Anthony Bourdain dead

[Anastasis 23469]

9 hours ago, Deej said:

Undefeated?

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2018/06/12/anthony-bourdains-crazy-love-for-asia-argento-worried-his-circle-friends-report.html

She was "cheating" on him weekend before he offed himself. Pretty clear there is an undefeated angle here. 

[Gardner Barnes 1562]

She was "cheating" on him weekend before he offed himself. Pretty clear there is an undefeated angle here. 

 

I had a feeling it had something to do with her. Thier relationship in the Rome episode edited or not, was almost uncomfortable and seemed a bit 1 way.

 

[Gardner Barnes 1562]

I’m watching the Vienna No Reservations episode right now. It’s pretty amazing how much darker Bordain’s shows became over the years.

Personally I enjoy the more journalistic aspect of his Parts Unknown/CNN days more, however these NR eps are entertaining. They are light and funny.

I wonder if his editing was reflective of CNN giving him more freedom to be a journalist and the Travel Channel wanting more of a Travel and Food host. Or if he just got darker over the years and the edits accurately reflect his psyche.

[Goofyboy 3280]

Where did you find NR episodes?

[Brew 3049]

Travel Channel has some full episodes up online under their Remembering AB link on the home page. They have also been airing them on the channel. 

[HenryJames 66041]

5 hours ago, Gardner Barnes said:

Personally I enjoy the more journalistic aspect of his Parts Unknown/CNN days more, however these NR eps are entertaining. They are light and funny.

I'm the opposite. The journalist/political stuff wasn't his strength and seemed forced. Plus the CNN editing is shit.

[Moby Ric 2058]

Just like many here I hear about a celebrity dying and I am like wow, then on to something else.  I have traveled a lot and gone to places based off his recommendations in many of those places.  He is a guy who actually added something positive to this world and did not care what you thought about him.  Take it or leave it.  I was really sad to hear of his death.

I was watching the CNN remembering Anthony Bourdain, and all I kept thinking was these CNN personalities that were discussing who he was and what he was about had me chuckling. Cause all I could think about was Bourdain sitting in the afterlife drinking a fine glass of something with a cigarette and making a snarky comment about every person who was saying something about him and how they all got him wrong.

[jdhorn92 1545]

On 6/8/2018 at 11:46 PM, WhatTheBuck said:

Yeah, give me a choice and I'd take Phil Hartman, Robin Williams, or Philip Seymour Hoffman back first. Or John Candy. Or John Belushi. Or Chris Farley. 

only the good die young.

[cabowabo 4484]

On 6/12/2018 at 11:59 AM, Deej said:

Undefeated?

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2018/06/12/anthony-bourdains-crazy-love-for-asia-argento-worried-his-circle-friends-report.html

He left his 13 year old daughter high and dry because some young  tatooed up skank he had banged a few times is fucking somene else younger than him. What a fucking loser.....

[MAUFRAIS 6623]

Now you’ve done it.

[BlueGreySky 1004]

He left his 13 year old daughter high and dry because some young  tatooed up skank he had banged a few times is fucking somene else younger than him. What a fucking loser.....

 

Fuck you man. As someone who has lost a good friend to suicide and mental illness, fuck you. I hope no one you love ever battles with something as awful as mental illness because they stand zero chance with someone like you in their corner.

[cabowabo 4484]

1 hour ago, BlueGreySky said:

 

Fuck you man. As someone who has lost a good friend to suicide and mental illness, fuck you. I hope no one you love ever battles with something as awful as mental illness because they stand zero chance with someone like you in their corner.

Let's hope his poor daughter does not stand zero chance without her father in her corner.  And has it been proven that he had mental illness?  Is everyone who kills themselves "mentally ill?"  If that's the way you think, then a person who kills another is probably mentally ill also, no?  Are we supposed to have empathy and sadness now for murders?  I'm just telling it like it is.

Edited June 15, 2018 by cabowabo

[crash_davis 23107]

you probably don't have many friends, do you.

[Errestaurants 2570]

go ahead and retire this thread. about to be a shit show. 

[Prepuce of Doom 21065]

1 hour ago, cabowabo said:

Let's hope his poor daughter does not stand zero chance without her father in her corner.  And has it been proven that he had mental illness?  Is everyone who kills themselves "mentally ill?"  If that's the way you think, then a person who kills another is probably mentally ill also, no?  Are we supposed to have empathy and sadness now for murders?  I'm just telling it like it is.

You're dumb. 

[YChang 3443]

1 hour ago, cabowabo said:

Are we supposed to have empathy and sadness now for murders?  I'm just telling it like it is.

Heheh...

[Sawbonz 27547]

1 hour ago, crash_davis said:

you probably don't have many friends, do you.

Probably all killed themselves 

[Tyler Durden 132]

Don't know Cabo IRL but his posts at Shaggy lead me to believe he isn't a bad guy.  Don't agree with him here and that's okay.  Suicide is hard and that is what we have seen here.  

[Armybrat 40832]

Maybe someone ought to pour you guys a few shots like a certain old fat man did for his fellow Shagsters to chase that free keg beer they were drinking at John Mueller's BBQ when Bourdain & his Travel Channel show visited Austin in 2011. At least there were 3 or 4 ounces left for said fat man to present to Bourdain at his table.

(Video courtesy of ToY)

 

[JohnnyRage 1617]

Thanks for the random backwash Brat!

And thanks Dr. Cabo for setting us straight on offing ourselves.

[HoustonHorn 1062]

Without getting into definitions of mental health issues, there is a 13 year old girl who doesn't have a father anymore. That's sad and she has a tougher road ahead as a result.

[Gil Bang 25944]

Holy shit.  From David Simon, creator of "The WIre".

 

Tony

11JUN

I was still on the sofa at four in the afternoon, still half-dressed, when I decided that my life could not be complete if I did not somehow become friends with Anthony Bourdain. My son, then a young teenager, also in his underwear, was as inert and transfixed as I was. We were both locked into the ninth or tenth consecutive hour of a Labor Day weekend marathon of Bourdain’s cultural-journey-through-food breakthrough show, “No Reservations.”

I remember the exact moment, the exact image:

The long, lanky, exquisitely sad-faced visage of a road-worn Bourdain sitting on broken pavement in a South American alley – Buenos Aires or maybe Montevideo, there is no way to be sure when twenty episodes are consumed at once — his back to a stone wall, arms crossed above his knees, watching children play at rag-tag soccer with a deflated ball. And with the older men, he is sharing Siete y Tres, the backstreet concoction of cheap red wine and Coca-Cola. And all this imagery with his narration — his exquisite writing so weighted with love for other worlds and their peoples – just washing over another delicate moment.

“This guy is so fucking real,” I remember telling my son.

“This guy,” Ethan replied, correcting me, “might be the absolute coolest person on the entire planet.”

Still prostrate before the Travel Channel two hours later, I was located by my more culturally literate wife who informed me not only that my discovery of Tony Bourdain’s greatness was belated – the man was already a phenomenon in the world of cuisine — but also that we had met and enjoyed part of an evening with him at a crime-writing convention in England some years before. Freshly boosted by the success of Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain had been trying his hand at crime fiction – a master storyteller still sampling forms before simply inventing the documentarian oeuvre for which he was perfection itself.

On that night in Manchester, Bourdain compassed us both and immediately apologized for the poor treatment he had given Baltimore in his writing:  “Forgive me. What I remember of Baltimore is that I was an addict at that point and I had the hardest time finding heroin there.”

Defending our city as best one can, we both assured him that this was no fair reflection on Baltimore. It merely marked him as the most incompetent heroin addict on record.

“That guy?” I remembered. “He was grand.”

“You really, really need to read Kitchen Confidential,” she told me.

And I did.  And from that moment forward my primary mission for all of that autumn was to hang out and eat and drink and become friends with this Anthony Bourdain fellow.

*           *           *

In the end, I cold-called him.  And I don’t actually remember what I said in the opening seventeen-paragraph ramble of desperate exposition that followed his simple, “Hello.”

