Thank You Tony
I can’t say I started loving food because of him, because I’ve loved food since before I could walk — evidenced by crawling around our Bangkok kitchen eating sticky rice and salted fish balls. But I love people more because of him. I love difference, and complexity, and simplicity, and laughter and anger — I love all of these things MORE because of Anthony Bourdain.
He was unapologetic, but he was kind. He was the protector of the family cooks, those preserving millennial recipes in long-forgotten corners of the world. He tore down the institution in a tireless search for the source, he was grassroots. He appreciated the finer things but seemed more at home in an Italian courtyard sharing cucina povera with the people he cared about.
Of course, I never knew Tony, perhaps his legacy didn’t shine bright in his heart in these last days — months, years, or at all. Despite everything, maybe he still hadn’t forgiven himself for his asshole youth. It breaks my heart because we had long forgiven him.
From a Cook’s Tour to No Reservations and beyond, it was through undisguised words, hallmark of his idiosyncratic matter-of-fact style, and a deep, unwavering empathy that he became the man we always wanted him to be. He led the counter culture — smiting the excess and glitz of the bougie culinary world, of gold-foiled chicken wings — he embraced the wild, the heartbroken and the pained. He knew what made food taste good, it was callused hands, long fires, a day’s hike, a century-old cauldron — everything he did during his reinvention, the multi-decade shedding of the ego, was designed so we would not forget these things.
Now we can’t. I won’t.
Thank you for sharing your life with us, for sharing the lives of the people you met and their stories with us. For doing it without judgement, with humility and grace. You are, and always will be, an inspiration to the black sheep, the against-the-grain-ers, the renegades and every last one of us on a tireless search for the better version of ourselves we know is out there — somewhere — in a part [yet] unknown.
