On Anthony Bourdain
Reflecting on Unanswered Questions
I wrote the following blurb in the middle of the night on my notes app after reading Kitchen Confidential for the first time. Hopefully, it will pique your interest.
Bourdain’s writing invokes more emotion in me than most novelists could ever hope to conjure. As soon as I finished Kitchen Confidential, I saw something online that he said while filming the Japan episode of Parts Unknown (Season 2 Episode 7):
‘It was a powerful and violent experience. It was just like taking acid for the first time - meaning, what do I do now? I see the whole world in a different way. I often compare the experience of going to Japan for the first time, of going to Tokyo for the first time, to what Eric Clapton and Pete Townsend, the reigning guitar gods of England, must have gone through when Jimi Hendrix came to town. You hear about it. You go to see it. A whole window opens up into a whole new thing. And you think, what does this mean? What do I have left to say? What do I do now?’
Bourdain asks a lot of questions when he writes - but he doesn’t ask them like he knows the answer better than you might know the answer. He asks with a bit of chest, sure, but without the ego or superiority you might get from other columnists or memoir writers. When he asks these questions, it’s as if the weight of the unanswerable becomes slightly lighter in a shared unknowingness between him and whoever is listening. As if he were to hear what you might have to say, then the tangled rhetoric which bore the question might begin to unravel. Because of my romantic interpretation of his persistent question-asking, coupled with our shared love for food, anthropology, and music, I feel heard in the chaos of an intricate internal pressure to find the answer to similarly ambiguous and broad confusions. It’s like when you read Bourdain; despite not hearing his voice, you still hear him personally prompting you as if he were in the room. You resonate with this frustration of not being able to precisely pinpoint the answers to his quite frankly unanswerable questions… yet the stubbornness in needing to know is anchored in both of you. Bourdain traveled the world trying to answer these questions; we followed him.
Bourdain and I share the same birthday. In him, in his writing, and in his voice, which speaks for a world unseen and then found by food, I find a friend. When I read and listen to Bourdain's words, I find twin thoughts that have been coded and spoken eloquently and intimately, intelligence unearthed by hands that have seen the dirt and grime and passion of the kitchen, an entire universe that he unveiled for the curious public to savor. In those words, I find myself found.
Maybe a chef is someone who is always looking for the missing ingredient, an answer to the questions they concoct themselves.