I know only that I was talking at standard front-stoop reporter-interrogative speed, which is to say at enough revolutions-per-minute so there are no pauses long enough for the subject-victim to say “no comment” or “I have to go” or  “how did you get this address, you sick parasitic bastard” before slamming the door in your face. I just kept talking until I ran out of stupid justifications for having bothered him.

The stupidest of which was, perhaps, this:

“I make television shows and I’ve got a show order from HBO for a post-Katrina drama in New Orleans that features a chef trying to make a go of it after the flood. And, Mister Bourdain, while I love great food, I’m perfectly ignorant of how it actually comes to be.  In other words, I like driving cars fast and I have no idea what’s under the hood of one. Would it be possible to buy you a meal and pick your brain?”

It was Laura who came up with that lie. And it was a lie, however plausible it sounded in the moment, or however true it ultimately became. At the time that I approached Tony about helping us with Treme, I wasn’t actually thinking about the task of writing Jannette DeSautel or her culinary adventures. I hadn’t focused much on that arc or on what Bourdain could do with it.  No, I just wanted a bromance.

We met at Sushi Yasuda on 43^rd Street near Grand Central, with Laura carrying a pen and notebook to maintain the fraud of a work meeting. Every now and then she would write something down, but really my wife was just as smitten.

And, of course, he was as he seemed on all those hours of television:  Warm, engaged, curious, all of it glossed with a veneer of self-mockery that you understood was well practiced, yet nonetheless genuine. He wore life’s mistakes as a badge and laughed at the improbability of his newfound cultural iconography. He said he felt like he was now racing through life in a stolen car, checking the rearview, but incredibly, somehow, there were no misery lights yet coming for him.  And me, the police reporter from Baltimore with an HBO production deal, heard the absolute honesty and wonder in that.

A lot of people will tell you that on meeting Tony – despite how extraordinary a being he was – they somehow felt as if they’d known him for years.  In part, this was the natural result of having so much of his wit and intellect bleed across our television screens. But just as elemental, I believe, was the man’s almost unlimited capacity for empathy, for feeling the lives and loves and hopes of others. He listened as few listen. And when he spoke, it was often to deliver some precise personal recollection that was an echo or simile on what was still in his ear. He abhorred a non sequitur; for him, human communication — much like his core ideas about food and travel and being – was about finding the sacred middle between people.

I am someone who can’t do two things at once.  At one point during that lunch, while struggling to talk coherently about a culinary arc in Treme that I hadn’t actually thought much about prior to meeting Bourdain, I made the error of filling my soy cup with sake. Being exceedingly polite on this first meeting, Tony said nothing. Later, walking back across town, I replayed that submoronic moment to my wife, who laughed and made it so much worse by noting that Bourdain himself had savored Naomichi Yasuda’s fare without soy sauce at all. As one does when the fish is so transcendently fresh.

Oh Christ. Fuck me.

Months later, when we gathered for the first time in New Orleans to begin the actual work, I joked that given my lunchtime performance, we were lucky to have him deigning to help us write the DeSautel storyline.

“You were a complete barbarian,” he assured me. “Fortunately, Naomichi didn’t visit our table or I would have had to disavow you and all your works publicly.”

He was always that funny – either dry in his rhetorical savagery, or over-the-top hyperbolic in his foaming rage at vegetarians or micro-beer experts or elitist social or political orders.  Everything built to a moment of careful, thoughtful wit. He often spoke as well as he wrote, and given the stylistic command of his prose work, this is saying something. I know a lot of writers. Only a few of us speak as we write. Shit, on a bad day, we can’t even write as we are supposed to write.  Tony was never arch or florid; his comic exaggerations and rhetorical provocations were always somehow perfectly measured.  He said what he meant and he meant what he said and he landed all of it. As a conversationalist, he simply delivered, moment to moment.

I could spend days explaining how perfectly his written scenes for Treme serviced Janette Desautel and her journey – and more importantly, how carefully and honestly he traversed the wounded, shoulder-chipped post-Katrina moodiness and pride of the New Orleans culinary world. The scenes were fresh butter. They need only be trimmed to fit in the expanse of fifty-eight minute episodes, and even then, what we had to consign to the cutting-room floor was entirely worthy. It died heedlessly, for space only.

His first scene of a kitchen at work crested gracefully in this moment:  The worthy Kim Dickens as DeSautel, her restaurant finally reopened, plating a shrimp-and-grits entrée crowned by a crusted brown-red prawn, bug-eyes and antennae upward, praying to whatever deity governs such transcendent perfection.

“Take a picture of that shit,” she tells her waitress with pride and an insider’s voice of a cook in command of her kitchen.

From that line of dialogue forward, we had no fear for the arc – neither in its direction, nor its execution.   For four seasons, in the writers’ room and on the page, Tony guided and wrote us all the way home.

*            *            *

Tellingly, what Tony wanted to say with the story arc in Treme was precisely the theme he was pursuing in his own work: Move, go, journey, address the new and different, acknowledge the vast distance and all of the epic social and cultural pluralism and then — at the same time — celebrate the commonality of being human as well.

Despite the hermetic tendencies of New Orleans itself when it comes to culture — all the more exacerbated and heightened by the genuine feeling of civic siege that existed there after Katrina – Bourdain insisted that creative and personal growth is, for all us, dependent on encounters with The Other, on a journey from the known and comfortable to the alien and disorienting. It was Tony who argued that once her own restaurant faltered, DeSautel should journey to a volatile culinary capital and be tossed about in Goldlilocks fashion as a line cook in various New York kitchens – this one too hot for her, that one too cool – until she lands in a place where new lessons and experiences begin to permeate. Then and only then should she return home, marry the new to the known, and be more than she would be otherwise. That’s what he argued successfully in our drama. That’s what he argued successfully in his world journeys on television.

He was precise when he told Barack Obama that he wished more Americans had passports. And indeed, it’s hard to argue against the idea that the portion of our republic that hasn’t ventured abroad is the deadweight now dragging us into national mediocrity, insisting that all points of the compass save ours lack basic liberties, or don’t exalt human values, or don’t eat, drink, cure the sick, proscribe violence or educate fools with greater efficacy than we do in this fading realm. They won’t go there. They won’t dare. Yet they already know how exceptional America is and how miserable and frightening the rest of the world must surely be.

Go, move, see, feel, eat – grow.  The Church of Bourdain was founded not merely on the ever-more-vulnerable national credo that all Americans are created equal, but on the much more ambitious insistence that this declaration might be applied wherever you wandered and with whomsoever you cooked or shared a meal.  He remains, for many of us, the American that we wish ourselves to be in the world’s sight. To have him widely displayed as our countryman, open to and caring about the rest of the world, and being so amid our current political degradation — this was ever more important and heroic. To lose him now, amid so many fear-mongering, xenophobic tantrums by those engaged in our misrule, is hideous and grievous.

But make no mistake: It wasn’t love of food that led Bourdain to the embrace of a shared human experience, of a world merely hiding its great commonalities behind vast and obvious culinary variations. It was the other way around. Tony was intensely political, a man always aware of those at the margins, or those who seem never to be reached by wealth or status or recognition.

When he came to Baltimore for an episode, he eschewed the usual subjects of crab cakes and oyster shuckers and instead willfully crossed to the other side of the city to highlight the palate of black Baltimore – the pit beef stands and the fried lake trout joints (not trout, and damn sure not from no lake) — that are a staple in the parts of town that never show up in Baltimore Magazine’s listings of great dining experiences. Some locals were livid at the obvious omissions; many others, long ignored, took real delight.

And it was the same everywhere. He did not journey to Louisiana to dart from one white tablecloth to another among the established New Orleans eateries. Instead, he was in search of the best pho however far out Chef Menteur Highway it happened. Or even further afield, he was hours to the west at an Opelousas campground boucherie where keepers of the Cajun cultural flame battled through a 98-degree day to disassemble an entire pig at fifteen separate stations and make all of it disappear in gastronomic ways that no Royal Street restauranteur could ever fathom.

