The book publishes Tuesday and isavailable for pre-order.
**
Right after high school, I spent an entire summer staring at Anthony Bourdains face.
Store employees werent technically supposed to read on the job, but what else was there to do?
Credit: Melville House
Did readingKitchen Confidentialchange my life?
What could I have believed about fancy restaurants, that this book upended my notions of their sanctity?
What could I have known about food writing that it shattered my sense of its limits?
It also explosively changed everything for Bourdain himself.
He writes about being recognized by a young cook at a bar: Fuck you, he says.
You dont even cook.
Youre not one of us anymore.
Far from being offended (though I am hurt), I want to give him a big hug.
Another drink or two, and I just might.
What I hadnt realized before readingMedium Rawwas that Bourdain had written it as a corrective.
secretswas pretty much just a radar blip.
The shows, when I tracked them down in reruns, were even better.
Its a walk in somebody elses shoes.
When Bourdain died, in 2018, it felt like the world was knocked off course.
But Bourdains suicide was sudden, unfathomable.
It felt like a mistake: surely it wasnt him, surely it wasnt real.
The senselessness of his death is somehow more enormous, still, than the great work of his life.
Bourdain defied category, which means he defies replacement.
This was where I ran into my Tony problem.
Even after we became friends, I had a hard time calling Bourdain Tony.
Bourdain seemed to me to be a fascinating specimen of celebrity.
Here, he is his true, dynamic self, cranky and smart and utterly charming.
Ive since found that most people seem to be pretty nicebasically good people doing the best they can.
But he was, from the start to the finish, exactly himself.
Copyright Melville House 2019
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