Meeting Anthony Bourdain

It’s the sixth anniversary of Bourdain’s tragic death today. I hope I don’t seem crass sharing some memories of meeting him before he was famous.

Appropriately enough I was in the bar of a restaurant about to embark on a boozy lunch with an old friend when I heard about the death of Anthony Bourdain. I am slightly ashamed to admit that after I had got over my initial shock my first thought was whether I could get an article out of it as I’d met him a few times in the early 00s before he was famous. Writers, eh? I’m pleased that I didn’t. A few years later I was asked to write an article on chefs and suicide linked to the anniversary of Bourdain’s death but again I had no special insight to share. 

But I think Substack is a good place to write something a bit more whimsical about Bourdain. I’ll admit now, it was a hazy alcohol-soaked time, at least for me, so I may have got certain things in the wrong order. I met him through my friend Anna ‘Anya’ Rosenberg who was working on the publicity for Kitchen Confidential when it came out in 2000. We’d all just moved down to London from Leeds where we were at university and whereas most of us were still working out what we wanted to do with our lives, Anya has quickly established herself as someone to watch at Bloomsbury books in Soho Square.

Bourdain in 2001 outside Les Halles

She was a natural at her job. So good in fact, that when she wasn’t on the phone convincing cynical Fleet Street hacks to cover Kitchen Confidential, she was pressing copies into the hands of her friends and family. Publicity starts at home. She couldn’t stop talking about how brilliant this book was by a New York chef exposing what really goes on in the restaurant kitchen. With her boss, Katie Collins (now Bond), they organised a midnight launch for the book in Smithfields so that chefs could attend after their shifts. 

At the time Bourdain was the executive chef at a restaurant in Manhattan called Les Halles. Outside New York restaurant circles, he was almost completely unknown. He’d written a couple of crime novels, both of which had sunk without trace. Kitchen Confidential, which was based on an article ‘Don't Eat Before Reading This’ in The New Yorker, however, quickly became a sensation first over here and then back in America. Tony, as Anya called him, was suddenly hugely in demand and began to come to Britain for media appearances. 

I first met him in 2001 when he turned up to a party I was organising for Booker prize night. It was a tradition that publishers with authors on the shortlist organised parties in central London for their authors to go to whether they had won or not. That year Sceptre, the publisher I worked for, had two books on the shortlist Oxygen by Andrew Miller and Number9dream by David Mitchell. Neither won so the problem was trying to stop people leaving to go to the winner’s party, Peter Carey. 

Suddenly, just as the party felt like it was dying, Anya appeared flanked by Bourdain and Gordon Ramsay - both wearing dinner jackets, I’m not sure why. Two alpha males drunk on each other’s brilliance… and free champagne. I remember them both rampaging through Soho while people stood and pointed at Ramsay. Nobody knew who the other chap was.

That night we ended up at China White, a celeb hangout in Soho. Ramsay barged to the front of the queue with his entourage, the bouncers let him, Tony and all the beautiful publishing girls in and then pointed at me and said “should we let him in too?” ‘Yeah, why not?’ Ramsay replied.

He then marched me to the bar and asked me what I wanted to drink. I asked for a beer, and he said something like ‘you’re with me, Gordon Ramsay, you can have any drink you want” And I said “I’d had quite a lot of champagne I just fancy a beer.” He looked at me in disgust then went off to the VIP room to talk to supermodels. On second thoughts this is more of a Grodon Ramsay anecdote than a Bourdain one. 

After that night, I met Bourdain quite a few times later as he came over from the US for literary festivals etc. There were nights out in Edinburgh and Manchester. The British press loved him, he was exactly how people wanted a brash, uncompromising American to be. He’d say rude things about Jamie Oliver and everyone lapped it all up. Or most people did, there was one book reading at Foyles where Bourdain read a particularly sweary bit and some people walked out. Like Hendrix, a comparison I think he would like, he arrived in London acting like a fully formed star even though he was unknown in America. And then that fame reflected back when he returned home.

