I think the most I noticed it was at social events. I ran into him at a party at Les Halles, and when I went to talk to him, he did this thing where he would sort of speak to me, but he was turned away, almost perpendicular. And you don’t know if he’s addressing you, or somebody near you. Maybe he’s talking to his friends, and I’m just around? And he was such a natural storyteller, and then, as he became more famous, more and more people would come around, so he’d address five people at once, and tell a funny anecdote. You felt like you were always part of an audience. Even if you were talking to him one-on-one, he had a way of talking to you where you still felt like you were part of an audience, but you were waiting for the other people to show up.
That said, he was never rude. I want to be totally clear about that. He was never unkind, he was always really generous, and he’d answer any questions, when I got the courage to ask him a question.
DANIEL HALPERN: When he wanted to talk, there was nobody more charming, and he could make small talk better than anybody. Always had his metaphors, his analogies that were surprising and accurate, always penetrating.
It wouldn’t matter if it was President Obama sitting across from him or some person in the street who wanted a selfie. It was the same kind of attention and energy he put into every one of those conversations.
A couple of times, my daughter’s school had an auction, we auctioned Tony off; he and I cooked dinner for twenty people. He was so generous, he came down there. Tony was very relaxed then. We made bone marrow and parsley salad. He and I were working together at the cutting board; he looked over and said, “Why don’t you just sit down? Your knife skills are shit.”
16
“I’d Love to Travel the World”
A Cook’s Tour Begins
KAREN RINALDI: Not one bit of it was planned, from the moment he signed up for Kitchen Confidential, to signing up for [his next book] A Cook’s Tour, and all the books that came after that. It wasn’t strategized, it wasn’t building a platform, or a brand, none of that stuff. We just kind of said, “We’ll see what happens, wing it.”
We were following Tony’s instincts, which I thought were really good, with [Tony’s agent] Kim [Witherspoon]. The three of us would have these conversations.
KIMBERLY WITHERSPOON: I think that he was truly surprised at the response to Kitchen Confidential, and that people were so positive about his voice when writing nonfiction. Prior to that, he pretty much thought of himself as a fiction writer. It took him a moment to adjust to the idea that there was going to be a consistent demand for his voice on the page, whether it was for magazines, or from his publisher, for another book. Karen was pretty quick about wanting another one. So before he had too much time to worry about it, Tony was thrown into a position where he had to produce another book, and that probably was one of the best things to happen to him. He didn’t have time to get writer’s block, or to start worrying about it.
KAREN RINALDI: Tony said, “I’d love to travel the world, and explore food all over the world; that’s my dream, to do it and write about it. What if I pick ten or fifteen cities and do this?” And I said, “Sounds like a good idea.” So that was A Cook’s Tour.
NANCY BOURDAIN: The fights we had over my [Typhoid Mary] research! Tony wanted so badly to see her recipes, the things she prided herself on, personal things. But there’s not much of that. She had no one but the state, so that’s who tells her story. At one point, Tony threatened to hire someone to do the job he thought I wasn’t doing—but I really was; I felt confident that I’d come up with all there actually was, though it was so pitifully thin and one-sided. So I said, “Go ahead.” And he did. That finally satisfied him that that’s all there was.
In 2001, Bloomsbury published Tony’s nonfiction book Typhoid Mary, about the notorious Irish cook Mary Mallon, who is believed to have infected thirty-three people with typhoid in the early twentieth century, in New York. Tony enlisted Nancy Bourdain to conduct research.
PANIO GIANOPOULOS: I did a line edit on [Typhoid Mary], too, but it was pretty clean. And it was such a short book, and it was a new series of urban historicals; we were just sort of figuring out what it was. I wish that book had done better. It was really sort of a charming and weird story, about this superfamous historical figure, done in an incredibly engaging way. It probably would have made a great little TV show.
