
Anthony Bourdain, whose madcap memoir about the dark corners of New York’s restaurants made him into a celebrity chef and touched off a nearly two-decade career as a globe-trotting television host, was found dead on Friday at 61.
Mr. Bourdain was found in his hotel room at Le Chambard, a luxury hotel in Kaysersberg, a village in the Alsace region of eastern France, according to a prosecutor in the nearby city of Colmar. The prosecutor, Christian de Rocquigny du Fayel, said the cause of death was hanging. “At this stage, we have no reason to suspect foul play,” he said.
Mr. Bourdain had traveled to Strasbourg in France, near the country’s border with Germany, with a television production crew to record an episode of his show “Parts Unknown” on CNN, the network said. “It is with extraordinary sadness we can confirm the death of our friend and colleague,” CNN said in a statement.
The United States Embassy in Paris also confirmed his death.
“Anthony was a dear friend,” Eric Ripert, a celebrity chef and restaurateur who appeared with Mr. Bourdain on several of his shows, told The New York Times. “He was an exceptional human being, so inspiring and generous. One of the great storytellers of our time who connected with so many. I wish him peace. My love and prayers are with his family, friends and loved ones.”
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In everything he did, Mr. Bourdain cultivated a renegade style and bad-boy persona.
For decades, he worked 13-hour days as a line cook in restaurants in New York and the Northeast before he became executive chef in the 1990s at Brasserie Les Halles, serving steak frites and onion soup in Lower Manhattan. He had been an executive chef for eight years when he sent an unsolicited article to The New Yorker about the underbelly of the restaurant world and its deceptions.
[Read more: Mr. Bourdain spoke in 2017 about his favorite books.]
To his surprise, the magazine accepted it and ran it — catching the attention of book editors. It resulted in “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,” a memoir that elevated Mr. Bourdain to a celebrity chef and a new career on TV.
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“Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds?” Mr. Bourdain wrote in the memoir. “Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.”
He first became conscious of food in fourth grade, he wrote. Aboard the Queen Mary on a family vacation to France, he sat in the cabin-class dining room and ate a bowl of vichyssoise, a creamy mix of leek and potato. What surprised him was that the soup was cold. “It was the first food I enjoyed and, more important, remembered enjoying,” he wrote. He did not remember much else about the trip.
Mr. Bourdain became an instant hero to a certain breed of professional cooks and restaurant-goers when “Kitchen Confidential” hit the best-seller lists in 2000. He is largely credited for defining an era of line cooks as warriors, exposing a kitchen culture in which drugs, drinking and long, brutal hours on the line in professional kitchens were both a badge of honor and a curse. Mr. Bourdain was open in his writing about his past addictions to heroin and cocaine.
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Before he joined CNN in 2012, he spent eight seasons as the globe-trotting host of “No Reservations” on the Travel Channel, highlighting obscure cuisine and unknown restaurants. “No Reservations” largely focused on food and Mr. Bourdain himself. But on “Parts Unknown,” he turned the lens around, delving into different countries around the world and the people who lived in them. He explored politics and history with locals, often over plates of food and drinks.
Mr. Bourdain famously appeared with President Barack Obama on an episode of “Parts Unknown” in Vietnam in 2016. Over cold beers, grilled pork and noodles at a restaurant in Hanoi, they discussed Vietnamese-American relations, Mr. Obama’s final months in office and fatherhood.
Anthony and Anderson talk Vietnam, dining with ObamaCreditVideo by CNN
Celebrities in the food and entertainment worlds expressed deep shock and disbelief Friday morning. Nigella Lawson, the British cookbook author and television personality, tweeted, “Heartbroken to hear about Tony Bourdain’s death. Unbearable for his family and girlfriend. Am going off twitter for a while.”
[Read more: Fans and friends reacted to Mr. Bourdain’s death.]
Andrew Zimmern, the television personality and chef, had much in common with Mr. Bourdain. The two met 13 years ago and were friends who often spoke of the pressures that come with fame and who both worked to overcome addiction.
“We shared a very, very deep feeling of wanting to get off this crazy roller coaster, but at the same time knowing that this was our work,” he said. “The world has lost a brilliant human being and I’ve lost one of the few people I could talk to about some of this stuff. When I did see him he and I would walk off into a corner or have dinner together and share our deepest darkest stuff.”
