Chapter 1The Oyster

Foreword

I have spent my working life among the dead of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Tudor courtiers, Stuart favourites, the men and women who rose at banquets and fell on scaffolds — that has been my territory for thirty years, and I have been content in it. The dead of four hundred years ago are courteous subjects. They do not give interviews. They do not contradict you on television. Their appetites are safely entombed in household accounts and ambassadors' dispatches, and the historian may walk among them without fear of meeting the family at a book signing. So when I told colleagues I was writing a life of Anthony Bourdain — a chef, an American, a man dead less than a decade — the response was a polite version of the question I had already asked myself. What was a historian of the Tudor table doing in a hotel in Alsace?

The honest answer is that I never left my subject. I only changed centuries.

Because the thing I had spent three decades studying — the table as an instrument of power, the feast as theater, the commoner raised by talent and audacity to the intimate company of princes — is written across Bourdain's life more legibly than across almost any courtier I have served. Here was a line cook, a former heroin addict, a man of no institutional standing whatsoever, who wrote one book and was lifted by it into a strange modern favouritism: the trusted companion of an entire culture, seated at its shoulder, licensed to say what no one else could say. And here, at the height of it, was a president of the United States on a plastic stool in Hanoi, eating a six-dollar bowl of noodles at Bourdain's invitation. I know a state banquet when I see one. That meal was diplomacy of a kind Henry's ambassadors would have recognized at once — the meal as message, the shared table as treaty — conducted without a single piece of gold plate. The historian in me sat up. The rest of me followed.

I expected to write about food and fame. I found myself writing about appetite, which is a different subject, older and harder. The record I worked from was unlike anything in my experience: not parchment but abundance. The man narrated himself for decades — in his books, in thousands of hours of film, in the press record, in the recollections and posthumous accounts of those who knew him, several of which contradict one another with a vigor any Tudor historian would find familiar. A subject who tells his own story so well is both a gift and a trap. The performance must be read against itself, the way one reads a courtier's letters home: not for what is said, but for what the saying is doing. I have tried to read him that way throughout, and where the record ends — and it ends, decisively, at the door of a hotel room in Kaysersberg — I have stopped. My trade teaches nothing more important than where to stop.

What unsettled me most was the absence of a wound. My subjects usually come with their catastrophes attached: the disgraced father, the burned estate, the early proximity to the axe. Bourdain came from a loving home in a quiet suburb and wanted for nothing except more world. The hunger was not compensation. It was constitution. A boy ate an oyster on a French bay and spent fifty years pursuing what it promised, through kitchens and needles and airports and the markets of five continents, and the pursuit made him the most trusted eater alive, and the pursuit ended in Alsace. How a single appetite holds all of that — the generosity and the destruction, the connection and the solitude — is the question of this book. I do not claim to have answered it. I claim to have laid the whole of it on the table.

The historian's usual privilege is distance. Four centuries make everyone a specimen. I have written this book without that privilege, about a man whose widow still declines to perform her grief and whose daughter is owed the privacy her father insisted every person deserved, and the writing has been the better discipline for it. He believed the table was where strangers stopped being strangers. I sat down at his, a stranger from another century's kitchens, and I got up changed. That is what the great subjects do. They feed you whether you meant to eat or not.

— Theo Wickham, Wiltshire

Chapter 1 · The Oyster

The fisherman's name was Monsieur Saint-Jour. He held out an oyster the way a priest holds out a communion wafer.

The boy was perhaps ten years old, on a boat in the Bassin d'Arcachon, the shallow tidal bay on the southwest coast of France where the Atlantic meets the marshes and the oyster beds stretch toward open water like underwater farms. His family spent many summers in Arcachon. His father, Pierre Bourdain, was French. Pierre's family had come to New York from France, and the summers were a return to the place where the Bourdain name still meant something to the neighbors.

The boy's parents were horrified. A raw oyster, unpasteurized, uncooked, pulled from the sea minutes earlier, still carrying the brine and cold of a living creature pried from its shell by a fisherman's knife. Not what they had in mind. The adults declined.

