Loved his series until he visited my hometown and completely misrepresented it. I get his style was anti establishment and mainstream, but he ended up hanging out with the wrong crowd in town, one of them known for being a fraudster, a spoiled child running bad restaurant after bad restaurant. Somehow these guys managed to be featured in the show as the progressive minds of local cuisine. It made me question everything else I have watched from Bourdain.
I appreciate that must have been difficult. If you could set the record straight, where would you have taken him? Love to hear your reccos and thoughts!
I had the same sense. I can see why people like the shows, but to me there's a subtle arrogance to the rich, white American guy just holding court everywhere he goes and explaining local matters as if he's an expert. The food aspect of his shows was often secondary.
It's always funny when I watch stuff about some foreigner visiting my home country and they either focus on something not all that important, or get something completely wrong.
The funniest part is trying to present some dish as "traditional" that everyone here eats, while it's some super niche thing only one region does, occasionally, if you have grandma that remembers how to make it
He probably didn’t personally vet the politics behind each person, the production team would’ve organised it in advance and he just turns up and goes along with it. That being said it’s still grounds to be skeptical of his shows. Also, please tell us your town
A companion to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46054879, we now had successfully recovered all the remaining li.st entries of Anthony Bourdain that were thought to be lost to time.
Oh wow! Did not know that—I went off the original post by Greg and he mentioned to me after I sent him this link that someone looked at Common Crawl as well.
Either way, I updated both the git and the webpage to shout-out the week-before-this findings! I linked directly to your website, lmk if that's how you prefer it.
I am big fan and it was sad to me when he died. It’s bizarre to me how much CNN runs content featuring him without ever acknowledging he is dead. You’d think he was alive based on how often they flaunt his content.
I know we shouldn’t be discussing website design, but using light grey font on a white background is not only ugly, it is basically illegible for anyone with oldster eyes.
The page does not have light grey text for me. Checked on desktop and mobile.
The #2B2B2B color should not look like "light grey" or be hard to read on a white background unless your display setup has a severely broken color calibration or gamma curve.
Site looks fine, in my opinion. The HN comments complaining about site design are probably best ignored.
I thought the same thing but noticed my dark mode extension changed the dark gray font into light gray. It looks fine to me with that extension turned off. Not sure if that happened to you.
If it's bothering the eyes, like many more of other websites would, feel free to pull up your favorite browser's reader mode with your preferences. Cheers!
i think the white dots add another factor to my brain i have to decipher.
It doesn't make or break the site but its like id rather not have to deal with a pattern and text. Just make the background white.
If you really love it, keep it. I dont know anything. Im just a human
A real Kramer is often much, much more than $2,500. Kramer’s mid-line knives go, even used, for $10–$30K while his high-end, rarer stuff goes for much more. In fact, Bourdain had a real Kramer with meteorite used in its construction that sold at auction in 2019 for $231,500.
thank you very much for doing this. I'm a huge bourdain fan, and despite many of his shortcomings as a human i think he was one of the MOST interesting people in the zeitgeist. just seemed so authentic, real, and visceral. his parts unknown series is some of the best human anthro content ever put on TV. this was a very interesting read!
At the risk of being downvoted… for the uninitiated among us, what’s interesting about these or the person? I understand he was a chef and had several TV shows. Is it just celebrity fascination?
Hard to summarize. He created the impression of being authentic. He had an unpretentious New York accent. He was happy in and advocated for unpretentious areas, which goes against some of the stereotypes of overly social media friendly foodie stuff. He encouraged his audience to travel and understand other people.
His struggles and imperfections also evoked sympathy. He spoke about how he used to have a drug problem. His death by suicide was sad. He certainly would have had lots of interesting things to say in the last 9 years, had he been around.
He was the last cultured dude before tech made everyone into a superficial arrogant lmgtfy'er, disinterested in true discovery. (Heap your downvotes on me HN, I've seen what makes you cheer!)
MY BOURDAIN LI.ST:
1) Masculinity without cringe: Tough, profane, credentialed through actual kitchen labor (not culinary school pedigree), but also emotionally literate, openly vulnerable, willing to cry on camera. He modeled a masculinity that wasn't apologetic but also wasn't performative.
2) Articulate outsider: Self-educated. Could reference Conrad, punk rock, and Apocalypse Now while maintaining blue-collar credibility. His book Kitchen Confidential read like a war memoir/crime novel.
