“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you,” –Chef and author Anthony Bourdain.
Travel and cooking might not seem to be a related path, but for Anthony Bourdain, those two passions guided his journey not only across the world in search of delicious food, but also his search for purpose, what he wanted to do with his life.
Bourdain was a regular guy who spent his life doing something extraordinary with other regular people by sharing life stories and many different meals. He humanized others and celebrated his way through the human experience.
Amid news of the upcoming Bourdain biopic, which is set to release in August, I’ve been thinking back on his 2000 book “Kitchen Confidential,” which tells the tale of his gritty life story, filled with timely advice pending my high school graduation.
Bourdain starts his memoir as a child, recalling the moment he truly discovered his passion for food. He was on vacation in Italy with his family, out on an oyster boat in the sea. He’d developed a newfound lust for the unknown, especially in food. The oysterman offered one to try, and, wanting to impress his grossed-out family, he gobbled it right down.
“I blame my first oyster for everything I did after: my decision to become a chef, my thrill-seeking, all my hideous screw-ups in pursuit of pleasure,” Bourdain said.
The rest of his book is set from that moment on, including his time getting into trouble in college, working as a dishwasher in Providence, then going to culinary school and becoming a chef. He tells tales of many scandalous and raw moments he’s seen working in kitchens, and you can’t help but want to know how it ends. There’s definitely a slight TV-17 rating on this book, but if you like gritty life lessons, it’s perfect.
“Kitchen Confidential” was the book that jump-started his career change, from a cook working long hours to a writer, which got him his first TV show, where the beautiful mesh of his lives comes together: food and a thirst for experience.
Bourdain, who died in 2018, was open and curious, and according to his tagline, “willing to risk everything.” His travels reflect the adventurous escapades from his years in the kitchen, eating things like cobra heart and snake wine in Vietnam. But in his most memorable episodes, he goes to family restaurants and people’s homes, doing what he calls “normal things with normal people,” to share the little moments that we take for granted that also make our lives whole.
Bourdain’s radical empathy follows him everywhere he goes; it’s his most respected trait in his work. From what he writes in “Kitchen Confidential” about his life in kitchens before his big break, it’s obvious how the humbling but rewarding work shaped his life, setting the groundwork for his admirable worldview he took everywhere with him.
Bourdain writes in “Kitchen Confidential,” “I think that, on balance, the world is filled with people doing the best they can, who love their kids, would like to put on a clean shirt every morning, and live their lives with a little dignity and have access to food and water, and hope. Just like everybody else.”
Though the defining lesson that I took from his book is that it’s never too late to start over. After an almost 20-year career as a dishwasher, cook, and then a chef (there is a difference), this book was the very beginning of the next 18 years of his life. As my fellow seniors grow closer to graduating, to the time that feels like it will define the rest of your life, remember that it is truly never too late to begin again, to try something new, to find who you are and what you want to do with your life.
With that, I leave with this last quote from Bourdain: “As you move through this life and this world, you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life – and travel – leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks – on your body or on your heart – are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.”