He last spoke with Mr. Bourdain about a month ago. “He told me he’d never been happier. He felt that he had finally found his true soul mate in Asia,” he said, referring to Mr. Bourdain’s girlfriend, the actor Asia Argento.
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But Mr. Zimmern had some indication that perhaps there was more going on.
“Things on the surface never seemed to add up or make sense,” he said.
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Anthony Bourdain sampled Appalachian cuisine in West Virginia in an episode of “Parts Unknown.”CreditCNN
“We have lost someone who was in my opinion the sharpest and keenest observer of culture that I have ever known,” he said. “When we were alone his hopes and dreams extended into amazing areas.”
[Read more: Last year, Mr. Bourdain offered his advice for what to take when traveling and what to avoid.]
Anthony Michael Bourdain was born June 25, 1956, the oldest son of Pierre Bourdain, who was an executive in the classical-music recording industry, and Gladys Bourdain, who was a longtime copy editor at The New York Times. He grew up outside New York City, in Leonia, N.J., and his parents exposed him to fine cuisine, taking him often to France.
Mr. Bourdain graduated from high school in 1973 and attended Vassar College, dropping out after two years, where he spent long nights drinking and smoking pot. “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructing and thoughtless young lout,” he wrote in “Kitchen Confidential.”
But at Vassar, he met Nancy Putkoski before he left school for a chance at a culinary career. Mr. Bourdain spent a summer in Provincetown on Cape Cod with some friends. There, he started working as a dishwasher at a seafood restaurant and closely watched the cooks, men who dressed like pirates, with gold earrings and turquoise chokers. “In the kitchen, they were like gods,” he wrote.
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The experience solidified his determination to make cooking his life’s work.
“I saw how the cooks and chefs behaved,” Mr. Bourdain told The Times in 1997. “They had sort of a swagger, got all the girls and drank everything in sight.”
He then enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America in 1975 and graduated in 1978, stepping away at times to work at restaurants in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. He started at the bottom in the kitchen hierarchy, with stops at the Rainbow Room, the W.P.A. restaurant on Spring Street and Gianni’s at the South Street Seaport. He reached the top in the 1990s, becoming an executive chef at Sullivan’s, the restaurant next to the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway, and at Les Halles.
Mr. Bourdain’s first marriage ended in divorce in 2005. In 2007, he married Ottavia Busia, who appeared in several episodes of “No Reservations,” and they had a daughter, Ariane, who is 11. The couple divorced in 2016. He had been dating Ms. Argento for about two years.
Mr. Bourdain had emerged as a leading male voice in support of the #MeToo movement in the wake of rape and abuse allegations against the film producer Harvey Weinstein and others.
Ms. Argento, 42, said in a lengthy story in The New Yorker that she endured multiple attacks and manipulation by Mr. Weinstein, and that he sexually assaulted her in a hotel room years ago, when she was 21.
She said she had left her native Italy and moved to Berlin to escape the tension and victim-shaming culture she said she experienced at home.
Last month, she gave a speech at Cannes that stunned the room. “In 1997, I was raped by Harvey Weinstein here at Cannes,” Ms. Argento said. “This festival was his hunting ground.”
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In an interview with IndieWire magazine this month, Mr. Bourdain called her speech a nuclear bomb.
“I was so proud of her. It was absolutely fearless to walk right into the lion’s den and say what she said, the way she said it. It was an incredibly powerful moment, I thought. I am honored to know someone who has the strength and fearlessness to do something like that.”
Mr. Bourdain continued speaking out boldly on the subject of sexual abuse and harassment, taking on everyone from Alec Baldwin to the chef Mario Batali, who is under investigation for sexual assault charges. Several women have come forward and described repeated incidents of Mr. Batali groping them and of unwanted kisses and sexual propositions.
When news of Mr. Batali’s plans to attempt a comeback were exposed, Mr. Bourdain kicked down the idea.
“Retire and count yourself lucky,” Mr. Bourdain, a longtime friend of Mr. Batali’s who had not spoken with him recently, said. “I say that without malice, or without much malice. I am not forgiving. I can’t get past it. I just cannot and that’s me, someone who really admired him and thought the world of him.”
[If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Here’s what you can do when a loved one is severely depressed.]
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