The boy did not.

He ate it.

The moment is the founding scene of Kitchen Confidential, the book that would, more than three decades later, make the boy famous. Bourdain described the experience with the precision of a man who had been replaying it in his mind for decades: "I'd not only survived — I'd enjoyed." And then, a breath later: "I'd learned something. Viscerally, instinctively, spiritually — even in some small, precursive way, sexually — and there was no turning back. The genie was out of the bottle. My life as a cook, and as a chef, had begun."

The oyster was not the beginning of a career. It was the beginning of a hunger. A hunger for experience, for the raw and unfiltered, for the thing that suburban New Jersey did not offer and the world beyond it did. The oyster tasted like the ocean. It tasted like France. It tasted like the future. The boy who ate it would spend the next fifty years chasing the feeling it produced, through kitchens and heroin dens and television studios and the markets of Hanoi and the streets of Beirut and a hotel room in Kaysersberg-Vignoble, near Colmar, until the chasing stopped.

Leonia, New Jersey, was not the kind of place that produced revolutionaries. A suburb. Small, quiet, tree-lined Bergen County, separated from Manhattan by the George Washington Bridge and by the cultural distance that suburbs are designed to create. In the 1960s, when Anthony Michael Bourdain was growing up there, Leonia was precisely what a suburb was supposed to be: safe, orderly, prosperous, unremarkable. The lawns were mowed. The schools were adequate. The town existed in a state of curated absence, defined not by what it contained but by what it had been built to exclude: the noise, the danger, the unpredictability, the life of the city across the river.

The Bourdain household was, by any reasonable measure, a good one. Pierre Bourdain — a camera-store salesman and record-store floor manager at the time of Tony's birth, who worked his way into the record business and would later become a classical-music executive at Columbia Records — was a cultured man, French in his sensibilities, who brought a European appreciation for food and wine into a New Jersey home. Gladys Bourdain, née Sacksman, was a Jewish woman from New York who would later spend nearly a quarter century as an editor at the New York Times; her intelligence and editorial rigor are visible in her son's prose, in the precision of his sentences, in that ability to say exactly what he meant in exactly the number of words required. The household was literate, culturally engaged, comfortably upper-middle-class. Books. Records. Conversations about art and politics and the wider world.

Anthony (Tony, to everyone who knew him) was already tall for his age, a lanky kid with dark hair and the restless posture of a boy who would rather be somewhere else. The height would continue; the restlessness would never stop. He described his childhood with a generosity that his later writing would not extend to most subjects: "I did not want for love or attention. My parents loved me. Neither of them drank to excess. Nobody beat me. God was never mentioned, so I was annoyed by neither church nor any notion of sin or damnation." Notable for what it does not contain. No trauma, no deprivation, no origin wound that would explain, in the clean causal language of pop psychology, why the boy who grew up in this house became the man who shot heroin and worked eighty-hour weeks in restaurant kitchens and could not stop moving until the day he stopped permanently.

The absence of a wound is itself the biographical fact. Bourdain did not become who he became through suffering. He became who he became through appetite. The comfortable, loving, well-stocked household in Leonia was, for a certain kind of temperament, not enough. Not wrong. Not deficient. Not abusive. Just not enough. The lawn was mowed. The dinner was predictable. The future was legible: college, career, suburb, repetition. And somewhere inside the boy who ate the oyster, a voice was saying: there is more than this.

But it would be wrong to say the household did not educate his palate. Pierre and Gladys Bourdain were, by the standards of suburban America in the 1960s, adventurous eaters. Pierre's French heritage meant food was taken seriously in the Bourdain home. Not preciously. Not with the performative reverence that twenty-first-century food culture demands. But seriously, in the European way that treats every meal as a minor occasion and every ingredient as worth attention. Gladys cooked from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, not to impress anyone but because the book was, for an intelligent American woman in the 1960s, the most rigorous cooking education available, and because she was married to a Frenchman whose family would notice if the boeuf bourguignon was not correct.

