What Anthony Bourdain Meant to Queens
It’s hard to eulogize a giant like Anthony Bourdain without feeling like you’ve fallen short.
How can you describe such a master wordsmith and even remotely do him justice?
His June 8 death hit everyone I knew hard, in my little community of food-loving travel addicts. A month later, we still tear up when we mention his name, and we wistfully exchange anecdotes of sweet-natured run-ins and conspiracy theories.
To us, he was a god, an American treasure, one of the greatest intellectuals of our time. He was smart and self-effacing, with a famously bawdy sense of humor, but always a gentleman. He somehow always knew the right way to amplify the voices of the marginalized.
In 2018, woke-ness is a regular talking point in celebrity interviews on late-night TV, and men of stature fall over themselves to identify as feminists, only to have accusations of past misconduct surface days later. But for Bourdain, decency and compassion didn’t seem to come as part of a calculated brand. It was just who he always was.
In 2017, he became one of the most vocal champions of the #MeToo movement after his partner Asia Argento publicly accused producer Harvey Weinstein of rape. When friend Mario Batali faced similar allegations, Bourdain didn’t hesitate to side with the women, and didn’t shy away from questioning his own culpability in romanticizing the testosterone-fueled culture of the restaurant industry in his writing.
In 2000, Bourdain was still running the kitchen at Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan when he published his breakout memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Amid tales of debauchery and vice, he stressed, again and again, that the restaurant industry in America is built on the labor of Mexican, Dominican, Salvadorian and Ecuadorian immigrants. In a list of all-important tips for wannabe-chefs, he ranks “Learn Spanish!” as must number two, just below “Be fully committed.”
He explains: “Should you become a leader, Spanish is absolutely essential…. These are your co-workers, your friends, the people you will be counting on, leaning on for much of your career… Show them some respect by bothering to know them. Learn their language. Eat their food. It will be personally rewarding and professionally invaluable.”
In 2018, his words of solidarity with immigrant workers in the food industry and beyond would make headlines. But it was even more revolutionary in 2000, when no prominent food personality was talking about race and inclusion.
Perhaps he knew even then, he would one day hang up his chef’s whites for good and devote the rest of his life and career to living out these words.
Throughout the years, on his TV shows, including CNN’s “Parts Unknown” and the Travel Channel’s “No Reservations,” Bourdain championed street food and hole-in-the-wall stalls the world over, alongside haute cuisine. He gave as much screen time to roadside food vendors as to heads of state, and treated them with no less dignity. He visited the hometowns of the immigrant friends from his restaurant days, and shared meals lovingly made by their mothers and grandmothers.
In New York City, where he was born, he devoted episodes to the vibrant immigrant neighborhoods of the outer boroughs, at a time when no mainstream media ever ventured that far out.
Bourdain’s 2007 “No Reservations” visit to a basement food stall in Flushing propelled the expansion of Xi’an Famous Foods, now a chain with 13 locations around the city.
CEO Jason Wang credits the segment with helping his family go from a humble life in a one-room apartment to achieving the American dream. Wang recounted in a tribute that when he thanked him for all he’d done, Bourdain said, “I’m just calling out good food like it is, that’s all.”
In the same episode, he visited the food court at the Ganesh Temple nearby. He included footage of the volunteer chefs making South Indian delicacies like vada and dosa to order. The coverage put the then-little-known community on the map. Today, the Temple Canteen is a foodie destination with visitors commonly making the long trek from Brooklyn or around the world to dine alongside parishioners and wander the sacred grounds.
Bourdain later happily tried san-nakji (moving octopus tentacles) at Korean restaurant Sik Gaek, with chef friend David Chang acting as interpreter, at a time when such fare was relegated to gross-out reality shows like “Fear Factor.”
As a Queens native, seeing Anthony Bourdain extoll the no-frills restaurants my friends and I grew up visiting gave us a new-found sense of legitimacy and pride in where we came from. All of a sudden, it felt cool to invite curious out-of-town friends who grew up dining in shiny food courts in suburban malls to try out hand-pulled noodles served on styrofoam plates in basement food stalls. What once seemed foreign and inaccessible to outsiders now became a celebrated part of what made New York great.
It wasn’t only in New York that people of color and first- and second-generation immigrants felt seen thanks to the love and respect he gave to their food. “Bourdain never treated our food like he ‘discovered’ it,” comedian and California native Jenny Yang wrote in a viral tweet that’s since been liked over 180,000 times. “He kicked it with grandma because he knew that HE was the one that needed to catch up to our brilliance.”
“Bourdain … told complex stories with humanity and respect, where [others] might have softly exoticized and essentialized instead. His message, over and over, was that no matter how foreign the rituals we keep, we’re all human in the end. In a world of powerful people profiting off disparity, that’s a tough idea to convey,” Japan-based food writer Julliard Lin wrote on Instagram.
It shouldn’t be so remarkable for a man raised in New Jersey with a first-generation French-American father to find common ground with people from foreign lands. After all, he credited his love of food to a chance encounter with an oyster during a childhood summer in France, and settled down to become the executive chef at a French-American restaurant. What was the difference between his story and that of the countless striving restaurant workers with origins in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa, who make their living hawking recipes passed down from their forebears?
Queens, and the city at large, is constantly evolving, and surely this trend towards authenticity and inclusion would have happened even without Anthony Bourdain. But he sure made it seem cool, and long before woke ideals became so mainstream. I miss the hell out of that man. We all do.
