After about 1986, I would say, I never saw Tony again. I think he did get, um, grouchier, shall we say? I think there was more alcohol involved at some point, but we were all so self-centered and self-serving back then. It was, from my perspective, just a case of drifting apart. We were more interested in getting high than keeping hold of relationships, friendships, you know; that’s just the way it was.
It wasn’t exactly clear when I first met Tony, but it did become clear, from hanging out with him, that he was so much more multidimensional than just your average chef. He was just so much broader than that. He had his interest in literature, and culture, and life in general. I mean, he struck me as a quintessential New Yorker, and he wasn’t from New York, but he just embodied that global-citizen thing, before he had all his stamps on his passport, way before he kind of had that going on.
I really did look up to Tony in a lot of ways. He was this brilliant guy, doing stuff, young, creative, and very intelligent. In the short amount of time that I knew him, he made a really big impression on me, and that was at a time before he was famous, and there wasn’t that Pavlovian response that people give to celebrities, you know?
LENNY MOSSE: I still use things in the kitchen that I learned from those guys. Tony was one of my formative mentors in New York kitchens. I learned a lot about the finer aspects of cooking, the restaurant business, cutting out the bullshit. I learned how to create a team, a cohesive fighting unit.
5
“He Just Wanted to Be a Writer in the Worst Way”
Meeting Joel Rose
JOEL ROSE, WRITING COLLABORATOR: I had this little literary magazine called Between C & D. I had some friends write for it—Patrick McGrath, [my ex-wife] Catherine [Texier]. I wrote for it, a bunch of people wrote for it, and I brought it to Saint Mark’s Bookshop and East Side Books. I did all the covers by hand, because it was the old days, you couldn’t do anything on a computer, really. It was all dot matrix, Courier print, but they were beautiful.
One day after the first issue was out, in 1983 or 1984, I got a submission; it was a comic book. It was from somebody I didn’t know—Anthony Bourdain. Nobody knew him. And I wrote back that it was “interesting.” I said, “Your drawings sort of suck, but your writing doesn’t.” And the next thing I knew, somebody was ringing the buzzer downstairs. I went down, and it was Bourdain, in his chef whites. He had run over to Second Street to score [heroin] and he was high and he came over. The address was on the magazine. And he stayed for like two or three hours.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE, NEW YORKER WRITER WHO PROFILED TONY IN 2017: When Tony talked about his early days as a writer—one of the really big questions in my mind was, you hear the story that Tony has told a million times: all he ever wanted to be is a chef. He works his way through kitchens. He’s got a crew that kind of collects around him; they’re total badasses. Their biggest ambition is to work one perfect brunch shift. He really made it sound as though he wasn’t hustling all that time to get out of the kitchen. I didn’t buy it, instinctively. What I was wondering was, “Were you a frustrated writer all that time?” And he basically said he wasn’t, and then I went to NYU to find the archives of Between C & D, the downtown zine that he wrote for.
There’s all these letters from young Tony to Joel Rose, where he’s so fucking hungry . . . I’ve gotten these emails from people. I used to write these emails myself. It’s the young writer who is trying to sound brash and casual, but actually is super needy and wants affirmation. Playing it cool, but hitting the jokes a little too hard. And it’s all those things that I didn’t associate with Tony, but he was that guy.
JOEL ROSE: Tony and I just hit it off right from the start. We just became really close friends. He didn’t know any writers. He always said it: “You’re the only writer I know.” He just wanted to be a writer in the worst way, and I thought he was a terrific writer.
Aside from that first time, and maybe a few more times, I didn’t really see him strung out or anything like that. Truthfully, when we were together, we talked about writing.
We stayed real close. I followed him from every shithole restaurant he worked in, you know, just every place. I think I was in every kitchen he ever worked in.
I don’t want to say he looked up to me, but he trusted me. He talked a lot about his insecurities as a writer. “Can I do this? Do I have anything to say?”
He was always so brilliant. His mind was so sharp. He was a catalog of stuff that was astonishing. He would just entertain me. And as much as I was a mentor to him, he was a mentor to me. He turned me on to so much stuff.
While he had insecurities about his writing, he was a good writer, right from the start. He had a voice that he could access.
JOEL ROSE: I was so adamantly against him taking that course with Gordon Lish.* I thought he had nothing to teach him and could only hurt him in his writing. I thought Tony was a natural writer, a dedicated writer. He knew not where he was going—he couldn’t possibly—but he was willing to figure it out. He was already good, and I was afraid that someone as ego driven as Lish would confuse his own egocentric feelings and pollute Tony’s work.
JAMES GRAHAM: As soon as he took Gordon Lish’s class, it was like someone joining a cult. He started dressing differently, he started getting his hair done differently, he changed the kind of cigarettes he smoked. He became very aloof and referred to himself as a writer. He was a bit insufferable at times. It’s hard for me to say then what his poison was; there was quite a lot of cocaine going around back then.
JOEL ROSE: I don’t think anybody had any influence on Tony except for Tony. For all his insecurities, I felt that the backbone was very strong. That’s what I was trying to tell him. “Wherever you’re going, whatever trip you’re on, just go there.” Because I knew he was on a very special track right from the start. I was always cheering him on.
I think he dreamed of being a crime novelist. He thought that was an incredible place to be, if he could ever achieve that. And he really did.
NANCY BOURDAIN: Tony always wanted to be with the in-crowd, and he usually found it, even in Saint Maarten. We used to stay at a lovely hotel, only twenty rooms. The Oyster Pond Hotel. It was very small, and at night—it used to be quite something in its heyday, but by then it was a quite staid place, a lot of old people, and we were young then. And at night we’d hear laughter and partying and fun from across the inlet, and finally we got on the scooter and tracked it down.
There were two wrong bars first, and one of them really was like Star Wars—there were all these really weird creatures, nobody looked alike, and they looked like they’d been there since the stone age. And then we found the Dinghy Dock, which was right across from us. He used to write there, and that became a big hangout.
6
“They Got Some Money, and It Just Went into Their Veins”
Heroin
CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: We were having lunch with my dad, shortly after [my wife] Jennifer’s grandmother died. She had lived most of her life in DC but wanted to be buried in Queens. So we were with my dad, having a nice lunch or something, and—he had a nice, very resonating kind of voice. He would have been a very good classical radio announcer. Jennifer asked, “How do they get a body from Washington to New York?” Our dad looked at her, and said, in this very serious tone, “Well, first thing they do is they need to dress it completely in a clown costume.” That was him to a T, totally.
Our dad never took care of himself. He was never hugely overweight, but he was always overweight. He never got exercise, and he smoked. There were always people who smoked more, but he smoked. Anyway, he dropped dead at two in the morning one night, in 1987. We got a call from his partner, and Tony and I ran to his apartment, you know; it was too late.
He was penniless when he died. He had zero assets, and in fact, I think he owed the IRS like $15,000, but his aunt had been one of those people who squirreled away money for fifty years, from the Depression on, and had left a trust fund. My dad was the beneficiar
y of the trust fund while he was alive, and then after he died, Tony and I each got a chunk of money, about a quarter-million dollars for each of us. I mean, this was not money to sneeze at. I ended up using mine to buy my first house.
NANCY BOURDAIN: Tony was bad with money. When his dad died [in 1987], he inherited a little bit of money, and it was annoying to me, because we were married then, and he would just spend money like—it was stuff for us, a TV or something, but not practical. You want to be in on big decisions, but once he made up his mind, he was gonna do it anyway, if you were on board or you weren’t.
CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: Tony and Nancy were talking about buying a little casita, a little two-room house in a project under construction in Saint Maarten that was mostly for tourists who wanted to buy a pied-à-terre down there. He said, “Yeah, we’re just gonna go live there, and I’ll be able to go to the beach every day, and sprawl out, and tan, and find some kind of a job in a restaurant down there, if need be.” He was really, really on that for a few months. I mean, he had this whole offering document from this sponsor and everything.
