Anthony Bourdain > Quotes

“Whatever had the most shock value became my meal of choice.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Looking at these photographs, I know that I will never understand the world I live in or fully know the places I've been. I've learned for sure only what I don't know - and how much I have to learn.”
― Anthony Bourdain, No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach

“I had always believed that if somebody who worked with me went home feeling like a jerk for giving their time and their genuine effort, then it was me who had failed them—and in a very personal, fundamental way.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

“history, as they say, will always be written by the victors.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

“Shepherd's pie'? 'Chili special'? Sounds like leftovers to me. How about swordfish? I like it fine. But my seafood purveyor, when he goes out to dinner, won't eat it. He's seen too many of those 3-foot-long parasitic worms that riddle the fish's flesh.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“How many'd we do?" is the question frequently asked at the end of the shift, when the cooks collapse onto flour sacks and milk crates and piles of dirty linen, smoking their cigarettes, drinking their shift cocktails,”
― Anthony Bourdain, The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones

“I like cooking pasta. Maybe it's that I always wanted to be Italian American in some dark part of my soul; maybe I get off on that final squirt of emulsifying extra virgin, just after the basil goes in, I don't know.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Don't look back someone might be gaining on you.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Life was clearly a cruel joke. A place with no guarantees, built on a foundation of false assumptions if not outright untruths. You think everything’s going okay… Then they shoot your fucking dog.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

“When I finally leave the market, the streets are dark, and I pass a few blocks where not a single electric light appears – only dark open storefronts and coms (fast-food eateries), broom closet-sized restaurants serving fish, meat, and rice for under a dollar, flickering candles barely revealing the silhouettes of seated figures. The tide of cyclists, motorbikes, and scooters has increased to an uninterrupted flow, a river that, given the slightest opportunity, diverts through automobile traffic, stopping it cold, spreads into tributaries that spill out over sidewalks, across lots, through filling stations. They pour through narrow openings in front of cars: young men, their girlfriends hanging on the back; families of four: mom, dad, baby, and grandma, all on a fragile, wobbly, underpowered motorbike; three people, the day’s shopping piled on a rear fender; women carrying bouquets of flapping chickens, gathered by their feet while youngest son drives and baby rests on the handlebars; motorbikes carrying furniture, spare tires, wooden crates, lumber, cinder blocks, boxes of shoes. Nothing is too large to pile onto or strap to a bike. Lone men in ragged clothes stand or sit by the roadsides, selling petrol from small soda bottles, servicing punctures with little patch kits and old bicycle pumps.”
― Anthony Bourdain, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines

“What did you do before there were drugs? Before there were antibiotics?  . . . You learned to sit on the bedside and hold the hand  . . . every once in a while you gave the person a hug.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary

“I talk about these mysterious forces all the time with my chef cronies. Nothing illustrates them more than the Last Meal Game. You're getting into the electric chair tomorrow morning. They're gonna strap you down, turn up the juice and fry your ass until your eyes sizzle and pop like McNuggets. You've got one meal left. What are you having for dinner? When playing this game with chefs - and we're talking good chefs here- the answers are invariable simple ones.”
― Anthony Bourdain, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines

“Glasgow is maybe the most bullshit-free place on earth. I think I call it "the antidote to the rest of the world."

It's so unapologetically working class and attitude-free. Everyone's looking "to take the piss out of you," as they put it. They're all comedians, and tough. They don't put on airs.”
― Anthony Bourdain

“The whole suggestion is predicated on a damnable fucking lie—the BIG lie, actually—one which Richman himself happily helped create and which he works hard, on a daily basis, to keep alive. See … it makes for a better article when you associate the food with a personality. Richman, along with the best and worst of his peers, built up these names, helped make them celebrities by promoting the illusion that they cook—that if you walk into one of dozens of Jean-Georges’s restaurants, he’s somehow back there on the line, personally sweating over your halibut, measuring freshly chopped herbs between thumb and forefinger. Every time someone writes “Mr. Batali is fond of strong, assertive flavors” (however true that might be) or “Jean Georges has a way with herbs” and implies or suggests that it was Mr. Batali or Mr. Vongerichten who actually cooked the dish, it ignores the reality, if not the whole history, of command and control and the creative process in restaurant kitchens. While helpful to chefs, on the one hand, in that the Big Lie builds interest and helps create an identifiable brand, it also denies the truth of what is great about them: that there are plenty of great cooks in this world—but not that many great chefs. The word “chef” means “chief.” A chef is simply a cook who leads other cooks. That quality—leadership, the ability to successfully command, inspire, and delegate work to others—is the very essence of what chefs are about. As Richman knows. But it makes better reading (and easier writing) to first propagate a lie—then, later, react with entirely feigned outrage at the reality.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

“Once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with you're bear hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about the treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia - the fruits of his genius for statesmanship - and you will never understand why he's not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remake at A-list parties, Cambodi, the neutral nation he illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.”
― Anthony Bourdain, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines

“you'd never never never again work for that manipulative, Machiavellian psychopath. And he'd get you back on the team, often with a gesture as simple and inexpensive as a baseball cap or a T-shirt. The timing was what did it, that he knew. He knew just when to apply that well-timed pat on the back, the strangled and difficult-for-him 'Thank you for your good work' appreciation of your labors.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“I think people lose sight of the fact that chefs should be ultimately in the pleasure business, not in the look-at-me business.”
― Anthony Bourdain

“I believe the words “meat” and “treated with ammonia” should never occur in the same paragraph—much less the same sentence. Unless you’re talking about surreptitiously disposing of a corpse.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

