What Anthony Bourdain Was Really Like, According To The People That Knew Him

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Anthony Bourdain was among the towering figures in a generation of food celebrities who elevated their passion and field to heights rarely even previously considered. After working in kitchens as a line cook and chef for decades, Bourdain started writing about food — what people eat, what it's like to work in big-city restaurants — and it made him into a star. Then he took his talents to television, hosting a series of globetrotting, food-based travelogues, like "A Cook's Tour," "No Reservations," "The Layover," and "Parts Unknown." That made Anthony Bourdain a superstar among the public and one of the most lauded and respected figures in the world-spanning realm of prominent food professionals.

Bourdain's moving, impassioned portrayals that showed the interconnection of the human race through food made good TV, but it also made him a lot of friends. Many famous chefs and food personalities not only liked Bourdain's work, but they liked Bourdain, too. Over time, they got to know the real person behind the leather jacket and often world-weary punk rock cynicism he'd held onto since his youth. They were all certainly devastated when Bourdain died by suicide in 2018, and many told the world about their friend as a way to eulogize him. Here's what Anthony Bourdain was like behind the scenes, according to his famous friends.

Nigella Lawson and Anthony Bourdain both elevated food on television. Lawson made cooking shows that were cinematic and witty for British TV while Bourdain added his literary wanderlust to American cable. They first met at a dinner in London in the late 1990s, but didn't really hit it off until they both signed on to make the food game show "The Taste" in the 2010s, and only because the other agreed to do it.

"He was a very introverted person, which people misunderstood in a way, because of his facility with people, but he was always a slightly detached presence," Lawson said in "Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography" (via Bon Appétit). Lawson said she loved being around Bourdain. "When you're young, what you want of people is that they're funny and clever. And then as you get older, you realize kindness is important. But it's not often that you meet people who are funny, clever, and kind. And he was."

Lawson added that Bourdain had a unique voice and perspective. "I think he had a great gift of articulating his thoughts in a way that was very direct and very highly charged, yet with a calmness as well," she told the Canton Repository. "Every sentence was beautifully weighted [...] and his every thought was so ably transmitted that one got the idea behind it, the wit in it that made you smile as he said something."

Anthony Bourdain teamed up with another long-time chef friend to help form the panel of experts on "The Taste": Ludo Lefebvre, who began working in highly-regarded French restaurants when he was a teenager. He and Bourdain often palled around together, both on TV and not. While he filmed several shows with Bourdain, the best project was working on "No Reservations" together when the pair traveled to Lefebvre's hometown of Burgundy, the chef told Mashed.

During filming of the 2012 "No Reservations" installment, according to Lefebvre, Bourdain was unfailingly kind and curious. "Anthony is very humble — a very nice guy. I mean, he was very smart and had a big heart. He loved everybody," Lefebvre recalled. "Just to be around him and see how he was with people, it was a good example for me in my life, how to be with people, how to talk with people, and to really listen to people. He was really listening to everything about people. He was very smart about that."

Anthony Bourdain worked steadily in television for over 15 years, and nobody worked closely or more often with him than director and producer Tom Vitale. The TV maker traveled with Bourdain around the world and helped shape the chef's persona and sensibility across dozens of episodes of "No Reservations" and "Parts Unknown." All that preparation and down time, when the cameras weren't rolling, across many years, allowed for a closeness between the two professionals. After Bourdain's book, Vitale wrote a memoir, "In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain" to process it all when it suddenly came to an end.

"Tony always seemed to be in a hurry, like he might disappear at any second. He'd only ever smoke about half a cigarette before stamping it out. I asked him once why he did that. 'Old habit from my restaurant days,' he said. 'Gotta get back to the kitchen and see what's f***ed up,'" Vitale recalled in his memoir (via Vanity Fair). "My relationship with Tony was complicated. Tony was hard to be around, and painful to be away from. He was intellectually stimulating beyond compare, and his energy would suck you dry. Frustrating, difficult, and even terrifying at times, but always fascinating, bigger than life."

The book "World of BBQ" ought to be kept by smokers, as its author, Rodney Scott, is a James Beard Award-winning pitmaster and certified expert on the subject of grilling, smoking, and saucing meat. Scott met and befriended Anthony Bourdain despite the demands and rigors of television production. Trained in the traditional, Southern, whole hog barbecue method, one of the first times that Scott appeared on TV, and earned a tacit approval from the influential Bourdain, was when he guested on the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina-taped episode of "Parts Unknown."

"That day we had so much fun. I remember being in a hurry and we had to hurry up and film it. And when they set up the tables and they put the cold beer down, I was like, this guy is cool!" Scott remembered in an interview with Mashed. "And we sat down and we ate and we just had this nice conversation, and I've always admired his just coolness to everything. He's just nonchalant, laid back and he enjoys eating."

One of the most acclaimed classically trained French chefs and head of the kitchen at Le Bernardin for decades, Eric Ripert is the very definition of esteemed chef. Around the same time that Ripert was rising through the ranks, Bourdain became the chef at Brasserie Les Halles, and his chef memoir "Kitchen Confidential" was the first book Ripert read in English. They appeared on TV together in a 2002 episode of Bourdain's "A Cook's Tour," and were often inseparable since. It was Ripert who discovered Bourdain's body when he died in 2018 at age 61. Ripert and chef José Andrés called for June 25 to be "Bourdain Day" to celebrate their friend and colleague's life and work.

"Anthony was a very loyal friend, very noble, very generous with his fans. I have never seen someone so generous and spending so much time with them, signing books, taking pictures," Ripert told NBC's "Today." Bourdain was also demonstrably funny on television, but in a subtle, arch way. He was different off-camera. "He had a very dry sense of humor," Ripert said of Bourdain at a Culinary Institute of America tribute (via YouTube), going on to tell the story of how the late writer was the person responsible for editing the French chef's Wikipedia bio to identify him as a "surrender monkey."

Andy Ricker is a chef who helped put Portland on the food map, responsible for Pok Pok and its cult-status Vietnamese chicken wings. When Ricker asked a question at one of his book signings in 2010, Anthony Bourdain instantly clocked that Ricker was a chef. Four years later, Bourdain included Ricker in a "Parts Unknown" episode taped in Thailand, using him as a consultant for his expertise on that country's cuisine.

"He was cool as hell. He was a great writer. He told our stories and he recognized us as cooks. He embodied what we were about," Ricker told Explore Parts Unknown. "A lot of cooks and chefs out there call him Uncle Tony because he was just, like, the wise f*****g uncle that you can go to for advice." Ricker recalled a time when in Thailand with Bourdain, they encountered a tourist trap bar staging theatrical muay thai fights, which Bourdain wouldn't roll film on. "He turned around and we walked out. He had integrity, and he wasn't willing to compromise for the sake of entertainment."

The death of Anthony Bourdain was a sad milestone in the tragic real-life story of Andrew Zimmern, a Travel Channel star himself. Zimmern headlined "Bizarre Foods" to Bourdain's "No Reservations," and they enjoyed a rivalry that developed into mutual respect.

"As his friendly competitor during the first four or five years we were on the network together, growing our friendship, there was a lot of competition," Zimmern told Mashed. "Over the last four or five years of his life, we developed a deeper friendship," he added. 

"People saw him traveling and doing food, but we would spend hours together and we would never talk about that. There was never a better person to talk about music and movies and social justice and any of that with," Zimmern told Eater. "I'm a transparent person and sober a long time and deal with my own mental health issues, and I try to have honest conversations with people in my life. He was an incredible sounding board, a gracious and kind friend to me."

Anthony Bourdain ate in a lot of restaurants, but the one he liked best was St. John, in London. "I loved absolutely everything about it: the attitude, the look, the food, the wine," he told The Guardian. His friendship with chef and proprietor Fergus Henderson, a master at cooking offal, spanned decades and also included Henderson's wife and fellow chef Margot Henderson.

