From the Archives: How Anthony Bourdain Brought a Food Hall to New York’s Waterfront

This past Friday, August 7, marked the release of Tony, Matthew Johnson’s sketch of a young Anthony Bourdain (played with an appealing mix of wide-eyed naiveté and utter insouciance by Dominic Sessa) as he cut his teeth at a ramshackle restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the 1970s. That period in his life, which Bourdain described in his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, is briefly referenced in this 2016 profile of the chef, writer, publisher, and television personality by Oliver Strand for Vogue. If Bourdain, at the height of his powers, was accused by peers of being a bit tribal, a bit too cool and exclusive, Strand argues, it was because his initiation into the food business was by a hard-living gang of “pirates” who finally made him feel like he’d found his place in the world.

The news peg for Stone’s story was the development of Bourdain Market, envisioned as a global food hall at New York City’s Pier 57, on West 15th Street. Though the project fell apart even before Bourdain’s death by suicide in 2018, its concept would form the basis for Urban Hawker, a haven for Singaporean street food on West 50th Street that shuttered only last month.

“Man of the World,” by Oliver Strand, was originally published in the November 2016 issues of Vogue.

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Anthony Bourdain is already sitting in a corner booth when I walk into Sakagura, a Japanese bar in the basement of an office building in midtown Manhattan. Bourdain, I will come to learn, turns early arrivals into a competitive sport—no matter how well you plan, he will be there before you. This might seem like compulsively considerate behavior from a notorious hard-liver like Bourdain, a man whose public personality is tied up with late-night benders, foulmouthed frankness, and consuming such a staggering variety of food that he’s something like the Library of Congress of eating. If anybody is allowed to show up late for a night of sake and sashimi, it’s Bourdain.

Instead he’s pathologically prompt, which makes more sense when you pull back and take a wider view. Anthony Bourdain, the former head chef of Les Halles, a French steak house in New York that was well liked if not particularly influential, didn’t become Anthony Bourdain—the man who has been played by Bradley Cooper on television, the tastemaker whose name is set to be on a $60 million market hall on a pier in New York City, the CNN personality so broadly respected that President Obama will sit down with him in a fluorescent-lit noodle joint in Hanoi—on one-liners and being able to hold his liquor. Bourdain is indefatigable, and his unlikely rise to the top can be explained, in part, by his ability to marshal the energy and concentration needed to stick to an impossibly busy schedule filled with call times and production meetings and long-haul flights across the date line, and still look fresh when the cameras are rolling.

But being one of the hardest-working eaters in show business will get you only so far. What sets Bourdain apart is his honesty. When he finds something he loves, he smiles the toothy grin of an eleven-year-old boy. And when he comes across something he thinks is phony, he destroys his target with a few well-chosen words. “Agree with him or not, everyone knows his opinions come from a real place,” says the director Adam McKay, who gave Bourdain a cameo explaining collateralized debt obligations in his 2015 film, The Big Short. “So he was a perfect choice,” says McKay, for “cutting through mounds of banking bullshit and doublespeak.”

At the moment, Bourdain’s star has never been brighter or shone in so many millions of households, mainly thanks to Parts Unknown, which is now into its eighth season and has become one of CNN’s certifiable hits. Bourdain has leveraged his ratings to go to forbidding places: Libya, Iran, the West Bank and Gaza. Memorably, he and his crew took a boat up the Congo River, in a stateless part of the world where even the United Nations treads cautiously. The exercise was more a documentary art project than a see-the-sights travel show. “I assumed from the get-go that every minute I was on television was a freakish anomaly that would be over quickly,” Bourdain says. “It came as a sobering and confusing moment when I realized I was still on the air. What the fuck is going on?”

Bourdain is nothing if not entertaining, but there is a darkness to him that goes well beyond the manufactured tension you typically see on TV. “Life is complicated. It’s filled with nuance. It’s unsatisfying,” he tells me at Sakagura, a standby from the days before the Internet turned every hidden bar into a puppy pile of selfies: He suggested we go there so that we could eat and drink and disappear. To illustrate the point, he draws my attention to lettering tattooed on his arm. “It’s from the Greek skeptics,” he says. “The translation is ‘I am certain of nothing. I’m not even sure I’m certain of that.’ If I believe in anything, it is doubt. The root cause of all life’s problems is looking for a simple fucking answer.” It is by maintaining his integrity (a word he hates) that Bourdain has found his audience. Not that he cares. “Look,” he says. “I appreciate my fans, but I don’t feel any obligation to give them what they want or expect. I don’t feel any obligation to live up to anybody’s expectation of me.”

