The chef, who died at the age of 61, described the state as a "cultural petri dish which regularly issues forth greatness.''
Anthony Bourdain was the enfant terrible of the American food scene, this irascible former Jersey guy whose language took no prisoners, who had food epiphanies everywhere from Camden dive bars to back-street Tokyo noodle shops, whose books and TV shows were ripe with witty, catty, caustic commentary.
“There is no lying in the kitchen, and no God,” he once famously said.
He was a preening egomaniac to his enemies, a god-like figure to friends and fans. He either praised you or pissed you off; there seemed to be no middle ground.
My take? The chef, who died Friday at 61, had style and swagger, and he delighted in being a bad boy, a son of a bitch. Which was his appeal. TV food shows are overrun with bland smiling personalities. When Bourdain appeared you were almost forced to listen; you never knew what was coming next.
He was an inspiration for legions of food writers, who admired his brash style, his wanderlust.
“I have the best job in the world,” he said. “If I’m unhappy, it’s a failure of imagination.”
Sure, his writing could be painful at times: “I often feel this way when alone in Southeast Asian hotel bars — an enhanced sense of bathos, an ironic dry-smile sorrow, a sharpened sense of distance and loss,” he said in “Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook,” in which he savaged some of the biggest names in the culinary world.
In a review of “Medium Raw,” The New York Times described Bourdain as “a take-down artist who generates clouds of web traffic each time he eviscerates a bloated personalty or calls out a restaurant for bogus tactics.”
It’s not easy being honest in the food business, especially as a writer. Take my word for it. Anyone can glad-hand a chef or restaurant. You want to be loved, love every restaurant. Bourdain was not afraid to call out fakes and phonies; that was his appeal. Was it part of his shtick? Sure.
He knew his Jersey, and his Jersey food, that’s for sure. Bourdain, who was born in New York City but grew up in Leonia and graduated from Dwight-Englewood School in Englewood, loved Hiram’s, a legendary hot dog joint in Fort Lee. It was his “happy place.”
Hiram’s is a happy place for hot dog lovers around the state, including me. Our S.W.A.T. dog team named it the state’s best chili dog some years ago.
Bourdain enraged cheesesteak lovers in Philly when he declared Donkey’s Place in Camden the best Philly cheesesteak. There are better, in my opinion, but Donkey’s did make my list of the state’s best cheesesteaks.
Another favorite Jersey food stop for Bourdain was Frank’s Deli in Asbury Park. “As I always like to say, good is good forever,” he said of Frank’s. Good line. Frank’s is a time-warp wonder; it made my recent list of N.J.’s 35 best old-school restaurants.
I never met Bourdain, and admit I was a little jealous when Brian Donohue, former writer and videographer for NJ.com, did, during Bourdain’s visit to New Jersey for “Parts Unknown.”
“To know Jersey is to love her,” Bourdain once said. He described the state as a “cultural petri dish which regularly issues forth greatness.” Of his childhood summers down the shore: “I was up to every variety of criminal, anti-social behavior down here.”
The Times said Bourdain was “acutely aware of his own shtick, which risks turning him into Andy Rooney in a leather jacket.”
He was more than that, of course. You either loved him or couldn’t stand the sight and sound of him. On his shows “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown,” he took viewers to places they surely would never go on their own, ate things they wouldn’t think of eating.
“The episode where he traveled back after 10 years to the headhunters down the Amazon,” went a typical comment on NJ.com today. “Drinking jungle hooch until they all passed out, then got up to start drinking it all over again, and they gave him the honor of slaughtering the pig.”
Bourdain seemed to be everywhere – out in the world, on TV, on the internet, heck, you might have caught him eating dinner at your favorite Lower East Side restaurant.
Two years ago a memorable photo appeared of Bourdain and President Barack Obama sitting on plastic blue stools in a spare Hanoi restaurant, downing beers and eating bun cha, a grilled pork and noodle dish. Bourdain said the president’s people reached out to him to schedule the highly secretive meet-up.
“He’s so smooth, so loosey-goosey, cool; he was lovely,” Bourdain said in a piece on Roads and Kingdoms, an online guide to food, travel and politics. “At one point I asked him, ‘Do you ever miss just being able to go out in the afternoon and have a beer in an old man bar, just put a sad song on the jukebox?’ He looks at me, smiles, and says, ‘in about six months.'”
“I’ve never seen someone enjoy a cold beer on a little plastic stool more than President Obama,” he said.
“Kitchen Confidential,” maybe his best-known book, is billed by its publisher as a “deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales” from Bourdain, “laying out his more than quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine.”
There will be a run on Bourdain books on Amazon this week. I just ordered three myself.
Lately Bourdain had been filming episodes of Parts Unknown, a travel show for CNN, although “travel show” is a misnomer. Bourdain was always on the lookout for great food in unlikely places, but on Parts Unknown he was not afraid to mix food, travel and politics in a blustery, savory mix.
“Simply by coming here, I’ve become, as I read in the papers a few days later, officially persona non grata in Azerbaijan,” he said on a “Parts Unknown” visit to the Republic of Artsakh in an episode on Armenia.
The message at the heart of Bourdain’s work, according to Roads and Kingdoms: “We have nothing to fear from one another, that we are all connected by our love for food, drink, conversation, and our hope to live in peace and happiness.”
My favorite description of Bourdain’s spirit and style came from the writer himself, in the foreword to “Rice Noodle Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan’s Food Culture,’‘ by Matt Goulding, co-founder of Roads and Kingdoms.
Bourdain talked about his initial visit to Japan, the first Asian country he ever visited.
Tokyo, he said, was “so dense, so crowded with .. stuff, so complicated, tempting, delicious and seemingly unknowable .. one city block a life’s worth of exploration. … It was a glorious and lasting derangement of the senses that first trip, and I’ve never been the same since.”
Peter Genovese may be reached at pgenovese@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @PeteGenovese or via The Munchmobile @NJ_Munchmobile. Find the Munchmobile on Facebook and Instagram.
