SCOTT BRYAN: When I opened Veritas in ’99, he came in and said, “I’m doing a little synopsis on restaurants. Can I come into your kitchen and observe?” He hung around in the kitchen for five days; he saw how I ran my kitchen. I didn’t know he was writing a book until Kitchen Confidential came out. He was like, “Oh you’re in my book. Read it.” I was shocked.
BILL BUFORD, WRITER: It was radical and fresh. It was the first frank look at this world that we all rely on. It was the first frank look at what goes on beyond the doors of the kitchen, possibly since George Orwell. And it made a lot of other books possible, including mine [Heat]. It was a whole new anthropology. He had a sense of voice, and a sense of word choice, and a feel for narrative, and it was very exciting to read.
ALEX GETMANOV: His description of me in Kitchen Confidential hurt, because it was spot-on. He called me “a bit of a mama’s boy,” which I was, at that point.
DAVE MCMILLAN, CHEF-RESTAURATEUR: Lots of kids dropped out of university after reading Kitchen Confidential, just to become line cooks. We saw it for a decade. Intelligent, sober men and women dropping out and making a lifestyle change to work in kitchens.
FRED MORIN, CHEF-RESTAURATEUR: Ninety percent of applicants in the restaurant business, in the last ten years, have Anthony Bourdain to thank for going into that job.
JOSÉ ANDRÉS, CHEF-RESTAURATEUR: Kitchens were dark places that, as cooks, we were not allowed to come out [of], so it was fascinating to see how he came from deep in the caves, to very high up in the world. Tony seemed to be a guy who liberated himself by being a great writer.
DANIEL HALPERN, EDITOR AND PUBLISHER: When I first met Tony, he was so excited about the reception of Kitchen Confidential; he couldn’t believe his good fortune. I saw it in manuscript. [Editor] Karen [Rinaldi] had just gotten to Bloomsbury, and they needed money. I shouldn’t say that, but every publisher needs money.
She said, “It’s really good, and if you want to give us some money to buy the reprint rights . . .”
I had just gotten to HarperCollins, and I told the president of the company that I wanted to buy this book. She gave it to [cookbook publisher] Susan Friedland. Susan read it and said, “This is a piece of shit. Why would you even think about publishing it?”
I bought it anyway. It would take a moron not to know that was a great book. It was the voice. You can’t edit that into a book, and if you don’t have it, you’re never gonna have it. From the very first page, the turns of phrase, the way his mind shifts from thing to thing, the speaking voice, and it’s exactly his voice: whenever he gave a speech, whenever he was a master of ceremonies, whatever he did, it was always that Tony voice. That was in that manuscript. You couldn’t put it down. Certainly one of the best books I ever bought.
PANIO GIANOPOULOS: We wouldn’t have sold the paperback rights, frankly, if we knew how enduring and amazing it was gonna be. We were a new company, and we were trying to be profitable pretty early on, and so we sold it. I know Karen didn’t really want to, but eventually she gave in; I think she got pressured into it. I mean, who knew? Cooks weren’t a big thing yet. He was so ahead of the curve.
Immediately afterward, there were so many people trying to sell food books to us. Suddenly, I was getting memoir after memoir from people, these imitation books coming in to us, and I’m sure other publishers got them, too. I didn’t feel like anyone really replicated the Tony recipe.
14
“The Brass Ring Comes Around Only Once”
DAVID ROSENTHAL: He was ahead of his time. He was not a guy, back then, who one thought would have a TV career. He was not as outgoing as the Tony who showed up on TV. This guy was looking for himself, I think. And who knows? If the book hadn’t worked, he probably would’ve tried [more] screenwriting or something. I think he did want to become famous.
HELEN LANG: After Kitchen Confidential was published, he invited my partner Carol and me to dine with him at Les Halles. He was really hyped up, because at that point the book was a big success, and he was getting offers from all over the place, and he said, “The brass ring comes around only once, and I’m gonna grab it with both hands.” He knew this was his big opportunity, and he might not get another one.
NANCY BOURDAIN: Tony would always say that we were expecting everything to blow up, you know? He didn’t want to slow down. He thought everything was going to be taken away from him real quick, that he had fifteen minutes.