Always, wherever he went, Bourdain hunted the street food and the street people and the street parade. Once, after a day of storyboarding on Treme, my wife and I took him to a well-regarded high-end restaurant downtown and immediately, regardless of the fare itself, I knew I had erred. He’d had this experience too many times before – shit, as the chef at Les Halles, he’d delivered this experience night after night. We would have been better going on a crosstown challenge for the best roast beef po boy. Instead of pursuing much of his entrée, Bourdain asked wistfully if he could have our then-baby daughter on his knee; his own child was then three; he missed holding an infant more than he needed another plate of sweetbreads.

Yes, Tony was political in every respect; telling his stories from the left, always with an eye on inclusion, always positioned against the empty sneer of American exceptionalism, always ready to turn his gaze on anyone uncounted or ignored. At the same time, it wasn’t necessary to hew to a perfectly progressive line to break bread with the man. Journalistically, he gathered his material with an open mind, never making the basic act of humans bonding over a meal contingent on anyone’s place on the political spectrum. He could eat barbecue and shoot automatic weapons with Ted Nugent if it said something he thought relevant about the terrain in which he was traveling.

In the same spirit, I don’t think he chose his chef friends — or any of his friends — based on their political sensibilities dovetailing his own, or even on the quality and authority of their cuisine. Instead, looking sideways at the great diaspora of people I know who admired and loved Tony Bourdain, what seems most clear is how little bullshit there is. The icons of the kitchen with whom he most clearly connected, and whom he brought to Treme – Colicchio, Ripert, Dufresne, Chang – are, for all their standing and talent, remarkably devoid of cant and flummery. For Bourdain, a man of commanding and exceptional wit and talent, the greatest and most honorable fight was to stand with ordinary men – whether a New York busboy or a vendor on a Ho Chi Minh City streetcorner, a production assistant in his crew or a fan who recognized him on a subway platform. I loved him for this. It was, perhaps, the most important predicate to the great achievement of his journalism: Wherever you go, whoever you meet – there we are, all of us, so different and so much the same. And he chose, I think, his close friends in some part for their talent, but in greater part for their ability, regardless of that talent, to be themselves with all others, in all other spaces.

So I am sure, as I tell you this next story, that he surely did not blame his best friend, Eric Ripert, for serving the most exquisite meal to Henry Kissinger at Le Bernadin – the one that took place only a few tables from myself, my wife and a copse of other writer friends. Yes indeed, there he is, firm in my memory: Hunched-troll Kissinger, curved into his seat at a four-top, dancing his little spoon across the layers of Ripert’s legendary dessert egg – only a hundred plated a night for select customers – talking political science to his crisp, waspish dinner companions, the backwards consonants of his accent grating against my ears: “Vell, it is not really so hard to zee…”

The next day, when I email Bourdain a full-throated tale of this encounter, ripe with all my stunted and thwarted fury, he will forgive Eric, who lives life in a genuine construct of Buddhist thoughtfulness, disconnected from the brutalities and judgments of a political world. Eric, he will assure me, will know little of Kissinger or his works, and is wholly innocent of knowingly feeding America’s greatest living war criminal a dessert fit for prophets and angels. Indeed, I already know as much is true from the surprise on Ripert’s face when the chef came to visit our table, minutes after Kissinger had paid his bill and departed, and I sputtered out shards of raving Wikipedia entries on Chile, East Timor and Cambodia.

Okay, I reply in another email, so Ripert is innocent. But me? I knew. I could have done something. I could have summoned Aldo, the master sommelier, and asked him for the most expensive bottle of Chilean red on the wine list. I could have had the bottle quickly decanted, taken a sip for myself, and then marched over to Henry Kissinger’s table and poured it over the bastard’s head: “Compliments of Senor Allende, you ratfucking murderer.”

I waited on absolution.

Nothing. So I wrote again, offering the obvious reason for my inaction:

“But alas, we were all guests of the chef and this happened in his full dining room. Thus do manners make cowards of us all.”

A minute or two passed until Tony emailed me two words only:

“You pussy.”

*         *         *

Here’s the other thing:  He knew everything,

I don’t mean he knew everything about food or cuisine or travel or even world culture. I mean that for having come up in kitchens, without the formality of too much higher education, Tony Bourdain was simply a brilliant autodidact. He read voraciously and widely. He read things that were relevant to his work and he read things because he simply wanted to know everything a man could possibly know about a given subject. I don’t mean he read the canon for literature and enough non-fiction to be current or relevant at parties, I mean he read the obscure, often turgid stuff that academics wade into when they want to know the last fucking detail about something. As he was about so many things, he was obsessive about what could be learned and known.

After Treme, the project in which my production team held the most hope was a careful history of the CIA from the end of World War II through to the inevitable blowback of 9-11, examining in detail America’s postwar foreign policy footprint in the world. As we began to contemplate the staffing of that writing room, Ed Burns & I brought on espionage novelists such as Dan Fesperman and began to engage in discussions with the likes of Alan Furst and Joe Kanon. Names that made sense.

Bourdain, however, pulled me up once he got wind of the project.

“I can write that stuff.”

I humored him. You’re a great writer, Tony, a fucking natural with drama as it turns out. But for this room we’re looking for a particular level of expertise…

“Yeah, of course,” he said. “I have that.”

I began to query him politely on basic stuff: Angelton and the Italian elections, Haney and the Korean fiasco, Philby and Istanbul…

“Though, of course, never mind Philby,” he interrupted, at one point, “by then the Americans had been entirely compromised by their taking on Gehlen and his crew.”

“And what, Mr. No Reservations, do you know about Reinhard Gehlen?”

He looked at me for a moment, genuinely disappointed in my lack of faith.

“I can read a fucking book. Same as the rest of you fucks.”

And he had. Every history, every memoir, every cache of made-public government files that we had been chasing in the months of preparation to write our pilot scripts and show bible – all of it had already been acquired and read by Tony Bourdain. I told him he was in, and then hurried back to Baltimore to assure Ed Burns we had a live one on our hands.

“The food guy?”

“Ed, he knows this stuff. All of it. Cold.”

Ed, a vegan, was entirely dubious. “That guy doesn’t even get nutrition and world hunger issues right.”

I could only giggle and look forward to a green light on the series and several years of Ed Burns and Tony Bourdain yelling at each other across a Baltimore writing room over the nature and purpose of pork itself, never mind the Bay of Pigs. Problem was the green light never came.

For years, ever since the end of Treme, I’d been updating Tony on a nibble from this network or that, raising his hopes for a moment, then delivering bad news the next. A year ago, we had some belief that the BBC was going to pick the project up. But no go.

Six months ago, in December, I found myself in New York doing a charity gig with Tony for the PEN writer’s group. There were always charity gigs with Tony. Some were public, and some, as we are now learning, was Bourdain making things happen without anyone knowing, without ever playing it for pride or gain. We hadn’t been in the same city for months so we went hard at the bar even before the affair began and then we kept right on going throughout, eventually making good our escape to Desmond’s, a joint just a block up from where Bourdain used to cook. He had the home field advantage, but I tried to stay with him drink for drink. A few regulars from the old days greeted him as if it was just another after-shift respite from Les Halles. A couple of fresher faces asked for photographs. He accommodated all politely, dutifully, and in the case of a few remembered faces, warmly.

For us, there was fresh talk that the U.K.’s Channel 4 might take a chance on the CIA project if we could further enhance the role of British Intelligence in the narrative.  The problem was that postwar Berlin, which featured heavily in our pilot, had been done to death already at the Le Carre-saturated BBC.

“Until we figure out how to do this without leaning on the Berlin station part of the story, all the Brits are going to be leery,” I explained.

He took that in and relayed his own status. He was bone weary at the moment, but nonetheless, he was going to re-up with CNN and continue wandering and eating and telling stories for at least another few years.