The proximity to New York City gave the family access to cuisines that most suburban families in the 1960s never encountered. The Bourdains ate Danish food at the Scandinavian restaurants that still existed in midtown Manhattan. They went to Chinatown, not the sanitized, tourist-friendly Chinatown of later decades, but the real one, dense and Cantonese-speaking, south of Canal Street, where the menus were in Chinese and the dim sum carts came around with things the boy's New Jersey classmates had never seen. They tried Indian food when Indian restaurants began appearing in their orbit in the early 1970s. They tried sushi when raw fish in America was not a Tuesday-night convenience but an act of cultural bravery.

Christopher Bourdain, Tony's younger brother, described this culinary education with a clarity the adults in the family, who had simply been living their lives, had not recognized as educational: their parents had influenced them to try new things. Simple. Not a program or a philosophy but a habit. The habit of saying yes to the unfamiliar, of ordering the thing on the menu you had not tried, of crossing the bridge into the city and eating something that smelled strange and tasted extraordinary. The habit was the foundation. The oyster was the moment the foundation became a calling.

They also ate, of course, like Americans. The holiday table included roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, Pierre's French sensibility mediated by Gladys's American practicality, two culinary traditions meeting in the compromise that every bicultural household negotiates. Weeknight dinners were unremarkable. Casseroles. Meatloaf. The reliable rotation of proteins and starches that families across Bergen County were eating at the same hour in the same kind of house. The unremarkableness mattered. It was the baseline against which the French summers and the New York restaurants were measured, and the measurement always came out the same way: the world was bigger than Leonia. The food was better elsewhere. The adventure was elsewhere.

The Bassin d'Arcachon is worth describing because the food cannot be separated from the geography that produces it. A tidal lagoon on the Atlantic coast of southwestern France, in Aquitaine, between the Côte d'Argent and the Côte des Landes. Shallow. The tide retreats so far at low water that the oyster beds emerge from the sea, the parcels marked by stakes and tended by farmers in rubber boots who walk among them at low tide, harvesting and turning the bivalves with the patient attention of farmers everywhere. The bay produces thousands of tons of oysters a year, from hundreds of family operations spread across its little ports. The wooden oyster huts on stilts, first built in the nineteenth century so farmers could watch over their beds and protect them from thieves, now line the bay like a colony of seabirds, cabins with brightly painted shutters and hollyhocks climbing the walls, that French combination of utility and beauty.

The oysters themselves are huîtres creuses, the cupped Pacific oyster, Crassostrea gigas, introduced in the early 1970s after a viral disease wiped out the original flat oysters, the gravettes that had been harvested since Roman times. The Pacific oyster is hardier, more disease-resistant, and produces a flavor that is briny and mineral and slightly sweet, the cold, clean, mineral-rich waters of the Bassin giving Arcachon oysters a taste distinct from oysters grown anywhere else. Graded by size, packed in wooden crates, shipped to the markets and restaurants of France, eaten raw, on the half shell, with a squeeze of lemon and a glass of cold white wine, the way they have been eaten in this region for two thousand years.

Monsieur Saint-Jour was an oyster farmer. Weathered, practical, generous in the French way that combines hospitality with the assumption that hospitality is its own reward. He had taken the Bourdain family out on his boat not because they were special but because they were guests of his neighborhood, friends of the family of the man whose grandfather had emigrated from this very coast. The inviting was a courtesy. The day on the water was meant to be pleasant and educational, a chance for the American visitors to see the oyster beds at low tide, to understand how oysters were grown, to appreciate the work behind the food.

The boy ate the oyster. It tasted like the bay. Salt water. Mineral. The living funk of something pulled alive from the sea. That bracing cold slap of brine, then the sweetness underneath, faintly metallic, faintly vegetal, like chewing the ocean floor. Not portable. Not reproducible in New Jersey. Not packageable or shippable or imitable. The taste belonged to the place, and the place belonged to the taste, and the boy understood (not in words, because ten-year-olds do not understand things in words, but in his body) that the world contained taste like this, and that the rest of his life would be spent looking for it.