3) Permission: He made it acceptable for men to care deeply about food, travel, culture -- interests traditionally female coded. The guy had done heroin and worked the line and was 'allowed' to opine about pho. This was before the internet or at least before the internet got ultra stupid.
4) Wanderer: Not tourism, not expat pretension, something closer to seeking, now dead thanks to social media influencers, and he was curious not escapist.
5) Recovery: Open about addiction, chaos, bad decisions. A redemption narrative for men who've made mistakes.
6) Tragic: Suicide landed hard because many recognized something in him of themselves in him.
P.S. He's more elder millennial/genx coded for a lot of reasons so don't feel bad about not getting it but definitely read his book and watch his show, it's different than the slop you're probably used to.
> 6) Tragic: Suicide landed hard because many recognized something in him of themselves in him.
I would like to put it out there that his depression or whatever mental illness he had was on full display the whole time, and this probably resonated with people as well.
A couple years back I started re-watching all of his shows, start to finish, after watching Roadrunner. Especially the early seasons, there was rarely an episode he didn't joke about dying, being killed, or killing himself. (In the film, there was a quote from Tony about how an acquaintance observed they'd never met someone who wanted to die so much)
I think a lot of people picked up on that, and it made the whole the whole thing work. The grit, the machismo, the empathy for the plight of your fellow man. A lot of people who worked with him said he was an asshole, too. This is also not surprising that he would be at times when the cameras were off.
Bourdain actually joked about killing himself in the exact manner and location in, which he did. When I heard it happened, my wife and I both recalled the same times he'd mentioned it. It wasn't a surprise really.
Bourdain had been referencing Hunter S Thompson and the way he went out for years. He'd also repeatedly mentioned wanting to go out in southern France after a great day. Bourdain generally had the same "vibe" as Thompson as well. Here's Thompson's last note to his wife:
> No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt.
To me, it wasn't a surprise at all. My wife and I even had discussed when we thought it would happen. The main thing about Bourdain was that people could relate to him and he wrote excellent prose. He seemed authentic and he went out on his terms, which is what he wanted and was the way he lived.
An interesting question is whether any of this is good and worthy of emulation. I've been treating Bourdain as an cautionary tale and a reminder to check one's own priorities rigorously.
I asked google if he was religious, and got this: "He grew up in a home where God, sin, or damnation were never mentioned, leading to a lack of religious upbringing and belief, focusing instead on food, travel, and human connection."
And I think that's kinda the issue. The elevation of food and travel to the status anywhere on the same plain as deep religion (which I do think was the case here) is not going to lead one to good places.
> He was the last cultured dude before tech made everyone into a
I enjoyed Bourdain, but this level of hero worship is really excessive. Not to mention antithetical to much of what Bourdain stood for.
He was enjoyable to read and watch, but claiming he "made it acceptable" for men to care about food, travel or culture is weird.
He was an entertainer. An interesting guy. A great storyteller who lived an interesting life. Charismatic and fun to watch. But he was not the "last cultured dude" or some demarcation point between the past and present.
Holding a celebrity and television personality up as the realest, most genuine person feels like missing the point. Everything you saw of this man was carefully crafted and curated. Even the "unfiltered" takes were designed to sell you on some story. You didn't know this man as a person or a friend.
You might assume you have known depression, but you would not speak such cruelties had you truly experienced the depths of sadness that a human being is capable of feeling.
The idea that suffering will somehow make you noble is quite awful. Depression isn't some kind of cleansing fire that opens you to empathy. It affects good people and assholes and people in every phase of life.
It doesn't have to make you noble, but there's a certain level of suffering experienced where you stop making comments such as that toward someone who's committed suicide.
You won't be downvoted by me. He wrote a fun book (Kitchen Confidential, which I enjoyed) and it was downhill from there. He detailed some of his sketchy ethics in that book and it was refreshing.
Essentially, he seemed to me to be a bit of a &*$% and people liked that, confusing it for something admirable and for authenticity. He's till celebrated, especially by CNN, who paid a fortune for his show and then lost out on the chance for future episodes... now they peddle his old content on their landing page. Probably to try to recoup their probable losses.
He was a super hipster who pretended to be an anti-hipster.
This combination allowed him to make people feel like they were getting let in a little secret and were now part of a club that was better than everyone else.
He wrote honestly about a profession he worked at all levels. His travel/food programmes sampled the fanciest of foods as well as the greasy spoons, local cuisines, and all without arrogance or false humility. He was very relatable for many people.