I don’t think we did a great job publishing that book. I’m not insulting Karen, she’s a brilliant publisher, but I think we wanted to build a series, with these great authors writing about New York historical things, or any city’s historical things. But Tony was such a superstar that I feel like we should have just done it as a Tony book; we really should have pushed the angle. I think it could have been a bigger book if we’d found a way to do it right.
KAREN RINALDI: Next was a Les Halles cookbook, and he had a very definite idea of what it would feel like. We broke the rules; he said, “I want it on uncoated stock.” Nobody did cookbooks on uncoated stock, because they get messed up, which was the whole point. He said, “I want it to absorb everything.”
And that butcher-block paper [cover] with the stamp on it, that was all Tony. So [Anthony Bourdain’s] Les Halles Cookbook was really fun to put together. I remember the photographer, Robert DiScalfani, was so upset when the book came out at first, because at that point, nobody had done photography with uncoated stock. People loved that texture; that was Tony, that was his vision. And it’s a small thing, but that’s how he got, you know? “Let’s get the cookbook all fucked up and dirty and the pages will stick together.” That’s what he wanted.
NANCY BOURDAIN: [Tony’s mother] Gladys Bourdain called his publisher once. I think it was about the [Les Halles] cookbook. She [was] fluent in French. Loved living in France and working at the newspaper. She knew everything. So I said, “If you’re using French, make your mother feel good—she can really help you out with any errors. She’ll just see them right away.” He wouldn’t do it. Writing the first few novels, it didn’t matter so much, but for people who care, it’s a problem.
Anyway, she called the publisher, behind his back, to make corrections [to the cookbook]. Now, how’s that gonna make anybody feel, right? Although, she was a really good editor. For a long time, Tony had his life run by women. I think that’s a big reason he’s done so well. I really mean that.
GLADYS BOURDAIN: I never gave him any guidance in editing or writing. He was never quite one to ask his mom for anything like that, anyway. [Laughing] He never wanted his mother to be involved in any of that, although I wished I had been, because of some of the language that he used. He was never one to ask his mother for advice, or take it if I gave any. I would have changed a lot of the bad language, which I really didn’t like, but I just thought he was a terrific writer, always.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: The luxury that I have writing for The New Yorker is that I can spend a year working on a piece and keep coming back. My promise to Tony was, “I’m gonna do the work. I’ll talk to everybody.”
And he, amazingly, for a guy who’s so busy, was very obliging. The one thing he didn’t want me to do was talk to his mom.
CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: Our mom was very intelligent and talented. She loved French film, and she loved opera, and she got to write occasionally about those things. She’d written articles in Opera News and High Fidelity magazine, interviews with opera singers, and little clips about French film festivals and things that she loved.
She had the perfect job for Gladys Bourdain: she was an old-fashioned grammarian, and she was a copy editor at the New York Times for twenty-five years. She was paid to be fussy and correct other people. It was such a great job for her. And she worked well until after normal retirement age. I think she needed the money. She was seventy-five, and was sharp as a wit until then. But she was never not interfering. She figured, I have the better answer, and people should understand that I am giving them the right thing, and they should appreciate that I’m being helpful.
; I think she legitimately thought she was trying to help Tony by calling his publisher and trying to correct mistakes in one of his books. I mean, lady, just stay the hell out of it. You know, your son is already a global success story. He’s already sold two books, or whatever, and his own TV show, and here Mommy is, calling the publisher to say, “There are some grammatical and spelling mistakes here that should be taken care of.” That drove him bat-shit crazy.
17
“Tony Was So Reluctant to Do Television”
KAREN RINALDI: Tony was so reluctant to do television. He would say, “If I ever do TV, that would be a big sellout.” He was mostly just really funny about it.
LYDIA TENAGLIA, COFOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, ZERO POINT ZERO PRODUCTION: We met Tony in 2000. Chris [Collins] and I were working as producers on a lot of medical shows.
Kitchen Confidential was the big smash it became, and we had heard he was going to write a second book. It may have been named, too, at that point—A Cook’s Tour—and we were eager to get out of doing medical shows, so I called him and said, “I’m a producer, I work together with my partner; would you meet with us? We would love to talk to you about making A Cook’s Tour into something.”