He attended the Dwight-Englewood School, a private, coeducational college-preparatory day school in Englewood, New Jersey. Graduated in 1973. He was sixteen. The counterculture was ending. Vietnam was winding down. Watergate was unfolding. The hangover after the 1960s, the feeling that the revolution had been tried and had failed and that what remained was a choice between the establishment and something harder to define, would shape Bourdain's sensibility for the rest of his life.

He was a reader. This mattered more than the schools, more than the suburb, more than the summers in France. He read William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, the hallucinatory junkie narrative that made drug addiction sound like a literary project. He read George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, the memoir of poverty and dishwashing that treated manual labor as a subject worthy of a great writer's attention. He read Hunter S. Thompson, the gonzo journalist who had demonstrated that the observer could be as interesting as the observed, that the voice telling the story could be the story. These were not the reading assignments of Dwight-Englewood. They were the self-directed curriculum of a boy who was building, book by book, the sensibility that became the most recognizable voice in American food writing.

The punk rock ethos was forming too. Not through music alone, though Bourdain listened to the Ramones and the New York Dolls and the sound that was, in the early-to-mid-1970s, inventing itself in clubs on the Bowery. The ethos was broader: authenticity mattered more than polish. Raw honesty was more valuable than professional competence. The interesting things in life were happening not in the places the establishment approved of but in the places it had abandoned or condemned. The punk ethos would inform everything Bourdain ever did, from the way he wrote (direct, profane, self-lacerating) to the way he cooked (hearty, unfussy, French working-class) to the way he traveled (street food over fine dining, plastic stools over white tablecloths, the grandmother's kitchen over the Michelin-starred restaurant).

His brother Christopher was younger, quieter, less restless. Close in the way brothers in stable households are close — bonded by shared experience, separated by temperament. Christopher would later speak about his brother's death with a grief notable for its control, its refusal to perform the kind of public mourning that American culture demands of the bereaved. The restraint was perhaps a Bourdain family trait. Private things remained private. Grief was not content.

The summers in France were the counterargument to Leonia. Evidence, presented summer after summer, that the world was bigger and more interesting and more delicious than New Jersey could accommodate. Pierre Bourdain took his family back to Arcachon, to the cousins, the neighbors, the markets, the restaurants, the French relationship to food that treats every meal as serious and every ingredient as worth attention.

The boy ate. He ate the oysters Monsieur Saint-Jour pulled from the bay. He ate the bread from the boulangerie, the crackle of crust, the soft white interior, warm enough to melt the butter. He ate the cheese that was, by American standards, dangerously unpasteurized and, by French standards, merely cheese, its rind blooming and alive, reeking gorgeously on the counter. He ate with the appetite of a child discovering, bite by bite, that the sensory world is vastly larger than the world he has been given, and that access to the larger world requires only a willingness to put something in your mouth that you have never put in your mouth before.

The willingness was the key. Not talent. Bourdain was not, at ten or twelve or fifteen, a gifted cook. Not knowledge. He had no culinary training, no understanding of the brigade system or the mother sauces. What he had was willingness: the absolute, unqualified readiness to try the thing, eat the thing, go to the place, say yes when his parents said no. Call it courage, though the word is too grand for a boy eating an oyster. Call it rebellion, though the rebellion was against nothing more sinister than the mowed lawns of suburban New Jersey. Call it appetite. An appetite not just for food but for the experience of food, for the way a raw oyster connects you to the ocean and the fisherman and the bay and the country and the culture in a chain of associations that a hamburger on a backyard grill cannot replicate.

The appetite would take him everywhere. It would take him to the Culinary Institute of America and to the heroin dens of the Lower East Side and to Les Halles and to the pages of the New Yorker and to the street corners of Hanoi and to the camera that followed him across five continents and to the hotel room in Alsace where the appetite, finally, was not enough.

