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I was probably 12 or 13.
It was one of his India or Vietnam episodes. I can’t exactly remember which one. I remember watching No Reservations on a 12-inch Sony television set in my grandparents’ room.
I used to watch a lot of travel shows growing up, but Anthony Bourdain was nothing like the friendly, cheerful, and personable travel hosts I was used to.
As a 12-year-old girl, I found him smug, overbearing, and somewhat vulgar. But I couldn’t deny that there was something about him that demanded attention. You couldn’t help but watch him.
However, I eventually stopped watching his shows after an episode or two because every time I watched him with an adult around, I had to turn the volume down. He would inevitably say something inappropriate.
I didn’t think I would ever watch him again, let alone be inspired by him years later. Finding Tony
My next encounter with Anthony Bourdain came during my 21st year of life.
It was that strange period in my 20s when I suddenly felt I was outgrowing my own life and identity. I was desperately craving exploration and creativity. I wanted to write. I wanted to meet people. I wanted to try things I had never tried before.
I started venturing into hobby groups and creative circles, mostly writing focused groups. At one particular writers’ meetup that I frequented, we had mentors who would give us reading material and homework to take home.
One day, one of the mentors gave us an article from The New Yorker to read.
It was written by Anthony Bourdain.
“Ah. And we meet again,” I thought when I realized it was the same travel host I had sworn off as a child. I didn’t know he could write.
That evening, I went home and read the piece.
I was awestruck.
It was such a simple read, yet so smart, sexy, detailed, and funny that I immediately wanted to know what else this man had written.
I was very happy to discover that he had written a lot.
I read his book Kitchen Confidential, and that was it.
I was hooked.
I was deeply impressed by his wit, his charm, his sardonic humor, and, most of all, the authenticity that seemed to shine through his writing. It was intelligent without trying to prove how intelligent it was. It was irreverent without feeling manufactured.
It was the kind of writing that impressed me.
So naturally, I had to go back to the television shows I had rejected years earlier.
I couldn’t believe I had disliked him as a young girl, although I could understand why I had. I was now a 21-year-old who had developed an aversion to becoming the person the world expected me to be.
So, what perfect timing to rediscover the foul-mouthed, rebellious Anthony Bourdain.
The man who could flick a cigarette, say something unexpectedly clever, eat a strange-looking dish, and travel to the corners of the world, all while looking cool as hell.
I devoured his shows.
No Reservations. A Cook’s Tour. The Layover. Parts Unknown.
The lengths I went to find episodes from these shows is a story I’ll save you from.
But watching him felt less like watching a travel host and more like watching a man’s life unravel in front of me—his discovery of the world, and in some ways, his discovery of himself.
Every episode deepened my own thirst for exploration. As someone who already had a fascination with the world, his shows and his voice were catnip.
I was glad to have joined this 60-something-year-old man’s fandom as a 20-something-year-old, although I felt pretty secluded on my little island of Anthony Bourdain.
Back then, not many people my age seemed to know who he was, let alone care about him.
Except my sister, who had no choice but to become the victim listener of every one of my new obsessions growing up.
And then, just when I had discovered my new idol, I woke up to the news that he had died by suicide.
It broke my heart.
It really did.
I had somehow convinced myself that his life was perfect. The dream life. He was doing everything that I—and I’m sure many other people who dream about travel and exploration wanted to do.
He was traveling the world, writing, eating incredible food, and meeting people from everywhere.
He seemed to have it all.
After the news of his death, I went back and looked him up online. I read about him. I watched a lot of his interviews. I tried to understand what had happened. I wanted to know why my hero had fallen.
The truth, of course, was that his life was far from perfect.
He was deeply complex and deeply flawed. He had a troubled past. He had struggled with addiction. He could be self-absorbed, difficult, arrogant, and messy.
I don’t want to diagnose him or his life as though I actually knew him. We can make all the assumptions we want about another person, but none of us can know what was happening inside his mind better than he did.
So I’ll refrain from a Tony Bourdain character analysis.
These are simply my observations after years of following his work.
And this is also my chance to rant about something that has been getting under my skin lately.
The Bourdain Bandwagon
There is a flurry of Anthony Bourdain content on social media right now.
Quotes.
Clips.
Travel montages.
Bourdain analyses.
Cigarettes.
Coffee.
Vietnam.
People standing in exotic locations looking pensive, a scene set to some moody song that I’m sure Bourdain himself would have found pretentious or annoying.
And every time I see another “Anthony Bourdain aesthetic” reel on Instagram, I release the biggest sigh and several involuntary eye rolls.
