I remember watching an episode of A Cook’s Tour, on Travel&Living, sometime 13 or 14 years ago. And it just blew my mind.
I have always had a passion for traveling. I want to go everywhere, and see everything. And yet, in all that everything, we are never really sure of what we’ll be dealing with. And Anthony Bourdain opened those doors for me.
He used his storytelling abilities, his wit and his intelligence to take you on the road with him. Not only to get to know the food of the city, but the culture, the history, the idiosyncrasies and everything that seemingly stayed behind the -in more than one occasion- weird plates.
He was sarcastic and brutally honest. I loved that. He could tell you that a tripe plate was amazing, and I just kept looking in awe. ¿How can this man eat that? And at the next second, he was talking about lost history, tragedy, growth, poetry, art, politics, love for pork and heavy drinking.
You could be laughing hard at one scene, and just be shocked and saddened at the next. It was powerful, it was a learning experience through the eyes of a like minded fellow, a friend.
In No reservations, we all got to see the music-loving, not-suited-for-horseriding-or-fishing Anthony. But travel, as he once said, wasn’t always pretty. The Lebanon chapter proved Anthony and his crew to be courageous in the face of a critic situation. The one in Nicaragua, where children would be picking up their food from a garbage dump. And you could see him in pain. Traveling should change you, as he said. And throughout the seasons, we could see him transforming into a humbler, kinder, empathic human being, concerned with knowing the people with whom he shared meals.
It was about real food, and it was about the way it brings people together. It is one very important thing that people from a same condition, community, state or country share. It is part of the traditions, it is part of a country’s legacy.
I remember distinctly the chapter where his very mexican Les Halles sous chef took him to Puebla and Michoacán. I remember being so grateful to him for actually acknowledging the true mexican food, and the importance of mexican immigrants in the US’s culinary scene. He stood with my country, and it made him even more a closer friend of mine.
And you could see him and the whole crew eating on the streets of every country that has that kind of food. And I understood. I needed to change my mind and my perception towards food. I turned out to be a horribly picky eater. And anything that looked weird, or smells too much were things tat I wouldn’t even try. Anthony showed me that I was wasting precious life moments by shutting all that out. And I started to re-learn how to eat. It’s still a process, but I try, every day a little more, and I have my friend Tony to thank.
He also was truly unique and a role model to all of those people who fight to be themselves in a world that pushes you constantly to constrain your identity and personality to a series of rules. He was pure Bourdain, all day, every day. I was sure that what you got to see on the shows, was the man that you could run into on any street of Manhattan, or the world. The man was seriously in-your-face, spontaneous, rough and raw, and even when we was careful to choose his words, you knew that he wasn’t afraid to tell it as it was. And you could disagree, but his passion for what he did and the way he did it taught you to be the same way with your own.
And then there were the books. The humorous, sarcastic, painstakingly real, powerful and eloquent way he had to tell his own story, and owning his mistakes and growing through them, and getting that “lucky break” that gave him the “dream” life.
He was aware of his luck, and that he had the job that most of us would kill for. The man was traveling the entire world, eating, drinking and documenting it for TV.
And millions just feel in love with his ways, with the way he made us understand foreign cultures and made us feel closer to them, instead of afraid, instead of trying to push them away.
I have planed some of my tours based on what I saw with him. He saw traveling the same way I do, an opportunity to learn, immerse yourself in a different place, accept it and appreciate everything else. Travel has changed me. Every single time.
Anthony was outspoken and I even felt closer to him when he stood for the #MeToo movement. Being with Asia Argento and supporting Rose McGowan. Standing up to Trump and his “white male privilege empowerment” and just shutting down many Twitter trolls. I kept cheering on. ¡¡Burn them all, Tony!!
And then, today came. That painful moment where I found out that he had committed suicide. And I just could wrap my head around it. ¡¿WHAT The Fuck, Tony?!
I’ve never thought in my life that being famous and apparently having it all is reason enough to not have any problems. But this was too much for me. This was the man with whom I shared laughs, with whom I had been shocked, appalled, angry, amused, interested. I had felt the resilience, the bravery, the courage, the fear, the surprising outcomes and the pain of some realities. And of course, I had been drooling on every chapter, for some dishes. And I just kept saying “That’s what we all should do. That’s how we should be living the world.”
And he shocked me, once again, by leaving me. Leaving all of us, the large community of Bourdain fans that watched him, wherever he went, because he was so loved, as he brought us freedom of being and freedom of the mind.
And I laid in my bed, and I cried. For a man I never met, but felt like a knew him for 14 years. I felt close to him because I have learned so much from him. He opened my mind, my heart and my mouth to every single spot of the world where he stood.
And I cried several times after that, because the news kept flooding the internet and my social networks’ feed. And I felt terrible for his child, his 11 year old girl that will have to deal with losing his father for the rest of her life. I felt sad for all of the people who wrote on his Instagram about how devastated and sad they felt. I felt sad for Eric Ripert, his fellow chef and friend, who discovered the body. Felt sad for the friends he introduced on many chapters. ¿Why do our minds play us such terrible games?
¿Are emotions so powerful that override our natural instinct of survival?
The balance that we have to keep is so frail, and life sometimes is too hard.
And today, I feel pain, I feel sorrow. I feel his loss. I feel like I have lost a close friend.
Unpublished Thoughts 