JEFF FORMOSA: I was around his whole life, until he got famous. Right after Kitchen Confidential was published, it kind of went to his head. I remember he asked me to help him with a TV, help him buy it and hook it up. I went with him to buy it. We get out of the store, and he expects me to carry it for him, like he’s too much of a star to help me carry this TV for him!
ALEX GETMANOV: Around the time that he started to get published, we got together a few times, and then just completely— You know, there didn’t seem to be anything to pull us together. I lost touch with him. He was into this whole other world, the thing with the media and whatnot, and he didn’t seem interested in cooking or the restaurant world or hardly any of his old friends, people from that era.
ROBERT VUOLO: When Kitchen Confidential came out, I hadn’t really been in contact with him; we’d left messages on each other’s machines leading up to that point. But once that book came out, he was untouchable, and never returned any of my calls.
JEFF FORMOSA: Once he got famous, nobody who knew him, like Sam [Goldman] and Nancy—he just didn’t seem to see any of us. He did it on his own terms.
NIGELLA LAWSON, WRITER AND TV HOST: I met Tony at dinner, a long time ago, the late nineties, probably with the food critic A. A. [Adrian] Gill, in London. He didn’t frighten me at first, but I found him daunting, because he was quite manic. He had his silver thumb ring, and [was] wearing black leather.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, JOURNALIST, CNN: I first met Tony in London, in the early 2000s, when I was living there, through my very close friend Adrian Gill and his partner Nicola Formby. It was at a Chinese restaurant called Zen, which no longer exists; it was in Mayfair. My first impressions were that this was an extraordinarily charismatic and unusual fellow.
I remember Adrian and Tony being very key to what we all ate, and just having a whole different kind of experience at a meal with two obviously brilliant critics and storytellers.
NIGELLA LAWSON: I didn’t feel we got to know each other very much, but he was very much being Tony, many stories. From that dinner, he told everyone that I’d eaten aborted lamb, which is an embellished story. I was saying there were practices in France where they take the lamb out before it’s born and eat it. So he embellished that into a story about how that’s what I had done. I can’t tell you what trouble that got me into.
ERIC RIPERT, CHEF-RESTAURATEUR: I was fascinated by Kitchen Confidential, and I was also relieved that he didn’t trash Le Bernardin, because a lot of people were trashed in that book. I read it very quickly, because I was totally absorbed by the book, and I called him, and I wanted to talk to him, and I wanted to know who he was. I invited him to Le Bernardin to have lunch, and he said yes, and I was very happy.
I was surprised, because he showed up with a film crew. He warned me a few minutes before, “I’m coming with a crew, is it OK?” They were supposedly doing a documentary on him already, and they were supposed to stay a few minutes, and then leave us alone. It’s what happened.
So, I see this elegant man with good manners, smart, very articulate. We had a fantastic lunch together, and we really understand that we are very different, and come from very different backgrounds. I mean, the culinary backgrounds that we have are—opposite worlds. He comes from a ship with pirates, and I come from the kitchen of Robuchon, which is like the army. And we talk a lot on that lunch, and then we decided to see each other again, for drinks, and he took me to Siberia. And that was the beginning of the friendship.
MICHAEL RUHLMAN, FRIEND AND OCCASIONAL COLLABORATOR: Tony reviewed my book Soul of a Chef
for the New York Times. It was a brilliant review, and it was a book-selling review. And then in February 2001, I was coming to New York, I emailed him and he said, “Come by the restaurant,” so I did. I didn’t see him, and I was sort of intimidated, and I didn’t say anything. I had my steak frites, and then I saw that he was about to leave, so I went up behind him and said, “Mr. Bourdain.”
We sat down and just started talking. We talked about veal stock. He sent one of his cooks out for a pack of Lark cigarettes. And then we went and met Eric [Ripert] at Siberia bar. He idolized Eric to an extent that I found almost a little weird, a little embarrassing.