He let himself be talked out of the idea by our mom. She was definitely down on it. I remember her saying, “That’s a crazy idea.” And I remember him saying, “I should’ve never let her talk me down from that idea.” He was very, very angry with her for quite a while after that. I think they went through a time where he didn’t want to talk to her, because she’d talked him out of his dream. I can’t remember how long it went on. I mean, they would periodically go for anywhere from three months to a year without talking.
JEFF FORMOSA: When [Tony and Nancy] were really junkies, they wouldn’t answer the phone. When Tony’s dad died, they got some money, and it just went into their veins. They were reclusive, they would just cop dope, and they went on vacations, and then they were destitute again.
SCOTT BRYAN, NEW YORK CHEF: I knew that Tony went to CIA and was classically trained, but he always went for the money. He never went through the rigors that I did. I worked at fucking Gotham. I worked at Bouley. I worked with Gray Kunz at Lepinasse. I worked with Tom Colicchio at Mondrian. I worked at Le Bernardin, with Eric [Ripert]. Tony never went through that sort of hardship. He would work in the West Village for that guy Bigfoot [Andy Menschel], who would pay him $700 cash a week, while I worked like an idiot, making $400 for eighty hours a week. I think Tony saw himself as more of a writer than a chef.
SAM GOLDMAN: It didn’t matter how much money any of us made; it just didn’t matter. If you’re a dope fiend, it’s gone.
NANCY BOURDAIN: Tony was always generous, with our house, with our apartment. We had a friend at the Supper Club, when he worked there, who got very sick. He went to the hospital. When he got out, whoever was taking care of his apartment had lost his apartment, had never paid rent for three months, and he had no place to go, so he came to live with us. It was kind of a fait accompli. I knew the guy. It worked out very well. I was very fond of him. But we did that a lot. You know, people would need help, he’d help them.
LENNY MOSSE: When I had a fire at my apartment building and we had no heat, Tony let me stay with him.
NANCY BOURDAIN: There was another guy who had come [to Supper Club] on work release, and we were going to the islands. We needed someone to water the plants or watch the cat or whatever, and Tony let this guy Clarence do it. I think a week, that’s all he knew him, but he was willing to gamble on that.
He never said anything to me that this guy had been work-released, but he said, “You better take care of all your jewelry.” I didn’t have a lot, but what I had, I liked. Tony had a gold pocket watch that had either been his grandfather’s or his father’s, which Clarence did steal. I think he was an addict, and the temptation was too strong. Tony mentioned it to him, and he admitted what he had done, but it was too late to get it back.
I don’t think that was the end of trusting people in that way. Tony helped people out, and we had a few bad experiences. There was one guy we put up for a while who didn’t steal or anything, but he was just kind of a pig, and he started a fire on the mattress he was sleeping on.
ALEX GETMANOV: There was one year when I needed a place to stay in New York, in the summer. Gladys [Bourdain] was in Paris, and Tony sublet her apartment on West Sixty-Eighth to me. It was across the street from a firehouse, and my god, the alarm would go off every three minutes. I never got used to it, couldn’t stand it anymore, so I moved out.
As I was walking out, I had a suitcase, and as I was opening the front door, guess who’s standing there? Gladys. She didn’t know I’d been subletting her apartment, and she never saw a penny of the money, as far as I know. This was at a point when Tony had started his heroin hobby, and he wasn’t the most reliable person at that point. He and I drifted apart because of his heavy heroin use; I couldn’t deal with it anymore.
SAM GOLDMAN: Tony and Nancy rolled out of heroin and into the crack thing; they weren’t great company then. They were the first people I knew to get into treatment through methadone, and to this day I think without methadone he wouldn’t be alive. Or rather, he would’ve died a lot sooner.
