Anthony Bourdain: A kindred spirit

An ode to Bourdain and my brother and our shared love for cooking, travel, and connection - and a really great bottle of gamay

Photo taken at a knife store on Valencia in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood

I wrote this essay several years ago in a coffee shop in Venice Beach before my bartending shift. I worked down the road at the neighborhood joint Rose Café. I left it pretty much as is. Made up words and all. I always felt a connection with Bourdain and we share the same birthday which is today, June 25th. I felt compelled to share as I wrote this with the same sense of wanderlust I have to this day. An ode to a character and person who helped me become more myself.

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I’m not a chef. Bourdain never knew me. Had I mailed the letter I drafted last summer he might have known my name. But I never did.

Anthony was a colossus, a king, a big brother. He brought the food and cultures of every corner of the world, even the corner deli of your home town, closer to our minds and mouths. He brought them within reach. I still feel cold remembering the ice shack in Canada with the guys from Joe Beef but full hearing them share stories and memories about the food they were eating, what it meant to them, and why it’s still important.

I remember feeling pride for a nation when hearing what a KFC knockoff fast food restaurant meant for the young Libyan fighters. I was insanely hungry that same episode when he was eating sfinz, a Libyan frybread with an egg inside, and hearing how social media was used for good, in the moment, to fight a war.

As far as wars are concerned it seems chefs know all about them. On personal levels chefs do battle day in and day out. It’s often struggles than can lead a man, a woman, to the kitchen. A place that is both comforting and harsh, artist collective and warzone.

Anthony had addictions and described them with no remorse. Down to the gritty details. Smoking paint chips at one point hoping they had any amount of drug residue on them. This was part of his story and he didn’t leave it out.

I first picked up Kitchen Confidential in Alsace, France, out of my sisters’ backpack, who said I should read it. I was 14 and it took me places. Everything I’d read up to that point had been school based. Not counting biographies on my favorite bands Guns ‘n’ Roses and the Grateful Dead. I’m no rock star but I did love to cook. The book was real, it was gritty, and I understood the characters. My brother had been one of them.

My brother had passed away that year. He was going to be a chef.

I laughed and I’m sure I cried reading that book. In some respects, it read less like story and more like trajectory. I always had cooking in my mind as a possible job.

I think of my brother and I remember what we ate. We’d order pizza from across town. These nights at home, eating thick crusted pizza, with enough ranch to drown a small animal, were rooted in stories. From the drive to the pizza shack, hearing of adventures and conquests beyond my young ears, to our late nights of video games and double features, featuring anything and everything. Every activity pulsed with adventure.

I read Kitchen Confidential and was reminded of the kind of characters and stories my brother used to share, from his time in restaurants, and in life. Rooted in fact or fiction I wanted to be a part of them. At the very least I wanted to create them. My young mind, colored by the flavors and textures of travel and the rewarding daydreams fed by stories and films alike. I often found myself in my kitchen or with him past my bedtime going back and forth on movie or book ideas. Or the best thing we’d eaten. I didn’t do these things with anybody else.

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Gone.

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Maybe as a kid you had an imaginary friend. Or maybe you had a dog or maybe just the real thing. That kind of imagination can get lost with experience and as our thoughts become rooted more in reality so do our heroes. Still childlike in their origins but with more to base it off of.

Anthony’s stories fulfilled that lost sense of adventure. Not just the details, the way he turned a chefs’ life into a romance between chef and knife. The style itself was enough to open the floodgates. Hero. At once, brother from another mother.

Finding family outside of blood, sometimes while spilling it, characterizes many a chef. Anthony, in a juxtapositing way, felt like a long lost brother to me as he did for many people by talking like he did and sharing the stories he did, in the way he did. He had a style all his own. It was his own and it was genuine.

He galvanized a brotherhood of lost souls. For myself he wasn’t an ideal or rock star. He was a compatriot to lost dreams and forgotten conversations.

Even the indelibles are lost with time, only to be roused again by a kindred spirit. Bringing your spirit animal back to life like a spiritual trip on ayahuasca led by the author, the medicine man, Dr. Bourdain.

This is my experience, my own rendering. I suspect many chefs, writers, daydreamers, worldshakers, have their own. The common thread, is the thread of scar tissue. The scars each with their own stories.

Can you imagine the pride, the mixed emotions, the longing, felt by a young reader, or viewer, watching an episode on their heritage country they’ve yet to visit, pondering the family they’ve never met? Separated as much by bureaucracy and politics as by the oceans. Alive, but dead. Now, slightly more real.

Anthony woke up people’s sense of adventure with his own adventures and storytelling, as much as my brother did with me. He brought far away countries, their people’s stories, and their food to life. For some that meant a brief break from their day and a want to travel. For others it meant the longing to reconnect with lost family, forgotten food, and a new direction as a chef.

He was open about his scars. He showed the sense of brotherhood that exists for chefs, bartenders, servers, restaurant industry, and as Tom Colicchio said the best was yet to come.

As the presence of any person so big, that leaves so suddenly, we are left wondering, left thinking, what now? The rug pulled out from under us, our footing lost. We wonder, naturally, how will we carry on? How do we fill the gap that now exists? Thinking ourselves erudite as we briefly seek to replace someone’s presence with a dish of theirs on our menu or a quote on our Instagram.

Doing the greatest honor to our gone-for-gooders we must simply remember them. The best parts of them that inspired you and let them keep inspiring you. Use your inspirations to create your own stories, your own recipes, and moments. His stories are taken while ours have yet to be written. Use the victories, use the scars. Even the paint chips.

And in honor of food and drink I drank this incredibly lovely gamay while catching up with an old dear friend at Cadet in Napa. One I used to be close to and then time did its thing and we rarely spoke for years. Until last year when we hungout and, it being a crazy year, finally we got to catchup again the other night. And the best part is now him and his wife live in my town. I promised to teach them cocktails.

The conversation was as good as it ever was and almost five hours after I met up with him and his wife, one charcuterie board, and surprisingly only one bottle of wine later, we made our ways…to In n Out. Because it was 9:30 pm in Napa and the only thing open was that and Nations. Somebody get this town some Prevagen.

With love and hope,

Kevin