“No, Ryan. Anthony Bourdain wasn’t a nomad who liked to travel around the world eating food and smoking cigarettes. Please stop trying to become him after taking one trip to Vietnam.”
The Bourdain that exists on social media right now feels very different from the man I spent years watching. And I think the difference matters. Let me elaborate.
Tony was not this perfect, worldly creature who effortlessly wandered around the globe spreading wisdom and love, as many assume.
He was a deeply flawed man with a troubled past.
If you go all the way back to A Cook’s Tour, you can see just how different he was from the polished travel host people remember today.
And if you have seen his documentary, “Roadrunner”, you’d know that the producers of A Cook’s Tour initially thought they were doomed when they began filming the show. Because Tony was so awkward in front of the camera and extremely aloof, which is not an ideal personality for a TV show host.
But then something happened.
He cracked open.
You could watch him become more comfortable with himself as the episodes progressed. You could watch him figure out what kind of storyteller he wanted to be.
And that is precisely what I loved about him. Not because he was this perfect, agreeable travel host. Not because he always knew the right thing to say, or he had some magical ability to connect with every person he met.
He didn’t.
Sometimes he got things wrong. Sometimes he seemed unaware of what was happening around him. Sometimes he was awkward. Sometimes he was an a*shole.
But one thing he was… was that he was unmistakably human.
He didn’t always seem to know how to play the part. And to me, that was the magic.
When he sat down with someone from a completely different part of the world, I never felt like I was watching a television host perform because that was what the format required.
I felt like I was watching a person genuinely encounter something for the first time and then watching him react. Figure things out in real time.
That is what I think gets lost when Bourdain becomes an aesthetic. A “vibe”.
People see this really cool traveler, drinking beers, and smoking cigarettes. They see the leather jacket. They see his quotes about travel. They see him in exotic places. They see the traveler lifestyle and its appeal.
But they don’t always see the uncertainty underneath it.
They don’t see this honest and profound writer.
They don’t see this restless individual who was constantly questioning himself and the world around him. They don’t see the man who stumbled into television and somehow turned it into a vehicle for storytelling. They don’t see the contradictions.
I am genuinely glad that Bourdain is receiving much-deserved attention from younger people now. Really.
I spent years feeling like I was on a small island of Bourdain fandom populated mostly by people old enough to have retirement accounts.
Five or six years ago, I could mention him to a lot of the people my age and get a blank stare.
Now, millennials, Gen Z, travelers, nomads, writers, and aspiring adventurers are discovering him.
And I truly love that. I truly want them to watch him. Read his great work.
Be inspired and curious. Let him make you want to get on a plane.
But what I don’t want is for people to reduce him to a lifestyle or simply a social media trend. Because Bourdain’s life wasn’t really just about travel.
It wasn’t even really about food or cooking.
His life was about storytelling. About being able to brilliantly articulate his observations into words that made us feel something in return.
Travel was the vehicle. Food was the entry point. The real subject was always human beings. And perhaps, underneath all of that, he was also trying to understand himself.
He went from a young, reckless man with little ambition to someone whose life unexpectedly took him around the world.
Contrary to many popular beliefs on social media, he actually didn’t seem to start with a grand mission to become a worldly man. He stumbled into it. And then fell in love with the world along the way. That journey is what makes his story so special to me. It’s poetic yet also melancholic.
Because the man who seemed to have everything, the career, the travel, the freedom, the admiration, was still capable of experiencing enormous loneliness.
You can see glimpses of it in a few of the episodes of Parts Unknown.
You can hear the questioning. The restlessness that never quite left him.
And that is why I find it so limiting to reduce him to an Instagram quote about traveling somewhere you’ve never been.
Anthony Bourdain was a real person.
A difficult, brilliant, funny, wounded, contradictory man who happened to become one of the most recognizable storytellers of his generation.
And maybe that is why I feel strangely protective of the way he is remembered. Because I didn’t discover him as a cool older man with a passport and a cigarette.
I discovered him twice.
The first time, when I was a 12-year-old girl sitting in my grandparents’ room, annoyed by this lanky, goofy-looking man on a 12-inch television.
The second time, when I was 21 and desperately trying to figure out who I was going to become.
The first time, I couldn’t stand him. The second time, I couldn’t get enough.
To me, he will always be a storyteller who inspired the 21-year-old girl to express herself without inhibitions. To be a little brave. To give less f*cks about what the world thinks. He will be my creative hero who could still swear on camera, piss off a 12-year-old girl, and then somehow grow into the adult version of her to inspire her to be fearless, authentic, and, most importantly, herself.
There will truly be no one like him ever again.