“Are you getting tired?”

“I am. But I don’t know that I can stop. I can’t sit still. I know this.”

Then he talked about the ongoing battles with Harvey Weinstein, about his girlfriend and her public stand, about the cost of it and his pride in her. His tone was of someone who had been through a grinder, but who was now certain that Weinstein and all of his lawyers and private investigators and threats would be vanquished.

“Asia,” he said of his girlfriend, “is incredible.”

We had one too many. I was ready to sleep. We stood in the cold on Park Avenue South a little while longer, then hugged, which always seemed a ridiculous gesture with Bourdain, whose height made you feel as though you were embracing a cathedral. He was flying somewhere absurd in the morning. He still had to pack.

“Travel safe,” I said, which sounded dumb even as I said it. Yup. Me, waving away Tony fucking Bourdain with a platitude about how to travel.

The next day, of course, I would get on Twitter to tease him, to brag about drinking Tony Bourdain under the table at one of his own haunts. He would reply and concede defeat, but we both knew it was a lie. By then, I had swallowed two Tylenol and three Advil and I was drinking straight Coca-Cola for breakfast. Meanwhile there was already an email waiting for me in my inbox:

“Been thinking about the Berlin problem. Might consider other crucibles of the Cold War with great character inspirations:

Vint Laurence and Tony Po in Laos.

John Stockwell in Angola.

Operation JM/Wave in Miami.

Howard Hunt and David Atlee Phillips in Guatemala Arbenz campaign.

Lucien Conein in pre-war Vietnam.

Yuri Nosenko in custody.

T.”

I read that and wondered how the fuck how. Motherfucker was as drunk as I was, and between all the travel and the Weinstein battle, so much more tired. Yet he was already in the air somewhere – I couldn’t even remember what he had told me – heading to some other godforsaken time zone.  Now, today, it’s tempting for me to seize on the drinking and the weariness and the offhand remark that he couldn’t stop making those journeys and extrapolate some portentious meaning. But I know that I’d be lying to myself and grafting insight on a moment only in retrospect. No, I went to work that next day hungover but sated with smart talk, good drink, savage jokes, the hug goodbye, and the memory of my friend crossing the avenue, heading for the subway, then disappearing down the hole.

 

[6th Street 6392]

[Homercles 10205]

I read that his toxicology report came back clean. Apparently was fully sober. Still sad about this

[GRHorn 105]

On 6/13/2018 at 1:30 AM, Gardner Barnes said:

I’m watching the Vienna No Reservations episode right now. It’s pretty amazing how much darker Bordain’s shows became over the years.

Personally I enjoy the more journalistic aspect of his Parts Unknown/CNN days more, however these NR eps are entertaining. They are light and funny.

I wonder if his editing was reflective of CNN giving him more freedom to be a journalist and the Travel Channel wanting more of a Travel and Food host. Or if he just got darker over the years and the edits accurately reflect his psyche.

On the Joe Rogan interview he went on about how lucky he was to have been allowed to make whatever shows he wanted, however he wanted, so I think it was his choice.  

 

On 6/13/2018 at 7:00 AM, HenryJames said:

I'm the opposite. The journalist/political stuff wasn't his strength and seemed forced. Plus the CNN editing is shit.

I agree.  I watched pretty much every No Reservations episode.  Over time I stopped watching Parts Unknown.  It wasn’t a conscious decision, just happened. 

[GRHorn 105]

On 6/16/2018 at 10:54 PM, HoustonHorn said:

Without getting into definitions of mental health issues, there is a 13 year old girl who doesn't have a father anymore. That's sad and she has a tougher road ahead as a result.

I liked Bourdain, but it’s pretty obvious the daughter wasn’t a priority. When you’re already wealthy and famous but still travel for work 250 days a year that shows where your priorities lie.  

[JimmyHoffa 1188]

On 6/24/2018 at 9:04 AM, GRHorn said:

I liked Bourdain, but it’s pretty obvious the daughter wasn’t a priority. When you’re already wealthy and famous but still travel for work 250 days a year that shows where your priorities lie.  

 

I love when people make comments like this when they have no knowledge at all about one's personal life. Stay classy. 

[HoustonHorn 1062]

And your dad just killed himself because of a failed relationship, how do you feel? Nothing happens in a vacuum. I ask this as a parent who directly sees how my character and failures manifest themselves in my kids actions and approach to life.

Killing myself, no matter how fucked I am, doesn't impact other people who loved me and thought the world of me? I'm not saying it's selfish because I believe people who kill themselves aren't thinking clearly (without getting into definitions).

Bourdain's shows were the best TV on TV. I watched them regularly with my kids because they provided incredible perspective on the world and different cultures. I try my best to help them understand how important that is, even at a young age.




Sent from my LG-H931 using Tapatalk

[Born to Run 6569]

Holy shit.  From David Simon, creator of "The WIre".
 

Tony

11JUN

I was still on the sofa at four in the afternoon, still half-dressed, when I decided that my life could not be complete if I did not somehow become friends with Anthony Bourdain. My son, then a young teenager, also in his underwear, was as inert and transfixed as I was. We were both locked into the ninth or tenth consecutive hour of a Labor Day weekend marathon of Bourdain’s cultural-journey-through-food breakthrough show, “No Reservations.”

I remember the exact moment, the exact image:

The long, lanky, exquisitely sad-faced visage of a road-worn Bourdain sitting on broken pavement in a South American alley – Buenos Aires or maybe Montevideo, there is no way to be sure when twenty episodes are consumed at once — his back to a stone wall, arms crossed above his knees, watching children play at rag-tag soccer with a deflated ball. And with the older men, he is sharing Siete y Tres, the backstreet concoction of cheap red wine and Coca-Cola. And all this imagery with his narration — his exquisite writing so weighted with love for other worlds and their peoples – just washing over another delicate moment.

“This guy is so fucking real,” I remember telling my son.

“This guy,” Ethan replied, correcting me, “might be the absolute coolest person on the entire planet.”

Still prostrate before the Travel Channel two hours later, I was located by my more culturally literate wife who informed me not only that my discovery of Tony Bourdain’s greatness was belated – the man was already a phenomenon in the world of cuisine — but also that we had met and enjoyed part of an evening with him at a crime-writing convention in England some years before. Freshly boosted by the success of Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain had been trying his hand at crime fiction – a master storyteller still sampling forms before simply inventing the documentarian oeuvre for which he was perfection itself.

On that night in Manchester, Bourdain compassed us both and immediately apologized for the poor treatment he had given Baltimore in his writing:  “Forgive me. What I remember of Baltimore is that I was an addict at that point and I had the hardest time finding heroin there.”

Defending our city as best one can, we both assured him that this was no fair reflection on Baltimore. It merely marked him as the most incompetent heroin addict on record.

“That guy?” I remembered. “He was grand.”

“You really, really need to read Kitchen Confidential,” she told me.

And I did.  And from that moment forward my primary mission for all of that autumn was to hang out and eat and drink and become friends with this Anthony Bourdain fellow.

*           *           *

In the end, I cold-called him.  And I don’t actually remember what I said in the opening seventeen-paragraph ramble of desperate exposition that followed his simple, “Hello.”

I know only that I was talking at standard front-stoop reporter-interrogative speed, which is to say at enough revolutions-per-minute so there are no pauses long enough for the subject-victim to say “no comment” or “I have to go” or  “how did you get this address, you sick parasitic bastard” before slamming the door in your face. I just kept talking until I ran out of stupid justifications for having bothered him.

The stupidest of which was, perhaps, this:

“I make television shows and I’ve got a show order from HBO for a post-Katrina drama in New Orleans that features a chef trying to make a go of it after the flood. And, Mister Bourdain, while I love great food, I’m perfectly ignorant of how it actually comes to be.  In other words, I like driving cars fast and I have no idea what’s under the hood of one. Would it be possible to buy you a meal and pick your brain?”