I would recommend reading Kitchen Confidential. Alternatively watch any of his travel shows although I think understanding the man through the book first makes it easier to appreciate the shows.
Regarding this specific find I don't see anything particularly special but for many it's one final glimpse into the life of someone they admire.
His really early ones were kind of rough. Like you could see he was still figuring it out. There was one episode where he just narrated a lonely planet guide.
Loved his series until he visited my hometown and completely misrepresented it. I get his style was anti establishment and mainstream, but he ended up hanging out with the wrong crowd in town, one of them known for being a fraudster, a spoiled child running bad restaurant after bad restaurant. Somehow these guys managed to be featured in the show as the progressive minds of local cuisine. It made me question everything else I have watched from Bourdain.
I appreciate that must have been difficult. If you could set the record straight, where would you have taken him? Love to hear your reccos and thoughts!
I had the same sense. I can see why people like the shows, but to me there's a subtle arrogance to the rich, white American guy just holding court everywhere he goes and explaining local matters as if he's an expert. The food aspect of his shows was often secondary.
It's always funny when I watch stuff about some foreigner visiting my home country and they either focus on something not all that important, or get something completely wrong.
The funniest part is trying to present some dish as "traditional" that everyone here eats, while it's some super niche thing only one region does, occasionally, if you have grandma that remembers how to make it
He probably didn’t personally vet the politics behind each person, the production team would’ve organised it in advance and he just turns up and goes along with it. That being said it’s still grounds to be skeptical of his shows. Also, please tell us your town
Which town? I felt he did this in a few places and wondered how his team picked where he wild go.
What city so I can avoid that restaurant
A companion to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46054879, we now had successfully recovered all the remaining li.st entries of Anthony Bourdain that were thought to be lost to time.
Please enjoy—there is nobody like Tony.
Almost all.
According to the article, we are still missing one: "David Bowie Related" 1/14/2016
The missing David Bowie related list ( https://li.st/l/7SmVwCFEU6JDQ2jKQfeJzh ) has an image preview shared on Reddit, though sadly not the text https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthonyBourdain/comments/40wkx3/ant...
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I went down the same rabbit hole and did the exact same thing last week in a fit of procrastination. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46185128
Would appreciate a shout-out if you saw it and were inspired, otherwise it's nice to see others converging independently on the same thing.
Oh wow! Did not know that—I went off the original post by Greg and he mentioned to me after I sent him this link that someone looked at Common Crawl as well.
Either way, I updated both the git and the webpage to shout-out the week-before-this findings! I linked directly to your website, lmk if that's how you prefer it.
Cheers!
His favorite bar, Siberia, is also back, now at the south end of the Columbus Circle subway station. Same owner, Tracy, and same no-frills atmosphere.
I am big fan and it was sad to me when he died. It’s bizarre to me how much CNN runs content featuring him without ever acknowledging he is dead. You’d think he was alive based on how often they flaunt his content.
> Great Dead Bars of New York:
> 1. SIBERIA in any of its iterations. The one on the subway being the best.
Timely, as the latest reincarnation of SIBERIA just re-opened in 59th Street/Columbus Circle station
Very happy to see these recovered and archived :)! I hope images are able to be recovered, super curious about which records he was talking about.
Any movie list that features Tampopo is good by me.
I know we shouldn’t be discussing website design, but using light grey font on a white background is not only ugly, it is basically illegible for anyone with oldster eyes.
A sudden burst of bright white on the screen really hits the eyes, I get that.
> but using light grey font on a white background
The page does not have light grey text for me. Checked on desktop and mobile.
The #2B2B2B color should not look like "light grey" or be hard to read on a white background unless your display setup has a severely broken color calibration or gamma curve.
Site looks fine, in my opinion. The HN comments complaining about site design are probably best ignored.
I thought the same thing but noticed my dark mode extension changed the dark gray font into light gray. It looks fine to me with that extension turned off. Not sure if that happened to you.
and the dotted background just ever so lightly still visible. Contrast is king
Tell me more—these colors, #2B2B2B for fg and #F7F3EE for bg pass accessibility checks. See something like coolors [1] or WebAIM [2]
You could run something like https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ but contrast doesn't mean to run with black/white, http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ is better on the eyes.
If it's bothering the eyes, like many more of other websites would, feel free to pull up your favorite browser's reader mode with your preferences. Cheers!