ERIC RIPERT: It’s interesting, because, with Tony, he would say a lot of nice things about other people, and he would be almost obsessed about certain people whom he will meet in his life, and he would create a portrait of them that would be very complimentary, and so on. With me, he would never speak about Le Bernardin, and never say anything nice, or bad, but he would totally ignore the subject of Le Bernardin, and ignore the subject of my career or accomplishments. So, we will have actually a relationship that will be very interesting because we will not speak about those things. I think, in a sense, it was good, because it gave space to speak about other topics.
NANCY BOURDAIN: There was one time—he was starting to get famous—he had to go to a luncheon, and there was a lot of the food press. His reputation was as a bad boy, cursing, and totally different from the way the establishment did things. He’s at a table with all these people, he gets up to go either have a cigarette or take a leak; when he comes back, everybody’s gone from the table. I’d never seen him so hurt by people he didn’t really know.
If something negative happens to you, and you get a little down from it, I just think, well, that’s normal; not bouncing back is abnormal. It took me a while, but I got him out of it. I was saying, “What do you expect? Them to welcome you with open arms? You’re changing their whole lives, and you’re totally different, and now they have to pay attention, [after] phoning it in for a while. Just calm down. It means a good thing for you.”
I remember early, early, early on. Kitchen Confidential had just come out. He went to a Queens library, a limo came and got him, and another author drove out there with him. Tony came back, and said, “He gave me really good advice: ‘Stay public. You gotta promote, promote, promote, or it all dies. You just gotta be out there all the time.’” Tony embraced that, and he was really good at promoting his brand. I don’t know if he was doing it consciously, but he had an innate way of protecting his brand, protecting his name.
MICHAEL RUHLMAN: We were doing an event together, at the CIA. He was, by then, a cultural figure, but not what he would become. We were both smoking cigarettes, with students hovering around, and he squinted his eyes and said, “Ruhlman, it’s all about fame maintenance.” It was half-joke, but half-true; I think he liked and wanted to keep being famous. He was ambitious.
PHILIPPE LAJAUNIE: After Kitchen Confidential was published, in a very acute way, he tried matching the persona for himself, maybe for the people working in the kitchen. Now we could hear him screaming in the kitchen, which had never happened. He would throw things in the kitchen, which had never happened. But funny enough, I could tell that it was just a game; in other words, it was not natural. He was trying to scream, but shyly. He was throwing something, but being very careful not to hurt anyone. He was exactly how he described cooks and chefs in the book, but not at all what he was. Even the vocabulary kind of changed, and he was using stronger words.
I was impressed by his writing, and the scope of his intellect. He knew he could count on me, and vice versa. I was myself interviewed about him, and I was always careful to have my stories fit the person he was becoming.
JOEL ROSE: It’s not the first time that one of my best friends has gotten super famous, and it definitely puts some strain [on the friendship], just trying to figure it out. I thought Tony remained remarkably the same, at the same time that I saw this strain on him. How harried he could be, how frustrated and nervous he could be sometimes. It was a different iteration of what I had seen in him before.
15
“He Never Came Off Book Tour”
BETH ARETSKY: After Kitchen Confidential came out, he asked if I would be his assistant. I don’t think Nancy enjoyed doing any of that for him. I was pretty thrilled to get out of the kitchen for a bit and see what happened.
It started off pretty small, doing the scheduling, making sure he would get to his appointments on time. Tony was always very early. Anytime he’d say to meet at 8:00, you’d show up at 7:45, and he’d been sitting there since 7:30.
DANIEL HALPERN: He’d always be early, which was amazing. I think it spoke to his respect for people. He didn’t want to make people wait on him.
PHILIPPE LAJAUNIE: We all know about this obsessiveness with being on time. He had certain mental reflexes. He used to be a heroin user; heroin users have certain common traits and reflexes, which may or may not include obsessiveness. I had seen it very early on. In the seventies and eighties, I had too many people on my staff who were users. You know, you have a car accident, you keep walking funny the rest of your life; you have some mental reflexes that are noticeable.
BETH ARETSKY: I went on book tour with him. He was gaining some momentum, and he had a lot of fanboys who wanted to get him wasted, so we had this trick. They’d say, “Hey, Tony. Let’s do shots,” and Tony would say, “OK.”