It was Laura who came up with that lie. And it was a lie, however plausible it sounded in the moment, or however true it ultimately became. At the time that I approached Tony about helping us with Treme, I wasn’t actually thinking about the task of writing Jannette DeSautel or her culinary adventures. I hadn’t focused much on that arc or on what Bourdain could do with it.  No, I just wanted a bromance.

We met at Sushi Yasuda on 43^rd Street near Grand Central, with Laura carrying a pen and notebook to maintain the fraud of a work meeting. Every now and then she would write something down, but really my wife was just as smitten.

And, of course, he was as he seemed on all those hours of television:  Warm, engaged, curious, all of it glossed with a veneer of self-mockery that you understood was well practiced, yet nonetheless genuine. He wore life’s mistakes as a badge and laughed at the improbability of his newfound cultural iconography. He said he felt like he was now racing through life in a stolen car, checking the rearview, but incredibly, somehow, there were no misery lights yet coming for him.  And me, the police reporter from Baltimore with an HBO production deal, heard the absolute honesty and wonder in that.

A lot of people will tell you that on meeting Tony – despite how extraordinary a being he was – they somehow felt as if they’d known him for years.  In part, this was the natural result of having so much of his wit and intellect bleed across our television screens. But just as elemental, I believe, was the man’s almost unlimited capacity for empathy, for feeling the lives and loves and hopes of others. He listened as few listen. And when he spoke, it was often to deliver some precise personal recollection that was an echo or simile on what was still in his ear. He abhorred a non sequitur; for him, human communication — much like his core ideas about food and travel and being – was about finding the sacred middle between people.

I am someone who can’t do two things at once.  At one point during that lunch, while struggling to talk coherently about a culinary arc in Treme that I hadn’t actually thought much about prior to meeting Bourdain, I made the error of filling my soy cup with sake. Being exceedingly polite on this first meeting, Tony said nothing. Later, walking back across town, I replayed that submoronic moment to my wife, who laughed and made it so much worse by noting that Bourdain himself had savored Naomichi Yasuda’s fare without soy sauce at all. As one does when the fish is so transcendently fresh.

Oh Christ. Fuck me.

Months later, when we gathered for the first time in New Orleans to begin the actual work, I joked that given my lunchtime performance, we were lucky to have him deigning to help us write the DeSautel storyline.

“You were a complete barbarian,” he assured me. “Fortunately, Naomichi didn’t visit our table or I would have had to disavow you and all your works publicly.”

He was always that funny – either dry in his rhetorical savagery, or over-the-top hyperbolic in his foaming rage at vegetarians or micro-beer experts or elitist social or political orders.  Everything built to a moment of careful, thoughtful wit. He often spoke as well as he wrote, and given the stylistic command of his prose work, this is saying something. I know a lot of writers. Only a few of us speak as we write. Shit, on a bad day, we can’t even write as we are supposed to write.  Tony was never arch or florid; his comic exaggerations and rhetorical provocations were always somehow perfectly measured.  He said what he meant and he meant what he said and he landed all of it. As a conversationalist, he simply delivered, moment to moment.

I could spend days explaining how perfectly his written scenes for Treme serviced Janette Desautel and her journey – and more importantly, how carefully and honestly he traversed the wounded, shoulder-chipped post-Katrina moodiness and pride of the New Orleans culinary world. The scenes were fresh butter. They need only be trimmed to fit in the expanse of fifty-eight minute episodes, and even then, what we had to consign to the cutting-room floor was entirely worthy. It died heedlessly, for space only.

His first scene of a kitchen at work crested gracefully in this moment:  The worthy Kim Dickens as DeSautel, her restaurant finally reopened, plating a shrimp-and-grits entrée crowned by a crusted brown-red prawn, bug-eyes and antennae upward, praying to whatever deity governs such transcendent perfection.

“Take a picture of that shit,” she tells her waitress with pride and an insider’s voice of a cook in command of her kitchen.

From that line of dialogue forward, we had no fear for the arc – neither in its direction, nor its execution.   For four seasons, in the writers’ room and on the page, Tony guided and wrote us all the way home.

*            *            *

Tellingly, what Tony wanted to say with the story arc in Treme was precisely the theme he was pursuing in his own work: Move, go, journey, address the new and different, acknowledge the vast distance and all of the epic social and cultural pluralism and then — at the same time — celebrate the commonality of being human as well.

Despite the hermetic tendencies of New Orleans itself when it comes to culture — all the more exacerbated and heightened by the genuine feeling of civic siege that existed there after Katrina – Bourdain insisted that creative and personal growth is, for all us, dependent on encounters with The Other, on a journey from the known and comfortable to the alien and disorienting. It was Tony who argued that once her own restaurant faltered, DeSautel should journey to a volatile culinary capital and be tossed about in Goldlilocks fashion as a line cook in various New York kitchens – this one too hot for her, that one too cool – until she lands in a place where new lessons and experiences begin to permeate. Then and only then should she return home, marry the new to the known, and be more than she would be otherwise. That’s what he argued successfully in our drama. That’s what he argued successfully in his world journeys on television.

He was precise when he told Barack Obama that he wished more Americans had passports. And indeed, it’s hard to argue against the idea that the portion of our republic that hasn’t ventured abroad is the deadweight now dragging us into national mediocrity, insisting that all points of the compass save ours lack basic liberties, or don’t exalt human values, or don’t eat, drink, cure the sick, proscribe violence or educate fools with greater efficacy than we do in this fading realm. They won’t go there. They won’t dare. Yet they already know how exceptional America is and how miserable and frightening the rest of the world must surely be.

Go, move, see, feel, eat – grow.  The Church of Bourdain was founded not merely on the ever-more-vulnerable national credo that all Americans are created equal, but on the much more ambitious insistence that this declaration might be applied wherever you wandered and with whomsoever you cooked or shared a meal.  He remains, for many of us, the American that we wish ourselves to be in the world’s sight. To have him widely displayed as our countryman, open to and caring about the rest of the world, and being so amid our current political degradation — this was ever more important and heroic. To lose him now, amid so many fear-mongering, xenophobic tantrums by those engaged in our misrule, is hideous and grievous.

But make no mistake: It wasn’t love of food that led Bourdain to the embrace of a shared human experience, of a world merely hiding its great commonalities behind vast and obvious culinary variations. It was the other way around. Tony was intensely political, a man always aware of those at the margins, or those who seem never to be reached by wealth or status or recognition.

When he came to Baltimore for an episode, he eschewed the usual subjects of crab cakes and oyster shuckers and instead willfully crossed to the other side of the city to highlight the palate of black Baltimore – the pit beef stands and the fried lake trout joints (not trout, and damn sure not from no lake) — that are a staple in the parts of town that never show up in Baltimore Magazine’s listings of great dining experiences. Some locals were livid at the obvious omissions; many others, long ignored, took real delight.

And it was the same everywhere. He did not journey to Louisiana to dart from one white tablecloth to another among the established New Orleans eateries. Instead, he was in search of the best pho however far out Chef Menteur Highway it happened. Or even further afield, he was hours to the west at an Opelousas campground boucherie where keepers of the Cajun cultural flame battled through a 98-degree day to disassemble an entire pig at fifteen separate stations and make all of it disappear in gastronomic ways that no Royal Street restauranteur could ever fathom.

Always, wherever he went, Bourdain hunted the street food and the street people and the street parade. Once, after a day of storyboarding on Treme, my wife and I took him to a well-regarded high-end restaurant downtown and immediately, regardless of the fare itself, I knew I had erred. He’d had this experience too many times before – shit, as the chef at Les Halles, he’d delivered this experience night after night. We would have been better going on a crosstown challenge for the best roast beef po boy. Instead of pursuing much of his entrée, Bourdain asked wistfully if he could have our then-baby daughter on his knee; his own child was then three; he missed holding an infant more than he needed another plate of sweetbreads.