[1] https://coolors.co/contrast-checker/2b2b2b-f7f3ee
[2] https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
Raw colors are not the whole story. Font weight matters too. Being just on this side of passing the check is also not great, just better than bad.
Ambient lighting and display quality matter a lot too.
Okay, any specific feedback, then? Not seeing it (shrug)—I like how it feels.
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i think the white dots add another factor to my brain i have to decipher. It doesn't make or break the site but its like id rather not have to deal with a pattern and text. Just make the background white.
If you really love it, keep it. I dont know anything. Im just a human
>Kramer knives: I don’t own one. I can’t afford one
I highly doubt he couldn't afford a $2,500 knife https://kramerknives.com/product-category/latest-creations/
A real Kramer is often much, much more than $2,500. Kramer’s mid-line knives go, even used, for $10–$30K while his high-end, rarer stuff goes for much more. In fact, Bourdain had a real Kramer with meteorite used in its construction that sold at auction in 2019 for $231,500.
https://www.antiquesandthearts.com/anthony-bourdains-bob-kra...
See also, some current mid-line Kramer pricing: https://eatingtools.com/collections/pre-owned
Worthwhile for the hotel and book recommendations.
Obviously he has better food taste than I do, so those too. I will shit like a mink and love it.
Kudos to those who performed recovery and snatched back from the sands of time.
thank you very much for doing this. I'm a huge bourdain fan, and despite many of his shortcomings as a human i think he was one of the MOST interesting people in the zeitgeist. just seemed so authentic, real, and visceral. his parts unknown series is some of the best human anthro content ever put on TV. this was a very interesting read!
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love these, wonder what avenues still exist for the image archives
I imagine they exist in an AWS or GCP rack somewhere, too bad
Someone must have their browser untouched since 2015, which has all of the li.st content stored in their cache :D
At the risk of being downvoted… for the uninitiated among us, what’s interesting about these or the person? I understand he was a chef and had several TV shows. Is it just celebrity fascination?
Hard to summarize. He created the impression of being authentic. He had an unpretentious New York accent. He was happy in and advocated for unpretentious areas, which goes against some of the stereotypes of overly social media friendly foodie stuff. He encouraged his audience to travel and understand other people.
His struggles and imperfections also evoked sympathy. He spoke about how he used to have a drug problem. His death by suicide was sad. He certainly would have had lots of interesting things to say in the last 9 years, had he been around.
Kind, curious, open minded, down to earth with a big mouth . Like any other common interest. Watching his stuff shows you how to open your eyes
He was the last cultured dude before tech made everyone into a superficial arrogant lmgtfy'er, disinterested in true discovery. (Heap your downvotes on me HN, I've seen what makes you cheer!)
MY BOURDAIN LI.ST:
1) Masculinity without cringe: Tough, profane, credentialed through actual kitchen labor (not culinary school pedigree), but also emotionally literate, openly vulnerable, willing to cry on camera. He modeled a masculinity that wasn't apologetic but also wasn't performative.
2) Articulate outsider: Self-educated. Could reference Conrad, punk rock, and Apocalypse Now while maintaining blue-collar credibility. His book Kitchen Confidential read like a war memoir/crime novel.
3) Permission: He made it acceptable for men to care deeply about food, travel, culture -- interests traditionally female coded. The guy had done heroin and worked the line and was 'allowed' to opine about pho. This was before the internet or at least before the internet got ultra stupid.
4) Wanderer: Not tourism, not expat pretension, something closer to seeking, now dead thanks to social media influencers, and he was curious not escapist.
5) Recovery: Open about addiction, chaos, bad decisions. A redemption narrative for men who've made mistakes.
6) Tragic: Suicide landed hard because many recognized something in him of themselves in him.
P.S. He's more elder millennial/genx coded for a lot of reasons so don't feel bad about not getting it but definitely read his book and watch his show, it's different than the slop you're probably used to.
> 6) Tragic: Suicide landed hard because many recognized something in him of themselves in him.
I would like to put it out there that his depression or whatever mental illness he had was on full display the whole time, and this probably resonated with people as well.
A couple years back I started re-watching all of his shows, start to finish, after watching Roadrunner. Especially the early seasons, there was rarely an episode he didn't joke about dying, being killed, or killing himself. (In the film, there was a quote from Tony about how an acquaintance observed they'd never met someone who wanted to die so much)
I think a lot of people picked up on that, and it made the whole the whole thing work. The grit, the machismo, the empathy for the plight of your fellow man. A lot of people who worked with him said he was an asshole, too. This is also not surprising that he would be at times when the cameras were off.
