I Still Miss Anthony Bourdain
No one else is going to walk that walk.
I went to culinary arts school when I was 34 years old and very quickly fell in love with kitchen culture. There was something deeply satisfying about putting my body through a meat grinder everyday in order to churn out food that made people’s eyes roll back in their heads. People don’t realize how physically demanding the job is. They also don’t know how we get off on the fact that you’re getting off on our food. The whole thing is my kind of porn–I will willingly hurt myself for you to love what I feed you.
I don’t remember exactly who gave me a copy of Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, but I do remember feeling like it was whispering a secret into my rapidly hardening soul. There seemed to be two kinds of reactions to that book. If you didn’t work in a kitchen, you were equally horrified and seduced. If you did work in a kitchen, you sat back in your seat with your tattooed arms crossed and did nothing but nod your fucking head. Kitchens are not for the weak. Neither was Anthony.
Yet, my poor heart feels woefully incapable of accepting that he’s not with us anymore.
We didn’t see it coming.
He was our Ferris, our Jareth, our Leonidas. He was our inspiration, our leader, our DILF. He was in the trenches with us, but…
