Anthony Bourdain’s final meal: “Bad food is fake food”
As a wistful and wayward teen, frustrated by a feeling that he was sheltered from the cutting-edge of culture in a New Jersey suburb that his struggling family could ill afford to live in, Anthony Bourdain hungered to get out there in the happening world. However, as he hurled himself into the hustling life of heaving kitchens, he did so with a monkey on his back. But the shadow of addiction would follow him forevermore.
After initially kicking the habit, he paired his love for dining with a literary outlook, striking gold and a new lease of life with the travelling realisation that the way to grasp the world’s heart is through its stomach. Like Jack Kerouac chasing down eateries on the road as opposed to jazz joints, Bourdain set out a route to the true happening spirit of society. Served up with poeticism, wit, and a side of rock ‘n’ roll ruggedness, he brought a new realism to overly romanticised travel journals and disavowed the pretence of food writing.
His tour diary was more akin to George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, appraising burger joints and the finest 0.50 peso ceviche rather than some highfalutin fancy guide fit for the caviar coterie that often has a stronghold over the culinary world. In true counterculture fashion, he shunned elitism and sampled what really made the world tick.
He even stated the following about death row meals: ”When we ask ourselves and each other the question, what — if strapped to a chair, facing a fatal surge of electricity — would we want as that last taste of life, we seem to crave reminders of simpler, harder times. A crust of bread and butter . . . Poor-people food.” In fact, when he sat down with Jacques Pépin in 2015, they both confirmed that they would require little more than a fresh baguette, fine butter, and great company.
For him, the secret to a good meal was simply passion. And passion could easily be applied to simplicity. ”Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone,” Bourdain explained. ”Bad food is fake food… food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people’s ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives.”
He did elaborate beyond a simple baguette when speaking to Melanie Dunea for My Last Supper. He explained that with the bread and butter as a given on the side, he would go for roast bone marrow with parsley and caper salad, and he’d wash it down with a perfect pint of Guinness.
While, tragically, his last meal might not have been the baguette and marrow that he wanted, it was a hardy dish befitting of his wishes. While in the Alsace region of France, he dined at the Wistub La Petite Venise in Colmar. Perched at a picturesque table looking at onto a cobbled street in spring, like a scene from one of Leonard Cohen’s cheerier songs, Bourdain tucked into a local cervelas sausage, served with pock knuckle, a mound of saurkraut, some horseradish sauce, and a few robust potatoes. He washed it down with three glasses of €4 wine. And left with a smile on his face.
Sadly, things took a turn soon after, and he holed himself up in his hotel room in the days that followed. Four days on from his last restaurant trip, he hung himself in a hotel room in Strasburg. He was stricken with grief over his doomed relationship, struggling with fame and the ghosts of his past. However, it’s that last hardy meal that he should be remembered best: authentic and on the bone.
