He’s a smart ass sarcastic son-of-a-bitch…but I respect him. He travels the world and immerses himself with other cultures, eating anything out of respect to the people who feed him. Whether it be scrambled eggs cooked in sand, rocket fuel moonshine, or a bull’s penis, he’s game.
“”Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone … Bad food is fake food … food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people’s ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives. Food that’s too safe, too pasteurized, too healthy – it’s bad! There should be some risk, like unpasteurized cheese. Food is about rot, and decay, and fermentation….as much as it is also about freshness.” - AB
Career:
“Bourdain gained popularity from his New York Times bestselling book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, released in 2000. Kitchen Confidential describes the darker side of the culinary world, and serves as a memoir of Bourdain’s life as well. He is also author of the culinary mysteries Gone Bamboo and A Bone in the Throat, the popular history Typhoid Mary (An Urban Historical), and the cookbook, Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook. In addition there is A Cook’s Tour, which was made in conjunction with a TV series of the same name on the Food Network. In July 2005, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations premiered on the Travel Channel.
Among his many epicurean exploits, Bourdain is famous for consuming sheep testicles in Morocco, ant eggs in Puebla, Mexico, a raw seal eyeball as part of a traditional Inuit seal hunt, and a whole cobra — beating heart, blood, bile, and meat — in Vietnam. According to Bourdain, the most disgusting thing he has ever eaten is a Chicken McNugget, though he did declare the warthog rectum he ate in Namibia “the worst meal of [his] life”. The FOX Network produced a short-lived sitcom adaptation of Kitchen Confidential, which aired in the fall of 2005. The character “Jack Bourdain” was based loosely on the biography and persona of Anthony Bourdain.
Bourdain is an unrepentant smoker and drinker, and a former user of cocaine, heroin, and LSD. In Kitchen Confidential he writes: “We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in [refrigerator] at every opportunity to ‘conceptualize.’ Hardly a decision was made without drugs. Pot, quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey and used to sweeten tea, Seconal, Tuinal, speed, codeine and, increasingly, heroin, which we’d send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to Alphabet City to get.”[7] In a nod to Bourdain’s two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, renowned chef Thomas Keller once served him a 20-course tasting menu including a mid-meal “coffee and cigarettes” dish of foie gras with tobacco-infused custard.[8] Because of his liberal use of light profanity and sexual references in No Reservations, the network has prepended viewer discretion advisories to each segment. [wikipedia]“
Eating balut.
In Korea:
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