominican and Salvadoran cooks who kept these kitchens running. Many had started as dishwashers and worked their way up. For Bourdain, a cook who showed up every day and could be relied upon was often worth more than one with greater culinary flair.
Today, a peek inside a professional kitchen is hardly revelatory. YouTube channels such as Eater and Bon Appétit routinely take viewers through restaurant kitchens, sometimes over an entire day’s service. In 2000, however, the world behind the swinging doors remained largely out of sight.
Even Rinaldi could not anticipate what followed. “Whenever a book lands with such success and influence, it’s always a sweet surprise,” she told The Indian Express. Bourdain arrived as chefs were becoming increasingly visible outside their kitchens, but his profane, tattooed persona and candour about drugs and dysfunction helped cement a particular archetype: the swaggering “bad boy” chef, an image he would later become uneasy with.
For Rinaldi, Kitchen Confidential hit a rare publishing sweet spot: “the right book, by the right author, published at the right moment.”
What happened when Bourdain left the kitchen?
Television was almost an accident. After the success of Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain pitched a second nonfiction book that would send him around the world in search of food. When filmmakers approached him about making a television show, he suggested they come along. The resulting A Cook’s Tour premiered on the Food Network in 2002.
It would be the first of Bourdain’s three major travel shows: A Cook’s Tour ran on Food Network from 2002 to 2003, followed by No Reservations on Travel Channel from 2005 to 2012, and Parts Unknown on CNN from 2013 to 2018.
It also took Bourdain out of the world where he was the expert. In Kitchen Confidential, he could tell readers how a restaurant kitchen worked because he had spent much of his adult life in one. On the road, he entered worlds that belonged to other people.
Bourdain did not invent the travelling celebrity chef, and his programmes retained many of the conventions of travel television. These could be sweeping in their descriptions of places and cultures, revel in spectacle and exoticism, and frequently translate what he encountered for a presumed Western viewer. Yet even in No Reservations, Bourdain’s curiosity often extended well beyond what was on his plate: who cooked the food, who could afford it, who ate it, and what those answers revealed about the place he was visiting.
In an episode of No Reservations filmed in Egypt, for instance, a breakfast of ful, a fava-bean staple, quickly becomes a discussion of rising global food prices. A visit to Cairo’s spice market brings in a professor of food and culture to trace the spice trade through European exploration and colonial expansion.
Bourdain’s curiosity also extended to his own prejudices. Having notoriously mocked vegetarians in Kitchen Confidential, he found himself repeatedly impressed by vegetarian food while travelling through Punjab for Parts Unknown. At a roadside dhaba, he conceded that if this was what vegetarianism meant, he would be “at least half as much less of a dick about the subject”.
At the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the food itself quickly receded from view. The extraordinary logistics of a langar feeding thousands each day opened into conversations about seva, Sikhism and Punjab’s history. Bourdain supplied context, but increasingly relied on the people he met to explain the places through which he was travelling.
By Parts Unknown, Bourdain and his collaborators had become more comfortable letting him recede from the story. In a 2017 visit to Oman, a journey into the desert is carried as much by images of the landscape and the people living and cooking there as by Bourdain’s narration. His questions are simple and probing. Can one cross the desert alone? What does it take to survive here? He sets up the story, then frequently lets his hosts tell it.
For all his willingness to listen, Bourdain did not entirely escape the baggage of Western travel television. In a study of Parts Unknown’s Africa episodes, scholars Téwodros Workneh and H Leslie Steeves credit his reliance on local voices, historical context and awareness of his own outsider status, but also find moments where the show slips into familiar tropes about Africa and a colonial gaze.
What Bourdain left behind was a template that proved remarkably easy to imitate: travel somewhere, eat with people, ask questions, tell a larger story about the place. Reproducing what made his version work was harder. Rinaldi believes that may also explain why Bourdain proved so difficult to imitate. “You can’t emulate a singular voice,” she said.
Tony, starring Dominic Sessa as Anthony Bourdain is a fictionalised retelling of a relatively brief period in a much larger life. (NYT File, A24) 
Anthony Bourdain in his New York apartment in 1997. (Jack Manning/The New York Times)
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