Tony came out last month and, as a food writer, I was seemingly obliged to watch it (I wrote about its costuming and the real man’s style for CNN). I didn’t particularly care for it, probably because the film was depicting the “young lout” version of Anthony Bourdain instead of how we’d gotten to know him in Kitchen Confidential, which was in Bourdain’s own voice and with his critical bits of hindsight and humor. This could be a failure of my imagination but Tony as played by Dominic Sessa was a little too much of a piss-ant for me to root for in any way, and the story required the viewer to want him to win… something, in some way.

But I didn’t like Roadrunner, either, the documentary about his life, which I was assigned to write about as well and found to be exploitative and just downright a little weird. (I’m certainly sensitive to how dudes who die deaths of despair are depicted because of my own trauma.)

The thing is that I want to write about the effects of Bourdain’s actual writing and TV work rather than how he gets filtered into a character (or caricature, as in the case of meme culture). I’m best at writing about his words and work, because those are what is important, not who he was as a person; frankly the more I have seen any excavation on his personal life, the more grossed out I am by anyone with an inclination to know that kind of crap.

I have a new appreciation for this now that I’ve published a memoir: I’m careful with the version of myself that I give the world, because I’m careful about what I want people to consider my work and thus what is up for critique. I assume the same of other writers, and I try to act in good faith about their work as well—and I think I’ve gotten better at this over time, though like Bourdain, I was once too much of a loud dick about famous food people. I’m careful now about what is considered text. I also know that “famous” doesn’t really mean anything anymore.

After seeing Tony, I noticed that Parts Unknown was on HBO, so I put it on while nursing a hangover and tried to remember what it was like to watch the show, all of his shows, when they were on TV, and the conclusion I came to is that without him, there is no me; once it was clear that I was pretty interested in food, I imagined a life for myself based on a blueprint he developed, but I also wanted my autonomy. I don’t know whether I would’ve thought there must be space for the kind of writing I wanted to do (which took me a very long time to claw my way toward publishing) if there wasn’t a model for how taking food seriously inevitably opens one up to thinking about how its tentacles are in every major facet of life. (I’m thinking about vernacular, a way of making food compelling to people who haven’t yet bought in; among academics and gourmands, this had already been making itself obvious.)

I mean, look at how silly the idea that this wasn’t common knowledge is, how trite? This is trite in large part thanks to Bourdain, and I do worry that without him around, it’s been easy for food media to settle into something a bit more comfortable and consumption-led. It’s a question I’ll be considering in conversation with other indie food media publishers at an upcoming IIJ event.

It’s impossible to be Bourdain, to replicate Bourdain, and even if he’s become a caricature in the culture, respect is owed to the significance of the work he did in expanding the conversation around food in popular culture for the everyday viewer, even when maybe he failed—though I think he was always honest as to what he could give. To err is human and all that shit. I saw a girl on TikTok say she fast-forwards through every political part of his shows because he wasn’t a leftist.

Questionable desires for ideological purity aside, it’s telling, of course, that it’s impossible to put a more radical political-economic critique onto mainstream TV—but it is mainstream TV. His work didn’t open up possibilities for broader discourse on food to become more accessible to the masses; it opened up the minds of suits to the idea of sending Stanley Tucci around Italy repeatedly.

I also think it’s good that I never interacted with him as a person beyond one short phone interview to promote the Jeremiah Tower documentary he’d produced, which I concluded by asking him if he’d ever be going to Puerto Rico again; he was coincidentally going that next week. All I know is the text, not the man. Even so, I have never in my life been so sad about the passing of a celebrity.

There was one assignment I was given to write about post-Bourdain travel TV in which I said that he gave people “food studies 101,” meaning the way he presented food through his shows was connected to other aspects of culture, the political-economic conditions of wherever he was, the agriculture, etc. Food wasn’t just on the plate; it was a reliable conduit to all these other realms. The magazine didn’t end up running the piece, but I published it here in 2024 under the title, “What Was Parts Unknown?”

I started to say “Bourdain Studies” with a smirk in 2023 when I was invited to give a talk at the Terroir Symposium in Calgary, and I talked about what kind of hospitality is owed those who choose not to eat meat for ethical or environmental reasons. 

And I guess I continue to do Bourdain Studies, whether on assignment or off: He was mentioned in our Hard to Swallow Salon, and Tunde Wey had written very critically of Bourdain’s visit to his home city of Lagos; I return to his work whenever I want to get the lay of the land on a place or food question, like why rich people enjoy bad restaurants or because I’m teaching culinary tourism; and I’m always doing scholarly journal inquiries into mentions of him, to see what they’re thinking about food people, of whom he remains representative. I’ve read every piece in which he’s mentioned in the Gastronomica archives, and it’s always nice to stumble on something new to me while I have institutional access to databases, like “The celebrity chef phenomenon: a (reflective) commentary” from a 2019 edition of the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.

I think about Bourdain a lot by accident of generation and interests and because, I guess, I’m also properly situated to truly appreciate someone who’s erudite and crass in equal measure. (Perhaps Tony annoyed me because I too was a pretentious prick.) Though his legacy has to be wrestled with and I still wonder whether anyone will ever become as famous as him for talking about food—and who would it be? And would they be as good at it?—I really wouldn’t have it any other way. And so I’ll probably keep returning to his work, and I’ll probably keep taking every assignment offered about it, even though I once claimed I’d stop. Who am I to decide when Bourdain Studies dies? And hey, who am I to turn down a paycheck?