By the time he got off dope and was doing crack, the quality of restaurant jobs he could get was not great, but for some reason, in the restaurant business, especially in New York, you can’t get blackballed. You can always get another job. I’d get fired and go work for him. He’d get fired and go work for me. We’d both get fired and go work somewhere else together.
LENNY MOSSE: Between Sam, Alex, and Tony, there was never a time— When you were unemployed, if you didn’t want to be, they’d say, “I need a body,” which meant it was an unskilled job, or, “I need a pair of hands,” which meant they were looking to fill a slightly more skilled role. Later, I actually gave Tony a few gigs, after he had fallen on hard times. I fed him one Thanksgiving, right before I left New York. I had to get away from all that.
SAM GOLDMAN: The three of us stayed really tight, until it became impossible to be in my company, because he cleaned up way before I did. I thought it would be a good idea to start drinking, instead of doing heroin, and I became intolerable.
Before I [got sober], I really saw a lot of people turn their back on me. What happens is, it’s too fucking painful to watch us kill ourselves. I remember, with great clarity, when Tony just threw his hands up in the air and said, “I can’t take you anymore.”
When I eventually went to prison, he was just lifesaving. He was encouraging me to write, to read books; it was a time in my life when I had run out of friends, and he and Nancy were the only ones who took my call.
7
“I’m Tony Motherfucking Bourdain—You Got a Problem?”
New York in the Nineties
JOEL ROSE: He loved the kitchen, and hated it. It was so taxing on him. He loved his staff, just loved them, and counted on them, and talked about them a lot, but he was worried about being on the line when he got older, that he would physically not be able to do it. He worried about him and Nancy just paying the bills. He had nothing, and was frightened. And he just dreamed of [living] that life he later wrote about in Gone Bamboo. That was his dream, one day, to be able to just lie on the beach and have a cocktail in some shack in the sand.
STEVEN TEMPEL, NEW YORK KITCHEN COLLEAGUE: I met Tony in 1993, at the Supper Club, and became his sous chef. I brought my friend Adam [from Kitchen Confidential, “Adam Real Last Name Unknown”] in. Tony hated us. He was always begging [executive chef] John [Tesar] to fire both of us. We’d be in the middle of a rush, and I’d lean over and whip a tomato at the line and hit Adam in the side of the head. I was twenty-three years old.
I come in and do my work and don’t listen to you, but you can’t complain because I’m getting it done well. Eventually Tony stopped hating me. During service, he would just look at me, and I knew what he meant, what he wanted me to do. We would go out every single night after work and party, but then it would be one a.m., and he would go home, and I’d stay out all night.
&n
bsp; When we were together, he always let me know that I was doing a good job. He bought me knives. I was thinking about buying myself a Global [knife], and the next morning, there’s an $80 Global sitting on my workstation. That was a lot of money at the time.
PATTI JACKSON, NEW YORK KITCHEN COLLEAGUE: Tony was such a raconteur, such a great storyteller. And he was super friendly. I mean, you know, you couldn’t not start talking to him. We’d hang out, and drink beers, and tell stories. And when Coco Pazzo Teatro opened, it was great. Tony’s office, the chef’s office, was right off the pastry kitchen, and we’d all hang out in there. It was tiny. I mean, you could have one chair, maybe, and he’d open the file drawer, and put a six-pack in it, and somebody would sit on his desk, and somebody would squat in the door, and he would just tell stories. He had the best stories. He knew where all the shittiest bars were. We went to Siberia, when it was in the Fiftieth Street train station. We used to go to Desmond’s, on Park Avenue. At the time, it was still a serious Irish Republican [Army] bar, a little weird and dangerous, you know, ’cause there weren’t many of those left. We used to go to McManus every once in a while, across the street. He just really liked a divey bar.
SCOTT BRYAN: When I met Tony, he was nobody. He had no money, he lived in a rent-stabilized apartment with his first wife. On the weekend they’d smoke bones, I think, and he’d cook for her, you know, and he was just a laid-back— No one knew who Tony Bourdain was. And he was just a happy-go-lucky guy, an easygoing guy.
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