DEBORAH CROMBIE: Last week was a rough week. First Kate Spade, then Anthony Bourdain, gone. Both deaths were terribly, terribly sad, but I felt Tony Bourdain's with a profound sense of loss.
Much has been written about him in the last week, by people who knew him personally, which I, alas, did not. But here's the thing.
I've spent the last year and a half writing a book in which two of the main characters are chefs, and my fascination with these obsessive people in the kitchen goes back eighteen years to August of 2000, when a little known New York chef named Anthony Bourdain published a book called KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL.
Of course I was interested in food and cooking, but I had no idea what went on in restaurant kitchens, or what it took to be a chef--much less a good chef. Tony was smart and funny and articulate and sometimes brutal. He opened up a whole world to me, the professional kitchen with its sometimes unsavory underbelly, and with its denizens, the cooks, driven by necessity or passion.
Passion was the thing with Tony. He cared about life, and food, and especially about people. He went on to illuminate much more than a cook's life for us. He gave us other countries, other cultures, as well as the multitude of differences within our own country, and he celebrated those differences.
And, because we are writers, and crime writers, I have to add that Tony Bourdain was not only a great storyteller, he was a terrific writer--he could have made his reputation on his crime novels alone. A Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo, his crime novels set in the New York restaurant world, were published before Kitchen Confidential, The Bobby Gold Stories shortly after. He loved Dashiell Hammett and Elmore Leonard. His prose sparkled, his dialogue was on the money, his characters jumped off the page. But life, and the celebrity that came with Kitchen Confidential, took him in other directions.
But if we lost crime novels that might have been, we gained a unique view of the world with his television work, A Cook's Tour, No Reservations, and Parts Unknown. Through it all he made connections, with people, with food, and with life.
Anthony Bourdain was a rebel, a truth-teller, an explorer, an opener of doors, and we are all the poorer for his passing.
