Anthony Bourdain

Saturday

Alex Diggins

The Anthony Bourdain Reader leaves a reader hungry

Charismatic, handsome and with a great white shark’s feral cool, Anthony Bourdain was someone that everyone wanted to be. The chef, writer and TV presenter described the premise of his award-winning shows, No Reservations and Parts Unknown, as “I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit and basically do whatever the fuck I want.” They cemented his image as a gadabouting, kamikaze gourmand. Bourdain scarfed down andouillette and warthog anus, drank sun-bear bile and polished off the still-beating heart of a cobra, plonked into a shooter of Vietnamese firewater. He showed Barack Obama the correct way to slurp bún chả noodles on a steamy Hanoi side street, and he and his team watched from their hotel pool as Israeli jets strafed downtown Beirut during the 2006 invasion.

anthony bourdain

Thursday

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Meeting Eric Ripert, chef of America’s best restaurant 

For Eric Ripert, cooking is like jazz. Ad-libbing, balance, motion. “One day the garlic is very pungent, one day it is not pungent. One day the onion is very juicy and sweet, one day it’s less, so you have to adapt all the time,” says the celebrated chef, who is the co-owner of Manhattan’s Le Bernardin, a close friend of the late Anthony Bourdain and a TV personality in his own right. “So, it’s very similar to music — I do not play the same notes all the time, I take a lot of freedom and liberties. Because I can.” Ripert is French but has — like his storied restaurant — become a New York institution. The chef lives on the Upper East Side with his glamorous, dark-haired wife Sandra (a real-estate broker who is Brooklyn born-and-raised, of Puerto Rican descent).

Ripert

Thursday

Rich Cromwell

A glimpse into Anthony Bourdain’s final days

“I hate my fans, too. I hate being famous. I hate my job. I am lonely and living in constant uncertainty.” So wrote Anthony Bourdain in a text to his ex-wife and confidante, Ottavia Bussia-Bourdain, according to an unauthorized biography being released in October. Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain, written by journalist Charles Leerhsen, isn’t a retread of Bourdain: The Official Oral Biography, nor is it another Roadrunner, the movie about Bourdain released earlier this year. In Leershen’s own words, his motivation for writing it was that “We never had that big story, that long piece that said what happened, how the guy with the best job in the world took his own life.

Friday

Taki

The Bible’s #MeToo problem

I write this on my last day in the Bagel, and it sure is a scorcher, heat and humidity so high that the professional beggars on Fifth Avenue have moved closer to the lakes in Central Park. Heat usually calms the passions, but nowadays groupthink pundits are so busy presenting fake news as journalism you’d think this was election week in November. Here’s one jerk in the New York Times: ‘The court’s decision was narrow…’ The decision in question is the Supreme Court ruling that a baker could refuse a gay couple’s request for a cake on religious grounds. The writer who described the result as narrow, one Adam Liptak (Lipgloss would be more appropriate), did not mention that the vote was seven to two. Talk about fake news.