Tony had no designs, I think, on making television; it was never even in his mind. He was kind of, “Yeah, sure, whatever,” about it. I met with him at Les Halles. It was between the lunch and dinner shifts, and he was sitting at the bar. He had the chef jacket on, it was unbuttoned. He had a very tall drink in front of him.
I asked him, “Would you even consider making [A Cook’s Tour] into a TV show? No guarantees, but the next steps, as producers, we’d come in here, shoot some B-roll with you, do an interview.” In typical Tony fashion, he was kind of unfazed by the whole thing.
We made an appointment to shoot with him; it was a pretty busy night at Les Halles. Chris and I went with these small-format cameras and we ended up shooting with him in the kitchen. There was a lot of banter. It was clear he had full command of the kitchen, there was tremendous camaraderie, but he definitely kept things moving.
We shot from a fly-on-the-wall perspective; we weren’t directing him. It was a wonderful juxtaposition of somebody who was in control but also having fun with the crew. After the dinner shift, we sat him against a brick wall and started asking him questions: “Have you ever traveled before?” He hadn’t, really; he’d traveled to France as a kid, and once to Japan.
We said, “What do you hope to accomplish with A Cook’s Tour?” and he said, “Well, I owe the publisher another book; I want to travel around and experience other cultures and the way that they eat.”
What was clear was that Tony was very well read, he had a deep love of film; those were his points of reference. It was like, “I want to go check out the places that loom large in my mind, from the things I’ve read and the films I’ve seen.”
PANIO GIANOPOULOS: With A Cook’s Tour, it’s funny, because even though it was the book after Kitchen Confidential, so you’d think “sophomore slump,” and expect it not to do as well, it actually had a totally different feel to it, because there was [eventually] a TV show attached to it. And he was really kind of wrestling with that.
LYDIA TENAGLIA: We sold A Cook’s Tour to Food Network, and we were on our way.
EILEEN OPATUT, FORMER EVP OF PROGRAMMING, FOOD NETWORK: Tony was the person who exemplified exactly what I wanted to do on Food Network. He clearly had created a persona for himself. I wasn’t really clear whether that really was him, or whether that was a character, but I found him, like a lot of people who have a bravura personality, very soft-spoken, very intelligent, very well read, very serious about what he was doing, yet at the same time, still squeezing everything that he could out of his life and his experiences. He was very gentlemanly. In talking about the creation of the show, his intent was philosophical, and I loved that.
Some people are born with charm; people want to do for you. He was born with that, and you just knew it. The camera loved him. He always knew where the light would hit him.
It really was my reading of Kitchen Confidential that got me so enthused [to make television with him]. When I was asked, in an interview for the New York Times, if he was really that impudent and arrogant and a terror to work with, I said, “You know what? He’s totally different from that. In fact, I kind of think of him as a mama’s boy.”
Well, the phone rang very quickly after that printed, and it was Tony. He was not really sputtering, but he might as well have been. He said, “Why did you call me that?!” And I said, “Because it’s kind of true! You’re a really nice, smart, warm, intelligent person.”
LYDIA TENAGLIA: Chris and I got married, and we left a week later—it was December 2000—just me, Chris, and Tony [to begin shooting A Cook’s Tour]. We didn’t know each other very well. I look back on it now and the whole thing was so ill conceived. We had no real game plan. There was no real format to the show. We had no fucking clue what we were doing together, and it became quickly clear to us—
CHRIS COLLINS, COFOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, ZERO POINT ZERO PRODUCTION: Neither did Tony.
LYDIA TENAGLIA: In the back of his mind, he’s thinking, Somebody’s flying me over, fantastic. I’ll eat a few things, go back to my hotel, write my shit, with no sense of, We’re making a television series; I have to be really present for this.
Our first location was Japan. We were set up with a fixer who had a tremendous amount of well-studied protocol and etiquette, and was hypertyrannical about it. I think Tony felt awkward and weird and uncomfortable; he was avoiding me and Chris, not talking to us, not looking at us. He kept us at an arm’s length.
