Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Michael Bourdain was born in New York City in 1956 and raised in Leonia, New Jersey. A summer in France as a boy, where he tasted his first oyster, sparked a lifelong fascination with food. After attending Vassar College he graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978 and spent two decades in New York kitchens, eventually becoming executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles.

In 2000 his memoir Kitchen Confidential, an unvarnished account of restaurant life, became a bestseller and made him famous at forty-four. Television followed: A Cook's Tour, then No Reservations, and from 2013 the acclaimed CNN series Parts Unknown. He traveled to places most shows ignored, from Beirut to Congo to West Virginia, listening more than he talked and treating street vendors with the same respect as celebrated chefs.

Bourdain wrote fiction and nonfiction, championed immigrant kitchen workers, and won multiple Emmy and Peabody awards for storytelling that blended appetite, curiosity, and conscience. He died by suicide in France in June 2018 at sixty-one, while filming Parts Unknown. He is remembered for showing that sharing a meal is a form of respect, and that curiosity about others is a way of honoring them.