I’d go to the bar and get shots of Jäger with floaters of Bacardi 151 on top, and Tony and I would just have a straight-up shot of Jäger, or tequila, so we wouldn’t end up too fucked up.
KAREN RINALDI: His line was, he published Kitchen Confidential, and he never came off book tour.
DAVE MCMILLAN: The first time we met Tony, he was hawking a book. This was kind of, like, pretelevision.
FRED MORIN: He was still the “no fish on Monday” guy.
DAVE MCMILLAN: He was coming to town [Montréal] with a suitcase full of books. He was still lugging them by hand. It was Kitchen Confidential, but at kind of the end of the tour. It was already a hit.
I think we’d figured out quickly, at L’Express, over dinner, that— Fred and I have obscure knowledge of old French cooking. We’ve been down that rabbit hole for so many years, and for so long, that we can converse with very few people about the deep, very historic French cooking. We clicked immediately with Tony, because, all of a sudden, Tony knew who Alain Chapel was. Tony knew who Michel Guérard was.
FRED MORIN: The repertoire de la cuisine, and everything.
DAVE MCMILLAN: Yeah, the mise en scène of dining. None of our peers have that in-depth, historic knowledge of French cooking. We’ve always been alone in that. We’d drive around and buy oyster forks, and geek out on plates, like two nerds, Fred and I, who had this affinity for the ashtrays, and fucking absinthe spoons, and just so much useless information about old, historical dining in our minds. Tony was the third nerd who could join our loser club of guys who collected oyster forks. Tony would jump right into the rabbit hole of Limoges porcelain and fish knives, you know? It was like, Yay, we have another nerd to play with.
So I think that we kind of hit it off, because, all of a sudden, we’re talking about the seafood restaurant Le Divellec and Alain Chapel. You know how many duck press conversations we had with Tony? And from his upbringing, and where he worked, he shouldn’t know shit about that stuff. But he knew it as much as me and Fred, who are scholars on it.
There’s a code, kind of. It’s hard to describe to outsiders. And I don’t have that with young cooks, right? Tony understood that we were long-career line cooks, and we understood, as well, that he was.
DANIEL HALPERN: He wasn’t pretending to be a great chef. He was very open about that from the beginning; he was a line cook. He was incredibly modest.
It was as if he felt all of this was happening, and he could see it happening, but he didn’t deserve it. And that seemed to be right at the heart of so much
of his affect. He couldn’t believe he was Anthony Bourdain.
He always told me, when I’d invite him to dinners and things, “I don’t really like being around writers.” I think they made him feel insecure. He was certainly a much better writer than a chef; he would’ve been the first to agree. But he didn’t really like talking about his writing. I think it made him nervous. We talked about it in the context of editing the essays, that kind of thing, and he was fine with that. He’d say, “Yeah, I gotta keep that,” or “That sounds bad,” or “This essay should be last.” But the process, not so much.
Often he would say, “Let’s just have a phone call, we don’t need to meet.” He was always kind of easygoing, but really, when you were with him, at least in my experience, he was uncomfortable enough with himself that you felt uncomfortable. It would be taxing, actually, to spend two or three hours with him, because you felt there was a part of him that didn’t want to be there; that he’d rather just be alone.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: I remember, he used to do his thing with his hands, like a fidgeting thing, and I felt like he was always on the way somewhere, or felt like— I don’t know if he felt uncomfortable, or bored, or what it was. But I felt like he was a very complex person. And we got to see a little bit of it, and what we saw was remarkable, and funny, and thrilling, and smart, and cool. I was always left with this feeling of, I really wish I knew him more, and I really hope I can be like him one day.
PANIO GIANOPOULOS: With Tony, I felt a little bit like a freshman, hanging out with a cool senior. Maybe he’s friends with your older brother or something, and he kind of tolerates you, and he’s decent enough, but you just don’t really matter.
And it’s already—when you’re editing a book, you’re in this weird position where it’s collaborative, right? You’re having these conversations that are pretty involved, and it would seem like you’re peers, and yet, when I saw him in person, it was always weird. I felt like, Did we not just do this? Like, have a whole thing?
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