“A long-time associate, Beth, who likes to refer to herself as the 'Grill Bitch', excelled at putting loudmouths and fools into their proper place. She refused to behave any differently than her male co-workers: she'd change in the same locker area, dropping her pants right alongside them. She was as sexually aggressive, and as vocal about it, as her fellow cooks, but unlikely to suffer behavior she found demeaning. One sorry Moroccan cook who pinched her ass found himself suddenly bent over a cutting board with Beth dry-humping him from behind, saying, 'How do you like it, bitch?' The guy almost died of shame — and never repeated that mistake again.
Another female line cook I had the pleasure of working with arrived at work one morning to find that an Ecuadorian pasta cook had decorated her station with some particularly ugly hard-core pornography of pimply-assed women getting penetrated in every orifice by pot-bellied guys with prison tattoos and back hair. She didn't react at all, but a little later, while passing through the pasta man's station, casually remarked. 'Jose, I see you brought in some photos of the family. Mom looks good for her age.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“I've assembled a pretty good collection of mid-'70s New York punk classics on tape: Dead Boys, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Heartbreakers, Ramones, Television and so on,”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“I know how old most seafood is on Monday — about four to five days old!”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“if you’re going to a country, particularly in Southeast Asia, [where] you’ve never been before, it’s a very good idea to go to the market first, see what they’re selling, get an idea of what they’re good at, what the people are buying.”
― Anthony Bourdain, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide

“Tim and Andy stood there in head-to-toe leather motocross outfits, covered in road dust, behind me in a dark corner of the hotel’s dining room. Tim has penetrating pale blue eyes with tiny pupils, and the accent of an Englishman from the north – Newcastle, or Leeds maybe. Andy is an American with blond hair and the wholesome, well-fed good looks and accent of the Midwest. Behind them, two high-performance dirt bikes leaned on kickstands in the Hang Meas’ parking lot.      Tim owns a bar/restaurant in Siemreap. Andy is his chef. Go to the end of the world and apparently there will be an American chef there waiting for you.”
― Anthony Bourdain, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines

“Inarguably, a successful restaurant demands that you live on the premises for the first few years, working seventeen-hour days, with total involvement in every aspect of a complicated, cruel and very fickle trade. You must be fluent in not only Spanish but the Kabbala-like intricacies of health codes, tax law, fire department regulations, environmental protection laws, building code, occupational safety and health regs, fair hiring practices, zoning, insurance, the vagaries and back-alley back-scratching of liquor licenses, the netherworld of trash removal, linen, grease disposal. And with every dime you've got tied up in your new place, suddenly the drains in your prep kitchen are backing up with raw sewage, pushing hundreds of gallons of impacted crap into your dining room; your coke-addled chef just called that Asian waitress who's working her way through law school a chink, which ensures your presence in court for the next six months; your bartender is giving away the bar to under-age girls from Wantagh, any one of whom could then crash Daddy's Buick into a busload of divinity students, putting your liquor license in peril, to say the least; the Ansel System could go off, shutting down your kitchen in the middle of a ten-thousand-dollar night; there's the ongoing struggle with rodents and cockroaches, any one of which could crawl across the Tina Brown four-top in the middle of the dessert course; you just bought 10,000 dollars-worth of shrimp when the market was low, but the walk-in freezer just went on the fritz and naturally it's a holiday weekend, so good luck getting a service call in time; the dishwasher just walked out after arguing with the busboy, and they need glasses now on table seven; immigration is at the door for a surprise inspection of your kitchen's Green Cards; the produce guy wants a certified check or he's taking back the delivery; you didn't order enough napkins for the weekend — and is that the New York Times reviewer waiting for your hostess to stop flirting and notice her?”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“It’s like demanding of a date that she have unprotected sex with four or five other guys immediately before sleeping with you—just so she can’t point the finger directly at you should she later test positive for clap.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

“Try arguing the virtues of Nello on chowhound.com, or a similar online meeting ground for knowledgeable food nerds, and prepare to get pilloried.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

“It’s why Ronald McDonald is said to be more recognizable to children everywhere than Mickey Mouse or Jesus. Personally, I don’t care if my little girl ever recognizes those two other guys—but I do care about her relationship with Ronald. I want her to see American fast-food culture as I do. As the enemy.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

“The food was what you might expect to find on Air Uganda tourist class:”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“I want to tell you about the dark recesses of the restaurant underbelly — a subculture whose centuries-old militaristic hierarchy and ethos of 'rum, buggery and the lash' make for a mix of unwavering order and nerve-shattering chaos — because I find it all quite comfortable,”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Regina Schrambling is both hero and villain. My favorite villain, actually. The former New York Times and LA Times food writer and blogger is easily the Angriest Person Writing About Food. Her weekly blog entries at gastropoda.com are a deeply felt, episodic unburdening, a venting of all her bitterness, rage, contempt, and disappointment with a world that never seems to live up to her expectations. She hates nearly everything—and everybody—and when she doesn’t, she hates herself for allowing such a thing to happen. She never lets an old injury, a long-ago slight, go. She proofreads her former employer, the New York Times, with an eye for detail—every typo, any evidence of further diminution of quality—and when she can latch on to something (as, let’s face it, she always can), she unleashes a withering torrent of ridicule and contempt. She hates Alice Waters. She hates George Bush. (She’ll still be writing about him with the same blind rage long after he’s dead of old age.) She hates Ruth Reichl, Mario Batali, Frank Bruni, Mark Bittman … me. She hates the whole rotten, corrupt, self-interested sea in which she must swim: a daily ordeal, which, at the same time, she feels compelled to chronicle. She hates hypocrisy, silliness, mendacity. She is immaculate in the consistency and regularity of her loathing.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook