# The Kaysersberg Hotel *A Biography of Anthony Bourdain* — Legendary Biographies No. 089 - **Subject:** Anthony Michael Bourdain - **Written by:** Theo Wickham - **Shelf:** Letters & Ideas / Literature - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 203 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 203 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 203 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-045-4) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Desmond Vale (ISBN 979-8-90623-026-3) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/089-the-kaysersberg-hotel.html ## About this book An oyster, pulled cold from the Gironde estuary in the summer of 1966. A nine-year-old boy tips back the shell and swallows. Decades later, he would describe that briny shock as the moment a life began — the first appetite that would outrun every other. Theo Wickham traces the long arc of that hunger: through the dishpits and brigade kitchens of Provincetown and the Lower East Side, through the heroin years that nearly ended everything, through the broke and middle-aged line cook who, at forty-four, sat down at a borrowed typewriter and wrote the essay that pulled him out. Within a year he was the most famous chef in the world. Within a decade he had eaten in nearly every country on earth, on camera, for an audience that took him to be a kind of secular confessor. Wickham is interested in what the camera could not hold. The marriages and the daughter. The reading habit. The loyalty to old line cooks and old punk records. The depressions that arrived without warning in beautiful hotel rooms. The friends he made on the road, and the ones he could not save. Here is a portrait of a man who spent his life looking for the next true thing to put in his mouth, and of the appetite that, in the end, could not be fed. ## Contents 1. The Oyster 2. Vassar and the CIA 3. The Line 4. Les Halles 5. "Don't Eat Before Reading This" 6. Kitchen Confidential 7. A Cook's Tour 8. No Reservations 9. Parts Unknown 10. The Bun Cha 11. 250 Days 12. Medium Raw 13. The Immigrant Kitchen 14. Asia 15. Le Chambard 16. The Grief 17. Unknown Parts 18. The Inheritance 19. Roadrunner ## Questions **Who is The Kaysersberg Hotel about?** Anthony Michael Bourdain. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Kaysersberg Hotel — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,250 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 63,500 words, 19 chapters, 203 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Theo Wickham is an Oxford-educated cultural historian who brings the past to life through rigorous archival research. His detailed biographies of Tudor and Stuart figures have connected with readers across the UK, offering fresh perspectives on familiar historical eras. His writing focuses on the daily realities and complex social networks of the early modern period. In his book, The Kaysersberg Hotel, he applies his historical expertise to explore the rich cultural tapestry of regional European history. He writes from his home in Wiltshire. When he is not in the archives or at his desk, he enjoys restoring antique furniture and walking his dogs across the Wiltshire downs.