Yes, Tony was political in every respect; telling his stories from the left, always with an eye on inclusion, always positioned against the empty sneer of American exceptionalism, always ready to turn his gaze on anyone uncounted or ignored. At the same time, it wasn’t necessary to hew to a perfectly progressive line to break bread with the man. Journalistically, he gathered his material with an open mind, never making the basic act of humans bonding over a meal contingent on anyone’s place on the political spectrum. He could eat barbecue and shoot automatic weapons with Ted Nugent if it said something he thought relevant about the terrain in which he was traveling.

In the same spirit, I don’t think he chose his chef friends — or any of his friends — based on their political sensibilities dovetailing his own, or even on the quality and authority of their cuisine. Instead, looking sideways at the great diaspora of people I know who admired and loved Tony Bourdain, what seems most clear is how little bullshit there is. The icons of the kitchen with whom he most clearly connected, and whom he brought to Treme – Colicchio, Ripert, Dufresne, Chang – are, for all their standing and talent, remarkably devoid of cant and flummery. For Bourdain, a man of commanding and exceptional wit and talent, the greatest and most honorable fight was to stand with ordinary men – whether a New York busboy or a vendor on a Ho Chi Minh City streetcorner, a production assistant in his crew or a fan who recognized him on a subway platform. I loved him for this. It was, perhaps, the most important predicate to the great achievement of his journalism: Wherever you go, whoever you meet – there we are, all of us, so different and so much the same. And he chose, I think, his close friends in some part for their talent, but in greater part for their ability, regardless of that talent, to be themselves with all others, in all other spaces.

So I am sure, as I tell you this next story, that he surely did not blame his best friend, Eric Ripert, for serving the most exquisite meal to Henry Kissinger at Le Bernadin – the one that took place only a few tables from myself, my wife and a copse of other writer friends. Yes indeed, there he is, firm in my memory: Hunched-troll Kissinger, curved into his seat at a four-top, dancing his little spoon across the layers of Ripert’s legendary dessert egg – only a hundred plated a night for select customers – talking political science to his crisp, waspish dinner companions, the backwards consonants of his accent grating against my ears: “Vell, it is not really so hard to zee…”

The next day, when I email Bourdain a full-throated tale of this encounter, ripe with all my stunted and thwarted fury, he will forgive Eric, who lives life in a genuine construct of Buddhist thoughtfulness, disconnected from the brutalities and judgments of a political world. Eric, he will assure me, will know little of Kissinger or his works, and is wholly innocent of knowingly feeding America’s greatest living war criminal a dessert fit for prophets and angels. Indeed, I already know as much is true from the surprise on Ripert’s face when the chef came to visit our table, minutes after Kissinger had paid his bill and departed, and I sputtered out shards of raving Wikipedia entries on Chile, East Timor and Cambodia.

Okay, I reply in another email, so Ripert is innocent. But me? I knew. I could have done something. I could have summoned Aldo, the master sommelier, and asked him for the most expensive bottle of Chilean red on the wine list. I could have had the bottle quickly decanted, taken a sip for myself, and then marched over to Henry Kissinger’s table and poured it over the bastard’s head: “Compliments of Senor Allende, you ratfucking murderer.”

I waited on absolution.

Nothing. So I wrote again, offering the obvious reason for my inaction:

“But alas, we were all guests of the chef and this happened in his full dining room. Thus do manners make cowards of us all.”

A minute or two passed until Tony emailed me two words only:

“You pussy.”

*         *         *

Here’s the other thing:  He knew everything,

I don’t mean he knew everything about food or cuisine or travel or even world culture. I mean that for having come up in kitchens, without the formality of too much higher education, Tony Bourdain was simply a brilliant autodidact. He read voraciously and widely. He read things that were relevant to his work and he read things because he simply wanted to know everything a man could possibly know about a given subject. I don’t mean he read the canon for literature and enough non-fiction to be current or relevant at parties, I mean he read the obscure, often turgid stuff that academics wade into when they want to know the last fucking detail about something. As he was about so many things, he was obsessive about what could be learned and known.

After Treme, the project in which my production team held the most hope was a careful history of the CIA from the end of World War II through to the inevitable blowback of 9-11, examining in detail America’s postwar foreign policy footprint in the world. As we began to contemplate the staffing of that writing room, Ed Burns & I brought on espionage novelists such as Dan Fesperman and began to engage in discussions with the likes of Alan Furst and Joe Kanon. Names that made sense.

Bourdain, however, pulled me up once he got wind of the project.

“I can write that stuff.”

I humored him. You’re a great writer, Tony, a fucking natural with drama as it turns out. But for this room we’re looking for a particular level of expertise…

“Yeah, of course,” he said. “I have that.”

I began to query him politely on basic stuff: Angelton and the Italian elections, Haney and the Korean fiasco, Philby and Istanbul…

“Though, of course, never mind Philby,” he interrupted, at one point, “by then the Americans had been entirely compromised by their taking on Gehlen and his crew.”

“And what, Mr. No Reservations, do you know about Reinhard Gehlen?”

He looked at me for a moment, genuinely disappointed in my lack of faith.

“I can read a fucking book. Same as the rest of you fucks.”

And he had. Every history, every memoir, every cache of made-public government files that we had been chasing in the months of preparation to write our pilot scripts and show bible – all of it had already been acquired and read by Tony Bourdain. I told him he was in, and then hurried back to Baltimore to assure Ed Burns we had a live one on our hands.

“The food guy?”

“Ed, he knows this stuff. All of it. Cold.”

Ed, a vegan, was entirely dubious. “That guy doesn’t even get nutrition and world hunger issues right.”

I could only giggle and look forward to a green light on the series and several years of Ed Burns and Tony Bourdain yelling at each other across a Baltimore writing room over the nature and purpose of pork itself, never mind the Bay of Pigs. Problem was the green light never came.

For years, ever since the end of Treme, I’d been updating Tony on a nibble from this network or that, raising his hopes for a moment, then delivering bad news the next. A year ago, we had some belief that the BBC was going to pick the project up. But no go.

Six months ago, in December, I found myself in New York doing a charity gig with Tony for the PEN writer’s group. There were always charity gigs with Tony. Some were public, and some, as we are now learning, was Bourdain making things happen without anyone knowing, without ever playing it for pride or gain. We hadn’t been in the same city for months so we went hard at the bar even before the affair began and then we kept right on going throughout, eventually making good our escape to Desmond’s, a joint just a block up from where Bourdain used to cook. He had the home field advantage, but I tried to stay with him drink for drink. A few regulars from the old days greeted him as if it was just another after-shift respite from Les Halles. A couple of fresher faces asked for photographs. He accommodated all politely, dutifully, and in the case of a few remembered faces, warmly.

For us, there was fresh talk that the U.K.’s Channel 4 might take a chance on the CIA project if we could further enhance the role of British Intelligence in the narrative.  The problem was that postwar Berlin, which featured heavily in our pilot, had been done to death already at the Le Carre-saturated BBC.

“Until we figure out how to do this without leaning on the Berlin station part of the story, all the Brits are going to be leery,” I explained.

He took that in and relayed his own status. He was bone weary at the moment, but nonetheless, he was going to re-up with CNN and continue wandering and eating and telling stories for at least another few years.

“Are you getting tired?”

“I am. But I don’t know that I can stop. I can’t sit still. I know this.”

Then he talked about the ongoing battles with Harvey Weinstein, about his girlfriend and her public stand, about the cost of it and his pride in her. His tone was of someone who had been through a grinder, but who was now certain that Weinstein and all of his lawyers and private investigators and threats would be vanquished.

“Asia,” he said of his girlfriend, “is incredible.”

We had one too many. I was ready to sleep. We stood in the cold on Park Avenue South a little while longer, then hugged, which always seemed a ridiculous gesture with Bourdain, whose height made you feel as though you were embracing a cathedral. He was flying somewhere absurd in the morning. He still had to pack.

“Travel safe,” I said, which sounded dumb even as I said it. Yup. Me, waving away Tony fucking Bourdain with a platitude about how to travel.

