“I am the easiest [restaurant] Customer, “he assured Oprah Winfrey on her talk show in 2001. “I’m just so grateful that I sit down and someone else cook for me. I tip too much, I almost never complain – unless the waiter really offended my intelligence.”
His generously spiced judgment on food and the people who make, sell, and write about it was all the more applauded as he turned ruthlessly upon himself. He was amazingly open about his many mistakes, both professionally and personally, and his demons became an inseparable part of his own mythology, the cooking and travel expert who could be trusted because he was already cut to the bone and his own Spilled guts for the world to see.
“Someone called me the Elder Statesman of Food the other day,” Bourdain complained to Globes & Mail in 2010. “I found it deeply terrifying. I don’t want to be one of them because I see them as terminally ill, corrupt, tragic, mostly angry.”
Against the New Yorker in 2017, he was reluctant to use the title “Chef” and said, “Look, I’ve invested my time so I don’t feel uncomfortable. What I’m uncomfortable with is when a cook who actually works is better cooks.” than I’ve ever cooked in my life, calls me a cook. “
He said Marc Marron 2011: “I fell for the business because I fell in love with the lifestyle, I liked the people, I liked that I was part of a cult, I liked that I did something with my hands that either rewarded or was punished now I have the privilege of being able to travel the world on my stomach and really thinking about food and all my previous life in the life, 28 years old, I think it allows me a perspective in which I am always thinking, ‘Who cooked this meal?’ Not just what I eat, but who cooked it and why? ”
“Bullshit-free food,” that’s what Bourdain appreciated.
