Anthony Bourdain American Chef Born 1956 in New York City

Early life

Anthony Michael Bourdain was born in New York City on 25 June 1956 and spent much of his childhood in New Jersey. He finished school at Dwight-Englewood in Englewood and went on to Vassar College. During his time there he took summer work in seafood restaurants in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and that experience steered him toward cooking as a trade. He left Vassar after two years and trained at the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, completing his studies in 1978.

Career

Bourdain spent the following years in professional kitchens around New York City, running the cooking line at places such as the Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue and Sullivan's. In 1998 he became executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan. He held that post for many years and stayed associated with the restaurant even after his formal employment there ended.

Writing grew alongside the kitchen work. In the mid-1980s he had begun sending unsolicited pieces to a small literary magazine on the Lower East Side, and in 1995 he published a culinary mystery novel, Bone in the Throat, followed by a second, Gone Bamboo, in 1997. Neither sold well. The turning point came with a 1999 essay in The New Yorker titled "Don't Eat Before Reading This", which he expanded into Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, published in 2000. It reached the New York Times bestseller list and brought an offer from television. Later books included A Cook's Tour (2001), Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical, The Nasty Bits (2006), No Reservations (2007) and the memoir Medium Raw (2010). In 2012 he co-wrote the graphic novel Get Jiro! with Joel Rose, and an imprint carrying his name was set up at Ecco Press in 2011 to publish other authors.

His television career began with A Cook's Tour, which premiered on the Food Network in January 2002 and ran for 35 episodes through 2003. In July 2005 he started Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations on the Travel Channel, and in November 2011 the same network launched The Layover, in which each episode explored a city within a stopover of 24 to 48 hours. In 2013 he moved to CNN to host Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, which premiered on 14 April 2013 and took him to places including Libya, Tokyo, Jamaica, Ethiopia and Armenia. One episode, filmed in Hanoi and broadcast in September 2016, featured a meal with President Barack Obama. From 2013 to 2015 he also served as executive producer and judge on the ABC series The Taste.

Beyond hosting, he appeared as himself in the 2015 film The Big Short, where he used a seafood stew to explain the idea of a collateralized debt obligation. That year he also became the sole investor and editor-at-large of the publication Roads & Kingdoms, which later co-produced the digital series Explore Parts Unknown.

Recognition

Bourdain's honours span food writing, television and public life. He was named Food Writer of the Year by Bon Appétit in 2001. Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations earned Emmy recognition, including a nomination in 2007 for its Beirut episode, and Parts Unknown won multiple Emmy Awards in the informational series category. The 2013 season of Parts Unknown received a Peabody Award in 2014. He was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Program in 2013 for The Taste. In December 2017 the Culinary Institute of America awarded him an honorary doctorate. The National Humanities Medal appears in his record with the year 2023.

Personal life

Bourdain was married twice. His first marriage, to Nancy Putkoski, began in 1985 and ended in 2005. He married Ottavia Busia in 2007, and that marriage ended in 2016. He had one child. Outside work he trained in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and earned a blue belt in 2015. Anthony Bourdain died on 8 June 2018.