This past Friday, August 7, marked the release of Tony, Matthew Johnson’s sketch of a young Anthony Bourdain (played with an appealing mix of wide-eyed naiveté and utter insouciance by Dominic Sessa) as he cut his teeth at a ramshackle restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the 1970s. That period in his life, which Bourdain described in his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, is briefly referenced in this 2016 profile of the chef, writer, publisher, and television personality by Oliver Strand for Vogue. If Bourdain, at the height of his powers, was accused by peers of being a bit tribal, a bit too cool and exclusive, Strand argues, it was because his initiation into the food business was by a hard-living gang of “pirates” who finally made him feel like he’d found his place in the world.
The news peg for Stone’s story was the development of Bourdain Market, envisioned as a global food hall at New York City’s Pier 57, on West 15th Street. Though the project fell apart even before Bourdain’s death by suicide in 2018, its concept would form the basis for Urban Hawker, a haven for Singaporean street food on West 50th Street that shuttered only last month.
“Man of the World,” by Oliver Strand, was originally published in the November 2016 issues of Vogue.
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Anthony Bourdain is already sitting in a corner booth when I walk into Sakagura, a Japanese bar in the basement of an office building in midtown Manhattan. Bourdain, I will come to learn, turns early arrivals into a competitive sport—no matter how well you plan, he will be there before you. This might seem like compulsively considerate behavior from a notorious hard-liver like Bourdain, a man whose public personality is tied up with late-night benders, foulmouthed frankness, and consuming such a staggering variety of food that he’s something like the Library of Congress of eating. If anybody is allowed to show up late for a night of sake and sashimi, it’s Bourdain.
Instead he’s pathologically prompt, which makes more sense when you pull back and take a wider view. Anthony Bourdain, the former head chef of Les Halles, a French steak house in New York that was well liked if not particularly influential, didn’t become Anthony Bourdain—the man who has been played by Bradley Cooper on television, the tastemaker whose name is set to be on a $60 million market hall on a pier in New York City, the CNN personality so broadly respected that President Obama will sit down with him in a fluorescent-lit noodle joint in Hanoi—on one-liners and being able to hold his liquor. Bourdain is indefatigable, and his unlikely rise to the top can be explained, in part, by his ability to marshal the energy and concentration needed to stick to an impossibly busy schedule filled with call times and production meetings and long-haul flights across the date line, and still look fresh when the cameras are rolling.
But being one of the hardest-working eaters in show business will get you only so far. What sets Bourdain apart is his honesty. When he finds something he loves, he smiles the toothy grin of an eleven-year-old boy. And when he comes across something he thinks is phony, he destroys his target with a few well-chosen words. “Agree with him or not, everyone knows his opinions come from a real place,” says the director Adam McKay, who gave Bourdain a cameo explaining collateralized debt obligations in his 2015 film, The Big Short. “So he was a perfect choice,” says McKay, for “cutting through mounds of banking bullshit and doublespeak.”