"The first moment Anthony came into my life was at St. John," Fergus Henderson recalled in The Local Tongue. "It was one of those nights in the kitchen when everyone was just a bit down a bit gloomy. But help was at hand. Anthony rocked up to the kitchen, with a personality bigger than life, got down on his knees and said, 'you guys rock.' Just a few words of encouragement brought happiness and equilibrium back. He had a knack of bringing energy, fun and games to the table. The room was always better with Anthony in it."

"He's a very warm, funny, clever, brilliant guy. Very nervous as well," Margot Henderson told the "Hungry" podcast (via YouTube). "We did a dinner at the Groucho once and he would be asked a question and he could take it and go, but at the same time his hands were shaking under the table [...] He was a very sensitive, lovely person."

Chefs and TV food stars Anthony Bourdain and Marcus Samuelsson ran in similar circles, but they became friends when the former asked the latter to join him on an episode of CNN's "Parts Unknown" produced in Ethiopia, where the chef was born. Bourdain and Samuelsson also served as hosts, judges, and team leaders on the ABC reality-competition TV series "The Taste."

During that work trip for "Parts Unknown," Samuelsson felt that he got to know the part of Bourdain that wasn't expressed on television. "He was not the one that was the happiest in the hotel room bar or anything like that. He was the happiest when we're sitting in those huts, eating with the locals, whatever was served," Samuelsson explained to Mashed. "He was much happier being with the people, in the people, of the people, out eating and discovering something [he'd] never tasted before and asking questions."

Anthony Bourdain's food-based travels took him through Los Angeles, where he encountered beloved local food truck chef Roy Choi, who ran the acclaimed Kogi BBQ. Bourdain helped Choi move up to the next level of food celebrity when he elected to publish Choi's memoir and cookbook "L.A. Son" on his Ecco label in 2013. Bonding over food, the duo quickly grew close.

"It was kind of like a relationship I had with the homies on the street, right? So I already knew he's an extremely well-read, witty, verbally proficient human being, you know, like the way he looked at the world, and I wasn't interested in getting into philosophical arguments or discussions with him," Choi said on "People's Party with Talib Kweli" (via YouTube.) "I could spend hours with him and not say a word. Those are the relationships for me that mean the most is when you can sit on a couch with someone and just not even say a word, you know, and just look over and the only thing you say [is] 'you hungry?' and then you get up and you go eat, and that's kind of the relationship I had with Tony."

One of the most notable and successful food world stars of the 21st century, David Chang amassed a network of more than a dozen restaurants, including Momofuku, also a brand for a line of packaged foods. He's also an inquisitive food journalist and TV host in the vein of Anthony Bourdain, who brought Chang, a very good pal, collaborator, and colleague (they made PBS's "The Mind of a Chef" together) onto a couple of episodes of "No Reservations."

Chang connected with Bourdain over a shared history with depression, and he felt saddened and baffled when the iconic chef died by suicide. "It wasn't supposed to happen to him. That was supposed to happen to me. He was supposed to hold it together for all of us. All I know is it happened to Tony with all he had going for him. It could happen to anybody," Chang told People as he launched his memoir "Eat a Peach." He also revealed in the memoir an encouraging email that Bourdain had sent Chang when he felt defeated after the failure of his magazine, "Lucky Peach." "Be a fool. For love. For yourself. What you think MIGHT possibly make you happy. Even for a little while," Bourdain wrote. "Whatever the cost or good sense might dictate."

Anthony Bourdain was an outspoken critic of Michelin, particularly after Daniel, the restaurant and passion project of his friend, Daniel Boulud, was demoted down to a two-star establishment. The pair's tight friendship dated back to the 1990s, when Boulud paid a visit to Brasserie Les Halles, Bourdain's much talked about French bistro and steakhouse. Boulud had steak frites, the specialty of the house, and he and Bourdain got to know each other many meals together at one another's restaurants. Daniel was the site of Bourdain's infamous and illegal ortolan dinner he wrote about in his book "Medium Raw," according to Boulud (via YouTube).

"I think Tony was a genuine, curious man. Tony was always very curious about where you come from, who you are, curious about the food you do. Tony also was a purist and he always appreciated people that could dig in their soul, dig in their sort of background and make food that talked to him," Boulud told the "Friends of Anthony Bourdain" podcast.