But on the boat, on the bay, with Monsieur Saint-Jour holding out the oyster, the appetite was only beginning. The boy ate. The genie was out of the bottle. And the world, the raw, briny, dangerous, delicious world, opened its mouth and said: come in.

There is a story Bourdain told about his father that captures the household. Pierre had grown up speaking French (his own father had emigrated from Arcachon) and he had retained the language and the culinary sensibility it carried. Unusual in the second generation of an immigrant family. Most children of immigrants in the 1930s and 1940s let the language go, let the culture assimilate, embraced the American identity the country demanded of its newcomers. Pierre did not. He held on. He spoke French. He took his sons to France. He read French newspapers. He listened to French music. He insisted, in the small daily ways that fathers insist, that his sons would be at least partially French.

The insistence shaped Tony in ways the family did not always recognize. The French connection was not just an ethnic affiliation. It was a relationship to food, to wine, to time, to the table, a different model of how to live. A model in which the meal was serious, the ingredients were worth attention, and the cooking was an act of love rather than a chore. Pierre embodied this in the small daily ways that fathers embody things: the way he chose wine at dinner, spoke about cheese, reacted with visible pleasure to a well-prepared meal and visible disappointment to a poorly prepared one. The reactions were the curriculum. The boy absorbed them.

Pierre Bourdain died young, of a heart attack in the spring of 1987, at fifty-seven, when Tony was thirty and still deep in the addiction years, the worst period of his adult life. Bourdain spoke about this loss rarely but felt it deeply. The father who had taken him to France, who had introduced him to the oysters and the cheese and the markets, who had embodied the alternative model of life that Tony spent his adult years trying to inhabit, gone. A wound that healed without ever quite closing. The death was not the cause of anything in Bourdain's life. It was a fact in the background, a piece of the biography the biographer must mention because the boy could not have eaten the oyster without the father who took him to the boat.

Anthony Michael Bourdain was born on June 25, 1956, in New York City. Grew up in Leonia, New Jersey. Graduated from Dwight-Englewood in 1973. Read Burroughs and Orwell and Thompson. Listened to punk rock. Spent his summers in France, eating things his classmates had never heard of. By every external measure, a privileged child in a privileged household in a privileged country. The privilege was real, and the privilege was also insufficient. The boy who ate the oyster had discovered that the world was larger than the world he had been given, and the discovery was irreversible.

One more detail. The boy in Leonia was funny. From an early age, Tony Bourdain made the people around him laugh. Sharp, observational, slightly cynical humor, the humor of a smart kid who notices things and has not yet learned to keep his observations to himself. The dark wit, the deadpan delivery, the gift for finding the comic angle on situations other people would have treated with solemnity. It was visible to his brother and his parents and his friends. It was the thing that made him likable even when his other qualities (the restlessness, the impatience, the casual disdain for suburban norms) would have made him irritating.

The humor was, in some ways, his most consistent quality across the decades. The boy who told jokes in the Leonia classroom became the man who told jokes in Manhattan kitchens, then in his books, then in front of cameras around the world. The jokes changed (more literary, more pointed, more politically engaged) but the impulse was the same. Find the absurdity. Name it. Get the laugh. He understood, from an early age, that the laugh was the thing that bound people together. You could not be lonely while you were laughing with someone. The shared joke was a form of connection that did not require any deeper agreement. And the connection was worth pursuing for its own sake.

He would enroll at Vassar College. He would drop out. He would enroll at the Culinary Institute of America. He would enter the kitchen. He would not leave it (not really, not fully, not even when the kitchen was a television set or an airport or a street market in Lagos) for the next forty-five years.

The kitchen was the place where the appetite could be fed. The kitchen was the place where the boy who ate the oyster could become the man who showed the world how to eat. The kitchen was also the place where the appetite could consume the person who carried it, where the hunger for experience could become indistinguishable from the hunger for oblivion, where the same impulse that makes you eat a raw oyster at ten makes you shoot heroin at twenty-four.

But that came later. On the boat, there was only the oyster, and the boy, and the world opening like a shell.