CHRIS COLLINS: We’d shot with him only once before, when we shot the demo, and he was in control of that environment. He understood where everything was, how everything moved, how he could interact with people, where he could physically move. If you look at it today, he was actually playing with the camera, and us. He was giving us a heightened version of who he was; maybe that was the version he became over time, but what we were confronted with, in that first shoot in Tokyo, was a guy coming to terms with the fact that he didn’t know what he was doing, or what he was supposed to do.
And we might not have been as helpful as we could have been, at least those first couple of days. We kind of threw him into the boiling water and watched him squirm. Today I can laugh about it, but at the time, it was painful for all three of us.
I can still see the three of us, sitting, waiting to board a plane at JFK. Frankly, Tony looked and dressed like a kid who went away freshman year and came back sophomore year and had grown six inches over the summer but was still wearing the same jacket. His clothing—everything looked too small on him.
On the plane, we were about five rows from the toilet in the back, and Tony was three rows back from us. I don’t think he realized there was another way to travel. He was always open for that rough-and-tumble, in the early years. In fact, he did everything to have us stay in some of the dumpiest hotels, so he could experience it as close to the ground as possible, and write about it later.
LYDIA TENAGLIA: He seemed very jittery. He was constantly fidgeting with his thumb ring, and— I don’t know if shy is the right word, but when we put him in these Edo sushi scenes or at the yakitori place, it didn’t necessarily come naturally, for him to engage.
CHRIS COLLINS: He was uncomfortable.
PANIO GIANOPOULOS: It’s really easy to think that it’s the best gig in the world—you get to fly around the world, and meet cool people, and eat amazing food. And Tony was the first to admit that it is the best job in the world, right? But at the same time, there’s the showbiz side of it, which is so much more intense for TV and movies than it is for books.
So that was a big theme when he was working on the book, and I remember thinking, How do we integrate that, how do we get that tone in there and still make it fun, and not apologetic or disingenuous?
LYDIA TENAGLIA: You could see this wide-eyed enthusia
sm for what he was being exposed to, but in combination with nervous energy and insecurity. It was a constant through line, from the day we met him to the very end; those basic traits were always there, this combination of extraordinary intelligence surrounded by a vulnerability at the core of things.
CHRIS COLLINS: We shot in Japan for two weeks, and then he flew back to New York, to cook Christmas dinner for Nancy and her family. And it was like, “Why is he leaving now?” What was that sense of responsibility, or guilt, to do what was an incredibly generous act, physically grueling, to go back and forth?
LYDIA TENAGLIA: We overheard a few conversations; there was tension there with Nancy. I don’t think she was particularly happy that he was gone on this long trip.
There was a funny incident in Japan. He said, “I gotta get a gift for Nancy,” so we go into this jewelry store. He sees a pair of jade earrings. I don’t remember what the price was in yen, but he thought that they were, like, $300. He said to the clerk, “I want the earrings in the window,” and all of a sudden there was a big movement of people, and champagne came out, they put a velvet cloth out, it was like a tremendous ceremony—
CHRIS COLLINS: He gave his credit card over and we’re drinking—
LYDIA TENAGLIA: And he’s like, “Oh, she’s going to love those,” and of course he made a mistake with the currency. They were extremely expensive earrings. They tried to run his card, and he didn’t have that amount available. It was all very embarrassing; the fixer was very embarrassed. I think he laughed it off, then took a plane and went all the way home.
CHRIS COLLINS: He flew back and met us in Ho Chi Minh City. We always say that’s where the show really started to happen, because he had read so extensively about Vietnam, knew so much about its history, that when he flew into that airport, which remained largely unchanged since the Vietnam War, there were all these interesting points of reference that started to percolate—films and books and what have you. We were grabbing on to that energy. If you look at that footage, he’s coming alive in the field for the first time. His ability to communicate began to open up a little bit.
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