The next day, of course, I would get on Twitter to tease him, to brag about drinking Tony Bourdain under the table at one of his own haunts. He would reply and concede defeat, but we both knew it was a lie. By then, I had swallowed two Tylenol and three Advil and I was drinking straight Coca-Cola for breakfast. Meanwhile there was already an email waiting for me in my inbox:

“Been thinking about the Berlin problem. Might consider other crucibles of the Cold War with great character inspirations:

Vint Laurence and Tony Po in Laos.

John Stockwell in Angola.

Operation JM/Wave in Miami.

Howard Hunt and David Atlee Phillips in Guatemala Arbenz campaign.

Lucien Conein in pre-war Vietnam.

Yuri Nosenko in custody.

T.”

I read that and wondered how the fuck how. Motherfucker was as drunk as I was, and between all the travel and the Weinstein battle, so much more tired. Yet he was already in the air somewhere – I couldn’t even remember what he had told me – heading to some other godforsaken time zone.  Now, today, it’s tempting for me to seize on the drinking and the weariness and the offhand remark that he couldn’t stop making those journeys and extrapolate some portentious meaning. But I know that I’d be lying to myself and grafting insight on a moment only in retrospect. No, I went to work that next day hungover but sated with smart talk, good drink, savage jokes, the hug goodbye, and the memory of my friend crossing the avenue, heading for the subway, then disappearing down the hole.

 

Great, important read. Thanks !

[El Diablo 4232]

On ‎6‎/‎25‎/‎2018 at 9:18 AM, JimmyHoffa said:

 

I love when people make comments like this when they have no knowledge at all about one's personal life. Stay classy. 

No doubt. I don't know but maybe the daughter spent a good bit of time with her father during his travels. We just don't know and making statements like the one that you quoted is kneejerk judgmentally stupid.

[Chopper 17230]

I was a big fan of Bourdain but had no idea he wrote the restaurant and chef scenes for Treme. Loved that show and the chef was such a great character. 

[Stoogey 219]

Didn't follow Bourdain but he must have been a pretty nice guy.

SIAP. Please click on link. YouTube does not allow embedding of this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8kgotqy_Wg
 

[GringoSalado 1651]

Foodies bashed an 85-year-old food critic for reviewing Olive Garden — and Anthony Bourdain came to her rescue

http://www.thisisinsider.com/anthony-bourdain-defended-food-columnist-marilyn-hagerty-olive-garden-review-2018-6

 

Quote

In the aftermath of Anthony Bourdain's death, friends and fans are sharing their favorite memories of the celebrity chef who touched so many lives.

On Friday, Twitter user Zac Echola recalled how Bourdain came to the rescue of an 85-year-old food columnist when she was getting bullied online for her review of Olive Garden.

In 2012, Marilyn Hagerty was loudly mocked online for her review of the Olive Garden, which had recently opened in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Bourdain, who spent his life traveling the world in search of food and culture, was among the few professionals in the food industry who completely embraced Hagerty rather than crucifying her.

"Very much enjoying watching Internet sensation Marilyn Hagerty triumph over the snarkologists (myself included)," Bourdain tweeted after Hagerty's review went viral.

But Bourdain didn't just defend her, somehow he became her biggest supporter and helped her nab a book deal with his own book line at Ecco Press.

"She's been writing a food column in Grand Forks for 30 years. As we saw a little bit of her during her blow up on the internet and how she handled herself, what we have is a sincere, genuine reportage of food that people don't really see or talk about," Bourdain told reporters during a conference call in April 2012. "I see her life's work as a history of American dining. What's happened to them? Are they still around after 25 years?"

When Hagerty published her book, "Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews," Bourdain wrote the foreword and continued to laud her work as "a fascinating picture of dining in America, a gradual, cumulative overview of how we got from there ... to here."

Bourdain, who was found dead in his hotel room in France on Friday, lamented the uptick in snobbery among American foodies.

"I don't need a 10-minute description of my food," he told Business Insider in 2016 ahead of the seventh season of his Emmy-winning CNN show "Parts Unknown."

"You can't be a great food writer and a snob about food and just want fancy, expensive ingredients," he said. "You have to appreciate the qualities of a properly greasy fast-food burger."

The Critic Whose Olive Garden Review Went Viral Remembers How Anthony Bourdain Spoke Up For Her

"Anthony Bourdain spoke up for me at a time when people all over the country were making great fun of the column I write," said Marilyn Hagerty.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliareinstein/marilyn-hagerty-anthony-bourdain-olive-garden?utm_term=.sq5rPpYpQp#.lgNax0w0z0

 

Quote

In 2012, then–88-year-old Marilyn Hagerty of Grand Forks, North Dakota, wrote arguably the most viral restaurant reviewever written. It was for Olive Garden.

 

Hagerty, a food columnist for the local Grand Forks Herald, dubbed it "the largest and most beautiful restaurant now operating in Grand Forks."

"The chicken Alfredo ($10.95) was warm and comforting on a cold day. The portion was generous. My server was ready with Parmesan cheese," she wrote.

It was an instant viral sensation, with tons of people cracking sarcastic jokes about the octogenarian's earnest review. It even got a write-up on Gawker.

 

Despite the roasting, the review found her at least one big fan: Anthony Bourdain.

 

Bourdain defended Hagerty, celebrating her "triumph over the snarkologists" when the review went viral.

"Marilyn Hagerty's years of reviews to be a history of dining in the America too few of us from the coasts have seen. We need to see," he tweeted.

As a result of her online fame, Hagerty wound up flying to New York to do the media rounds, including a hot dog review for the New York Times.

While there, she and Bourdain met for coffee — and she wound up getting a book deal because of it.

 

The following year, Hagerty published a book of her reviews. Bourdain edited it and even wrote the foreword.

 

In the foreword, Bourdain praised Hagerty as a hard-working, quick-witted food writer with deep knowledge of her community.

"She is never mean — even when circumstances would clearly excuse a sharp elbow, a cruel remark," he wrote. "In fact, watching Marilyn struggle to find something nice to say about a place she clearly loathes is part of the fun. She is, unfailingly, a good neighbor and good citizen first — and entertainer second."

Bourdain added that the book "kills snark dead."

"This is a straightforward account of what people have been eating — still ARE eating — in much of America," he wrote. "As related by a kind, good-hearted reporter looking to pass along as much useful information as she can — while hurting no one."

 

In an interview with BuzzFeed News on Friday, Hagerty remembered how Bourdain celebrated her work, rather than mock it.

 

She said she heard about Bourdain's death Friday morning when her son sent her an article about it. She called it "sad, shocking news."

"Anthony Bourdain spoke up for me at a time when people all over the country were making great fun of the column I write," Hagerty told BuzzFeed News. "To have a man of his stature rise up and befriend me, it meant a lot to me."

Bourdain had also laughed when he first read the review, but dropped the snark when he realized how her columns represented her community, she said.

"He told me he felt the same way when he first read it, but that he changed his way of thinking," she said. "He decided I was writing about food in America and the way people eat in the middle of the country."

Their coffee meeting in New York was the only time they ever met, and Hagerty said she still thinks about it fondly.

"You know, sometimes you go through life and...you think about all the wonderful things that happened to you," she said. "And one of the wonderful things that happened to me was when Anthony Bourdain spoke up for me and wanted to publish my columns in a book."

 

[DaysOff 7947]

Olive Garden is boil in bag dog food.

[Grade of D as in David 13253]

I watched the parts unknown Charleston on Netflix the other day. It was the first Bourdain show I've seen, but it was amazing. Jaeger shots, waffle house, Bill Murray. 

[Homercles 10205]

I power reread Kitchen Confidential last week. That book combined my love of Hunter Thompson-style exposition and love of high quality food...was fun to think back, really opened my eye to how a big time kitchen operates and how your food is prepared.

That whole recycled bread caused a bit of a stir, but to me what was most eye opening was how understanding the logistics of rotating perishables can lead you to ordering smart...when fish is delivered (and therefore fresh), unpopular items buried in the corner of a menu may not be a smart play, reading the eyes of your waiter, etc.

