Anthony Bourdain, Celebrity Chef And TV Host Found Dead In Hotel
Anthony Bourdain, Celebrity Chef And TV Host Found Dead In Hotel: Anthony Bourdain, whose darkly funny memoir about life in New York City restaurant kitchens made him a celebrity chef, food expert and social activist, was found dead on Friday in his hotel room in France. He was 61.
His death was being treated as a suicide. Christian de Rocquigny du Fayel, the prosecutor for the city of Colmar, in the Alsace region near where Mr. Bourdain was found, said the death was by hanging. “At this stage, we have no reason to suspect foul play,” he said.
Mr. Bourdain’s lasting work was not in American kitchens; it was on television, where he ate noodles in Hanoi with President Barack Obama, sucked on soft-boiled turtle eggs at a market stall in Colombia, and stopped to appreciate handmade spring rolls in Cambodia en route to interview a member of the opposition government.
Mr. Bourdain had traveled to the Alsace region, near France’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.
His mother, Gladys Bourdain, who was a longtime editor at The New York Times, said she had no indication that Mr. Bourdain might have been thinking of suicide. “He is absolutely the last person in the world I would have ever dreamed would do something like this,” Ms. Bourdain said.
Mr. Bourdain spent more than two decades in professional kitchens, first shucking oysters and washing dishes in a Cape Cod seafood shack and later cooking in high-end Manhattan kitchens, before accepting a friend’s offer to fly him to Mexico if he agreed to write a novel.
Mr. Bourdain became an instant hero to a certain breed of professional cook and restaurant-goer when “Kitchen Confidential” hit the best-seller lists. He is largely credited with 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.
In 2011, Mr. Bourdain, an omnivorous reader, began his own publishing imprint at HarperCollins, editing books by the chefs Roy Choi, Wylie Dufresne and Danny Bowien that were as unconventional as his own.
Before he joined CNN in 2012, he spent eight seasons as the 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 Mr. Obama on an episode of “Parts Unknown” in Vietnam in 2016. Over grilled pork, noodles and beers at a restaurant in Hanoi, they discussed Vietnamese-American relations, Mr. Obama’s final months in office and fatherhood.
Anthony Michael Bourdain was born on June 25, 1956, in New York, and grew up in Leonia, N.J. His father, Pierre Bourdain, was an executive in the classical-music recording industry whose parents were born in France.
Mr. Bourdain graduated from high school in 1973 and followed his high school love, Nancy Putkoski, who would become his first wife, to Vassar College, where he spent long nights drinking and smoking pot. He dropped out after two years. “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructing and thoughtless young lout,” he wrote in “Kitchen Confidential.”
On Friday, people placed flowers and letters on the front door of the long-shuttered Les Halles on Park Avenue South, and celebrities in the food and entertainment worlds expressed deep shock and disbelief.
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