Anthony Bourdain Biography

Anthony Bourdain was a rough-and-tumble chef famous for his television shows about cooking and travel, and for his bestselling 2000 book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.

A New Yorker, Anthony Bourdain attended Vassar College for two years before moving to the Culinary Institute of America. He graduated in 1978, then worked his way up to being the executive chef at New York’s Brasserie les Halles. After two decades behind the grill he wrote Kitchen Confidential: a behind-the-scenes look at the world of elite restaurants, complete with lurid gossip and tales of Bourdain’s own wild drug use.

The book was a hit and Bourdain soon became a one-man empire of travel and cooking books and cable shows. His public persona was one of gray-maned, sassy machismo: he loved exotic foods and wasn’t afraid of offering disdain for other celebrity chefs. His books included A Cook’s Tour (2001), The Nasty Bits (2006), Medium Raw (2009) and Appetites: A Cookbook (2016).

Anthony Bourdain’s television shows included A Cook’s Tour (2002-03), Kitchen Confidential (2005-06), Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (2009-11) and the globe-trotting Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown (launched in 2013). He hosted President Barack Obama for dinner at a cafe in Vietnam for one 2016 episode of Parts Unknown.

Anthony Bourdain died on June 8, 2018. The network’s story said “Bourdain was in France working on an upcoming episode of his award-winning CNN series Parts Unknown. His close friend Eric Ripert, the French chef, found Bourdain unresponsive in his hotel room Friday morning.” It later was revealed that Bourdain had killed himself.