[Underdog 28612]

4 hours ago, DaysOff said:

Olive Garden is boil in bag dog food.

Those breadsticks, though. 

[RPM 26318]

3 hours ago, Grade of D as in David said:

I watched the parts unknown Charleston on Netflix the other day. It was the first Bourdain show I've seen, but it was amazing. Jaeger shots, waffle house, Bill Murray. 

That was a particularly good episode. Watch the No Reservations episode on New Orleans and the Parts Unknown episode on Cajun Mardi Gras. He goes off the beaten path in both and shows you some genuine cajun/creole parties.

Some of my favorite are the shows he did with Zamir Gotta, his Russian fixer.  Fucking brilliant.

[Homercles 10205]

That was a particularly good episode. Watch the No Reservations episode on New Orleans and the Parts Unknown episode on Cajun Mardi Gras. He goes off the beaten path in both and shows you some genuine cajun/creole parties.
Some of my favorite are the shows he did with Zamir Gotta, his Russian fixer.  Fucking brilliant.

God I love Zamir. That episode in...Transylvania?...was brilliant. Tony and his staff were experts at turning nothing into entertainment and insight.

[TonyTexas 10510]

I’ve been binging on the Parts Unknown episodes with Anthony and Eric Ripert. They are the funniest road buddies since Hope and Crosby. The episodes are Peru, French Alps, Sichuan and Marseille.

 

[Moby Ric 2058]

On 7/4/2018 at 7:24 AM, DaysOff said:

Olive Garden is boil in bag dog food.

Agreed it is total garbage.  What is interesting is that there is one in Times Square and it is fucking packed.  Who the fuck goes to NYC and eats at Olive Garden?!

[bigup2dahorns 3343]

19 minutes ago, Moby Ric said:

Agreed it is total garbage.  What is interesting is that there is one in Times Square and it is fucking packed.  Who the fuck goes to NYC and eats at Olive Garden?!

[Trey3216 15346]

21 hours ago, RPM said:

That was a particularly good episode. Watch the No Reservations episode on New Orleans and the Parts Unknown episode on Cajun Mardi Gras. He goes off the beaten path in both and shows you some genuine cajun/creole parties.

Some of my favorite are the shows he did with Zamir Gotta, his Russian fixer.  Fucking brilliant.

Yep, the episodes with Zamir are awesome, as well as the episodes in Brazil where they drink caipirihnas until they can't take it anymore.  Met Zamir late last year as he was touring the US launching his brand of Vodka.  It's pretty solid stuff.  Drank all day and evening with him.   Traded hugs, talked politics and philosophy, and generally about life, with the conclusion that we all are generally good people who want the same things: To live, laugh, love and enjoy our time here with our friends and family, all while making new ones along the way.  We still talk with each other on occasion.  Dude is as real as he is on tv.  

[jimmyjazz 45899]

Olive Garden may be dog food, but Bordain was right -- that kind of restaurant is where people eat in flyover country.  I grew up in a small midwestern town, and yeah, there were local diners, but to be honest they weren't very good.  They didn't have to try hard, so they didn't.  You could get meat loaf with mashed potatoes and green beans, but the meat loaf was eh, the mashed potatoes started out in a box and the green beans were out of a can.  There were a couple of "better" places where you could get a steak or maybe a plate of pasta, but to be honest, those steaks weren't any better than Saltgrass slings hundreds of times a night, and the pasta (while theoretically cooked to order) was nothing you couldn't do at home with some Barilla and a jar of Prego.

The arrival of Applebee's, Panera Bread, and Steak 'n Shake were huge events in my hometown.  People raved about those restaurants, and 20 years later, they still do.  Yes, it's corporate pablum, but the menus are at least varied a bit -- you want fajitas?  here you go -- you want a bloomin' onion?  look what we have here -- but most of all, they're actually more professional than the local joints.  They're cleaner, brighter, they don't cost more, they serve drinks.  Families go there to hang out and have fun.  They have just as much right to do so as any family eating at Elaine's.  Sure, it's like eating in The Truman Show.  Who cares?  Ya gotta eat.

[Homercles 10205]

Olive Garden may be dog food, but Bordain was right -- that kind of restaurant is where people eat in flyover country.  I grew up in a small midwestern town, and yeah, there were local diners, but to be honest they weren't very good.  They didn't have to try hard, so they didn't.  You could get meat loaf with mashed potatoes and green beans, but the meat loaf was eh, the mashed potatoes started out in a box and the green beans were out of a can.  There were a couple of "better" places where you could get a steak or maybe a plate of pasta, but to be honest, those steaks weren't any better than Saltgrass slings hundreds of times a night, and the pasta (while theoretically cooked to order) was nothing you couldn't do at home with some Barilla and a jar of Prego.
The arrival of Applebee's, Panera Bread, and Steak 'n Shake were huge events in my hometown.  People raved about those restaurants, and 20 years later, they still do.  Yes, it's corporate pablum, but the menus are at least varied a bit -- you want fajitas?  here you go -- you want a bloomin' onion?  look what we have here -- but most of all, they're actually more professional than the local joints.  They're cleaner, brighter, they don't cost more, they serve drinks.  Families go there to hang out and have fun.  They have just as much right to do so as any family eating at Elaine's.  Sure, it's like eating in The Truman Show.  Who cares?  Ya gotta eat.

[JimmyHoffa 1188]

7 hours ago, Moby Ric said:

Agreed it is total garbage.  What is interesting is that there is one in Times Square and it is fucking packed.  Who the fuck goes to NYC and eats at Olive Garden?!

 

I will take dumb people I avoid like the plague for $1000, Alex

Even thinking about being stuck in Time Square makes me ill. 

Edited July 5, 2018 by JimmyHoffa

[Brisketexan 105095]

My folks lived in Buenos Aires for several years.  A team of corporate auditors from US HQ came to town.  They left work promptly at 5:00, so they could eat dinner at 6:00, at Subway, and proudly proclaim "that's what's great about Subway -- it's the same all over the world."

Walking distance to some of the best beef and italian food in the world....and they voluntarily ate Subway.  That's who the bulk of America is.

But, for Grand Forks....Olive Garden may be a mighty fine option.  In flyover country, what jimmyjazz says is dead-on.  Often, when Chilis comes to town, it's a game-changer.  As someone who often has to travel to such locations, there isn't always a "beloved local favorite cafe that's a secret treasure."  Often, they're shitty, dirty, uninspiring places.  And the Chilis next to the hotel at least has a fresh salad or grilled salmon on the menu.

[GringoSalado 1651]

 

13 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

That's who the bulk of America is.

Bourdain made his peace with them. So should you.

[Gil Bang 25944]

My folks lived in Buenos Aires for several years.  A team of corporate auditors from US HQ came to town.  They left work promptly at 5:00, so they could eat dinner at 6:00, at Subway, and proudly proclaim "that's what's great about Subway -- it's the same all over the world."
Walking distance to some of the best beef and italian food in the world....and they voluntarily ate Subway.  That's who the bulk of America is.
But, for Grand Forks....Olive Garden may be a mighty fine option.  In flyover country, what jimmyjazz says is dead-on.  Often, when Chilis comes to town, it's a game-changer.  As someone who often has to travel to such locations, there isn't always a "beloved local favorite cafe that's a secret treasure."  Often, they're shitty, dirty, uninspiring places.  And the Chilis next to the hotel at least has a fresh salad or grilled salmon on the menu.

Yep. I worked in York PA for a time. Chili’s and Hooters were the best things there.

[phdhorn 6224]

Don't care what anyone says, Olive Garden's salads, breadsticks, and their potato sausage soup are damn good (the other pasta whatever).  I used to eat there at least once a week when I worked near the one in Brodie.  It was like $6.49 or something for their lunch special.  

Haven't eaten there in 10 years at least I must say, but I'd go there in a second and not give one flying shit what people think about it, for those items.