What Anthony Bourdain Understood About Authenticity

According to Anthony Bourdain, he became a chef because it looked cool. “I came into the business when cooks still smoked on the line and wore headbands,” he wrote in the New Yorker essay that began his rise from unknown New York City chef to international star at age 42. “I wanted it all: the cuts and burns on hands and wrists, the ghoulish kitchen humor, the free food, the pilfered booze, the camaraderie that flourished within rigid order and nerve-shattering chaos.”

The description makes his career choice sound like an aesthetic one, and Bourdain indeed was an aesthete, devoted to an art form—food—where intellect follows the tongue. But in his books and interviews and TV shows, beneath the headbands and smoke of the restaurant line lay a cohesive subculture, a means to pride, an outlet for twitchy energy, and a way to serve. When the sexist excesses of that subculture came into new light, he was to reckon forthrightly with it. To do otherwise would mean he wasn’t being real.