Anthony Bourdain, the colorful television personality and restaurateur who coined the term food porn, is dead. According to CNN, which carries his award-winning series “Parts Unknown,” was in France with his friend and fellow chef Eric Ripert where the two were working on an upcoming episode. Ripert found Bourdain unresponsive in his hotel room Friday morning.
In its obituary of the iconoclastic Bourdain, who was also known for his “bad boy” persona, the New York Times writes:
For decades, he worked 13-hour days as a line cook in restaurants in New York and the Northeast before he became executive chef in the 1990s at Brasserie Les Halles, serving steak frites and onion soup in Lower Manhattan. He had been the chef there for eight years when he sent an unsolicited article to The New Yorker about the underbelly of the restaurant world and its deceptions.
As a world traveler, Bourdain was an advocate for marginalized populations and campaigned for safer working conditions for restaurant staffs.
As far as I can divine from media reports, no suicide note was found, nor was anyone close to the chef aware of any emotional or other health problems that may have been a factor in his suicide.
He was 61.