And yet there was a charm and gentleness about Bourdain. Anya told me: “despite all the swearing and bad boy vibes, he was the most polite person I have ever met - he always ran ahead to open a door for me - such old school politeness.” I was incredibly gauche and unformed and yet I remember him listening to me, asking questions, though heaven knows what we spoke about. 

The time I talked with him the most was at the launch for Nose to Tail Eating at St. John in Clerkenwell in 2004. He’d written the introduction to a new edition of Fergus Henderson’s book. He was holding court shucking oysters and complimented me on my shiny mohair suit, said it looked like something from Goodfellas. A proud moment. We got riotously drunk, so drunk that somehow I met someone, swapped phone numbers and agreed to go on a date, and had no memory of it until she called me the following day to ask where we were going. 

There was something endearingly goofy about Tony. His dress sense hadn’t changed since the early ‘80s.  He wore tight black jeans with clumsy blue suede trainers and lots of gel in his hair. In those early days, he had the air about him of someone who couldn’t quite believe what was happening to him. Suddenly in early middle age, he was being lionised by the whole London food scene. 

Anya told me a story about taking Tony to dinner at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea just after Kitchen Confidential came out. They had a lavish meal, then when they asked for the bill, Ramsay comped the meal and the whole staff Ramsay included brought out their books to be signed. This was for a journeyman chef who a few years back had been living on the breadline in New York; a former heroin addict, now feted by one of the most famous chefs in the world.

Bourdain’s rise to huge fame from that point seems inevitable but it didn’t feel like that at the time. The follow up to Kitchen Confidential, A Cook’s Tour still had Bourdain’s unique voice, what the New Yorker primly described as “his bawdy vernacular”, but there was a feeling at Bloomsbury that it wasn’t anywhere near as good as its predecessor. The accompanying TV series sounded rather schlocky and it wasn’t shown in Britain. He could have been a one hit wonder, doomed to play the old tunes to diminishing audiences around the world. But of course that didn't happen. The TV got better with series like No Reservations and Parts Unknown. 

For a while Anya and Tony were very close, in one of his books he describes her as “his British publicist, who I adore.” Once I was in New York with Anya and suggested going to Tony’s restaurant, Les Halles, but she didn’t seem keen. I gather that Bourdain wasn’t as easy to work with since his long marriage to Nancy Putkoski ended. In a long New Yorker profile, both Bourdain and Putkoski blame his burgeoning TV career for the split. He wanted fame, she wanted things to stay the same. 

By the mid 00s, publicity trips to London no longer included nights out with his publicist’s university friends. There was a Les Halles Cookbook (2006) and then the jaded Medium Raw (2010) billed as ‘A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook’ where he reflected a little regretfully on how fame had changed the world for him:

“And, well, for most of my life I’d been way too far up my own ass to be of any use to anyone—something that only got worse after Kitchen Confidential. I don’t know exactly when the possibility of that changing presented itself—but sometime, I guess, after having made every mistake, having already fucked up in every way a man can fuck up, having realized that I’d had enough cocaine, that no amount in the world was going to make me any happier. That a naked, oiled supermodel was not going to make everything better in my life—nor any sports car known to man.”

You sometimes get glimpses of that ennui in his TV work. There’s one episode of No Reservations where he was in Boston just drinking and eating lots of revolting looking fried food and he looks so sad. It must have been a terribly lonely life. But other programmes such as a moving return to Cambodia showed Bourdain at his best: curious, modest and with a nose for a good story as well as a tasty meal. He couldn’t be further away from the caricature of him as a sort of big white hunter that some journalists saw. 

Bourdain’s brilliance as a presenter was that he came across just as he did in real life and in print, sometimes brash and confrontational, at others thoughtful and introspective. Whenever he was on screen, you felt like he was talking to you directly, which is why he was so loved. I feel very lucky to have met him, shared drinks and got to know him a little before everyone wanted a piece of him and life stopped being one big adventure.