Later on, one of those fans walks over and introduces herself. “I love your show,” she says, gushing a little—and I can see from the look on her face that this moment will be the story she tells tomorrow, when she went out for a drink at Sakagura and discovered Anthony Bourdain in a corner booth. “I really appreciate it. I appreciate that it’s not . . . I feel like it’s not about food. It doesn’t seem like it’s really about food.”

“Thank you,” he says. “I still don’t know what it’s about.”

“I will stay tuned to watch you figure it out.”

Born in New York City to a modestly prosperous family, Bourdain moved with his parents to New Jersey when he was young. The family was stable but not conservative. “My parents were pretty adventurous. We would go into New York and eat at a Swedish restaurant or a Japanese restaurant or something,” Bourdain says. “We liked movies with subtitles in my house. That meant something. The ‘other’ wasn’t bad or frightening. It was interesting.”

His brother took advantage of the circumstances. “The good one. Finished college at Brown. Entered the financial services: banking, currency. Very smart.” Meanwhile, Bourdain dropped acid at thirteen and started getting into trouble soon after. “I was a monstrous child. Monstrous,” he says. “The nightmare version of the cranky teen.” It wasn’t just delinquency. This was the early 1970s—Nixon, Vietnam—and Bourdain wanted to belong to a subculture. Some of his high school teachers, who “made reading fun and dangerous,” woke something inside him. “My favorite English teachers were clearly closeted gay men who were used to living in repressive times, for whom Tennessee Williams held real power,” Bourdain says. “What they were saying was ‘This is a pretty fucking subversive book you just read.’ They were talking about shit that we weren’t really allowed to talk about.” He devoured books and films, although that didn’t take him far at Vassar. He didn’t come back for junior year.

Then he discovered the kitchen. “I found a home in the restaurant business,” Bourdain says. “You know, ‘I found a home in the circus’ or ‘I found a home in the Army’? These were the first people I ever respected, and this was the first place where I went home respecting myself.” He tells that story in Kitchen Confidential, the 2000 best seller that transformed the public’s image of the restaurant chef from a wise figure who guides you through the mysteries of trussing a roast into an antihero whose obsessive, self-destructive nature might be the reason why your dinner tastes so delicious, and why that same person may not be capable of filling out a lease for an apartment.

He also discovered heroin. He tells that story in Bone in the Throat, his 1995 noir thriller that draws on his experience as a highly functioning addict. In one memorable scene, the Bourdain character gets a fix in an abandoned building in Alphabet City (remember when the East Village had abandoned buildings?) that is raided by the police, and he hides inside a wall with another junkie until the cops go away. “That actually happened,” Bourdain says.

Bone in the Throat didn’t make much of an impact. Neither did Gone Bamboo, a sequel published two years later. Kitchen Confidential did. That book came out of the New Yorker essay “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” which Bourdain originally wrote for the New York Press, a now-defunct alternative weekly. When the New York Press editor in chief killed the story, Bourdain’s mother told him to submit it to The New Yorker. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, OK, thanks, Mom,’” Bourdain says. But he did mail a typed manuscript to the magazine’s offices, where it made its way through the slush pile. “Within 48 hours of that article coming out I had a book deal,” says Bourdain, who now has thirteen books to his credit, including Appetites (his new cookbook), Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical (a nonfiction account of Mary Mallon), Get Jiro! and Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi (manga-style graphic novels); he writes regularly for Lucky Peach; and he has his own imprint at Ecco. In the Cliffs Notes version, Bourdain was a chef who wrote a best seller and made his way onto television, but if you actually line up the events of his life, he’s a literary figure who spent years finding his voice and honing his craft. Cooking paid the rent, but his mornings were dedicated to writing.