Death has done very little to slow down Anthony Bourdain’s career. Eight years after he died, the chef, writer and television presenter remains one of the hardest-working people in food media. In the intervening years, there have been documentaries, biographies (both authorised and unauthorised) and podcasts. Now comes Tony, rolling in the scent of Bourdain myth like a labrador in fox shit.
The biographical film starring Dominic Sessa as the American chef goes even further down the well than anyone yet – to the summer of 1975, when a 19-year-old Bourdain first discovered restaurant kitchens in a seafood shack in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It seems the Bourdain oilfield is simply too rich to abandon, and every few years, some avaricious pioneer hoists up a new derrick and discovers that there is still a little Tony left underground.
There is, of course, nothing unusual about a dead star living in the memory of his fans. But there is something more excavatory about the cult of Bourdain. Because it’s not just that the food world remembers Bourdain with poignant fondness; it’s that it seems increasingly unable to imagine itself without him.
Anthony Bourdain has become food media’s Che Guevara, an endlessly replicated icon whose component parts are now internationally recognisable. Like Guevara, whose revolutionary politics have been reduced to a Camden Market T-shirt, Bourdain has been reduced to a set of portable signifiers (the cigarettes, the booze, the leather jacket) whilst becoming ever more detached from the conditions that produced them. And they can be seen everywhere.
The Bourdain Bro has mastered his idol’s uniform with fidelity: cigs, profanity, late nights, expensive knives. He has a forearm tattoo, he affects contempt for tasting menus, and he writes long Instagram captions about how an elderly man grilling chicken hearts in Osaka has taught him something profound about mortality.
I know the type, because I spent a fair chunk of my own twenties moving through the world of kitchens and food media: writing cookbooks, running a supper club, cooking privately for anonymous European millionaires. Bourdain wasn’t why I went into cooking, but his influence was everywhere. For a certain genre of young man, he made the cook into something more glamorous than a man sweating over steak frites: damaged, literary, tattooed, sexually disreputable, nursing some substance problem. It turned a grim profession into a cool one. And those unfamiliar with the desolation – those outside the world of commercial kitchens – liked to try on bits of the costume. I probably tried on bits myself.
But the true mimics, especially those who thrive in the performative corners of Instagram and Substack, miss one crucial point: there were 20 years of struggle before that man blossomed in the early Noughties.
Anthony Bourdain was 44 when Kitchen Confidential catapulted him to fame. Long before anyone thought to point a camera at him, he spent decades as a middling chef – failing, reading, cooking brunch, getting high, getting sober, getting fired – accumulating the long, shapeless, commercially useless material from which an interesting person is eventually formed.
He lived his life first and the audience came later. That distinction matters, because the modern media career, especially in the age of social media, increasingly runs in the opposite direction. An audience can arrive in an explosive fashion early in someone’s life, usually after a few well-shot reels and a breathy knack for explaining anchovies, as if the hinterland can be acquired after the fact. Personality – or more often lack thereof – becomes something to be assembled in public.
Bourdain was never engineered to be anything other than himself. Food was the subject, sure, but only ever notionally. A meal was the vessel through which Bourdain interrogated colonialism, war, class, addiction, ageing, loneliness. His programmes were baggy, self-indulgent, happy to wander down a conversational cul-de-sac and stay there, without a scene having to justify its existence or a producer anxiously reminding the editor to make it clear what the episode is “about”.
That kind of flabbiness is close to extinction. Conventional television is anxious about holding our attention. Social media has trained us in the opposite direction: faster, shorter, more lurid. “Seven places you MUST eat in Lisbon.” “The BEST sandwiches in New York.” Or a Bourdain Bro pulling apart a cheese toastie in his parents’ £4m Shepherd’s Bush garden, whispering “insane” into his lapel mic.
Food media has never felt so intellectually underfed – that is perhaps why we keep going back to the oilfield. That culture consistently underserves an audience that evidently still desires what is no longer on the menu. Television increasingly manufactures interchangeable presenters and repeatable formats. Social media has distilled food content into recipes, lists and vertical videos; travel has become “content”. As for the writing, it is often so achingly reverential that a bowl of mashed potato cannot appear without carrying the accumulated burdens of memory, migration and empire.
The culture that inherited his aesthetic has steadily dismantled the conditions required to produce another Bourdain. Instead, we have another book, another film, another barrel of Bourdain.
That Tony centres on his adolescence is telling. We are no longer just rehashing the highlight reel; we are sifting through his prehistory for the source code, trying to identify the moment a comfortable, directionless teenager first acquired the qualities that would eventually make him Anthony Bourdain. The kitchen becomes the origin myth, the place where drugs, danger, camaraderie and romantic squalor first enter the bloodstream. For young men still drawn to Bourdain, that is an intoxicating proposition.
Perhaps he really was unique. The dead are often helped by being unavailable for comparison. But the unending process of his canonisation also feels like an admission of failure by the industry that inherited him, which has spent eight years producing thousands of people visibly influenced by Bourdain while finding remarkably few capable of filling the space he left behind.
And so, we have Tony. We tell ourselves this is because he is irreplaceable. The more embarrassing possibility is that the food world has simply failed to come up with anyone else.
[Further reading: Tony cannot make Bourdain cool]
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