Anthony Bourdain dead at 61

’Kitchen Confidential’ was the reason I became interested in food years ago. I never missed an episode of any of his shows because I loved how he showed us the world. I admired him as a chef, traveller, and all around person. I feel like I lost a friend today.

RIP, Tony.

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Always hoped to meet him - he was a true hero of mine. His writing was so darn good - obviously in this visually obsessed time the authorial Bourdain is now eclipsed by the tv persona but I think it is important to remember the pen pulled him out of the kitchen - then came the shows. Which I loved too. Anytime you met a Bourdain fan you knew there would be a good chance of enjoying the person.

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He loved L.A., although, as a New Yorker, he knew he was supposed to disparage it. :slight_smile:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xo2mru

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I just wanted to add, as an immigrant myself, how deeply I appreciate how much he cared about immigrant rights.

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Listen to the audio book if you haven’t. He was the reader.

“His dining was less about the menu and more about Bourdain’s approach to it. He used food, that most diverse of human unifiers, to teach us about each other and to question power and scrutinize injustice. We all eat, and we all prepare meals differently, each dish a story that can explain something about a community, what it provides (or does not), and how certain ingredients come to end all mixed up on a nation’s plate. Food is nourishment, it is comfort, it is identity, tradition, history and memory. In preparing a dish for Bourdain, what many of the people on his show also seemed to be saying was, “This is who I am, and I want to share it with you.””

And…
"The Lebanese capital, he said, was a place he fell in love with, so much so he considered naming his daughter Beirut. It was a city “where nothing made any damn sense at all — in the best possible way,” he wrote. “You should go there. It defies logic. It defies expectations. It is amazing.”

So, too, were you, Anthony Bourdain, and your way of looking at the world. A chef who embraced difference in an increasingly intolerant world. A man who viewed Beirut — and all the many other places too often oversimplified, marginalized and demonized — on their own terms."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/06/08/anthony-bourdain-showed-the-middle-east-that-i-know-and-love/

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This is a beautiful tribute by David Simon (creator of The Wire, Treme, etc.).

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Brilliant! Thanks SO much for sharing. I’ve shared on FB. Need to follow David Simon.

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Beautiful.

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Simon’s got his chronology wrong, Bourdain wrote two crime novels before Kitchen Confidential, while he was still putting in long hours at Les Halles.

We have a son-in-law who’s had a professional podcast for over ten years about rock climbing and other outdoor activities. I’ve always said about his work “It’s always about more than just climbing.” Same with Bourdain. It was always about more than ‘just’ food and travel.

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Great. Now I have to leave because turn this into your crybaby politics.

I didn’t know you were here.

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People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids? … It’s just not right. It’s not right. It’s not, it’s not going to change anything. We’ll, we’ll get our justice … Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to work it out.

Rodney King

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Weird juju this week.

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I hope you choke - David Chang

- Michael Scott

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  • Wayne Gretzky
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I couldn’t pick a favorite photo so take YOUR pick:

https://www.google.com/search?q=bourdain&rlz=1CASMAH_enGR739GR739&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwivrNXN1OjbAhUOWq0KHSVJCVUQ_AUICygC&biw=1366&bih=627

And he was H. O. T. And that too rare quality that men AND women liked him. And I just read that his mother, who didn’t like his tattoos, is going to get one on her inside wrist that will be “TONY.” :slight_smile:

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https://www.foodandwine.com/news/cnn-anthony-bourdain-memorial-book?did=369438-20190425&utm_campaign=faw-the-dish_newsletter&utm_source=foodandwine.com&utm_medium=email&utm_content=042519&cid=369438&mid=20475263876

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