Bourdain actually joked about killing himself in the exact manner and location in, which he did. When I heard it happened, my wife and I both recalled the same times he'd mentioned it. It wasn't a surprise really.
Bourdain had been referencing Hunter S Thompson and the way he went out for years. He'd also repeatedly mentioned wanting to go out in southern France after a great day. Bourdain generally had the same "vibe" as Thompson as well. Here's Thompson's last note to his wife:
> No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt.
To me, it wasn't a surprise at all. My wife and I even had discussed when we thought it would happen. The main thing about Bourdain was that people could relate to him and he wrote excellent prose. He seemed authentic and he went out on his terms, which is what he wanted and was the way he lived.
Your list is spot on.
An interesting question is whether any of this is good and worthy of emulation. I've been treating Bourdain as an cautionary tale and a reminder to check one's own priorities rigorously.
I asked google if he was religious, and got this: "He grew up in a home where God, sin, or damnation were never mentioned, leading to a lack of religious upbringing and belief, focusing instead on food, travel, and human connection."
And I think that's kinda the issue. The elevation of food and travel to the status anywhere on the same plain as deep religion (which I do think was the case here) is not going to lead one to good places.
> He was the last cultured dude before tech made everyone into a
I enjoyed Bourdain, but this level of hero worship is really excessive. Not to mention antithetical to much of what Bourdain stood for.
He was enjoyable to read and watch, but claiming he "made it acceptable" for men to care about food, travel or culture is weird.
He was an entertainer. An interesting guy. A great storyteller who lived an interesting life. Charismatic and fun to watch. But he was not the "last cultured dude" or some demarcation point between the past and present.
Holding a celebrity and television personality up as the realest, most genuine person feels like missing the point. Everything you saw of this man was carefully crafted and curated. Even the "unfiltered" takes were designed to sell you on some story. You didn't know this man as a person or a friend.
You'd think otherwise if you ever had the steak frites at Les Halles.
Let's not forget his connection with Epstein before deifying him.
You should either elaborate on this statement and back it with evidence, or withdraw it.
He took the easy way out and fucked over his kid in the process.
Complaining 24/7.
A regular hero.
So did Robin Williams and countless others.
Practically everyone complains 24/7 about something or other, in a roundabout way you are doing it now..
Overall I fail to see your point.
What a privilege to not know depression.
You assume too much
You might assume you have known depression, but you would not speak such cruelties had you truly experienced the depths of sadness that a human being is capable of feeling.
The idea that suffering will somehow make you noble is quite awful. Depression isn't some kind of cleansing fire that opens you to empathy. It affects good people and assholes and people in every phase of life.
It doesn't have to make you noble, but there's a certain level of suffering experienced where you stop making comments such as that toward someone who's committed suicide.
I hope you never have to understand the difficulty and complexity of the so called "easy way out".
you could explain yourself instead of making assumptions about me, but you don’t.
read Spinoza
He attributes everything to God. I don’t think it’s relevant.
You won't be downvoted by me. He wrote a fun book (Kitchen Confidential, which I enjoyed) and it was downhill from there. He detailed some of his sketchy ethics in that book and it was refreshing.
Essentially, he seemed to me to be a bit of a &*$% and people liked that, confusing it for something admirable and for authenticity. He's till celebrated, especially by CNN, who paid a fortune for his show and then lost out on the chance for future episodes... now they peddle his old content on their landing page. Probably to try to recoup their probable losses.
You're not missing anything.
He was a super hipster who pretended to be an anti-hipster.
This combination allowed him to make people feel like they were getting let in a little secret and were now part of a club that was better than everyone else.
He wrote honestly about a profession he worked at all levels. His travel/food programmes sampled the fanciest of foods as well as the greasy spoons, local cuisines, and all without arrogance or false humility. He was very relatable for many people.
I would recommend reading Kitchen Confidential. Alternatively watch any of his travel shows although I think understanding the man through the book first makes it easier to appreciate the shows.
Regarding this specific find I don't see anything particularly special but for many it's one final glimpse into the life of someone they admire.
> Alternatively watch any of his travel shows
His really early ones were kind of rough. Like you could see he was still figuring it out. There was one episode where he just narrated a lonely planet guide.
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