Anthony Michael Bourdain (born June 25, 1956) is an American chef, author and television personality. He is well known for his 2000 book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, and is the host of Travel Channel's culinary and cultural adventure program Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. A 1978 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and a veteran of professional kitchens, Bourdain is currently a chef-at-large, whose home base is Brasserie Les Halles, New York where he was executive chef for many years. Bourdain was born in New York City to Pierre (d.1988) and Gladys Bourdain, and grew up in Leonia, New Jersey. Bourdain has French ancestry on his father's side; his paternal grandfather emigrated to New York from France following World War I. Bourdain was a student at Englewood School for Boys, graduating in 1973. He attended Vassar College where he was a member of the Delta Chi fraternity, before dropping out of Vassar after two years. He graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978.
Bourdain married his high-school girlfriend, Nancy Putkoski, in the 1980s, remaining together for two decades before divorcing; Bourdain has cited the irrevocable changes that come from traveling widely as the cause of the split. He currently lives with his second wife, Ottavia Busia. Together, they have a daughter, Ariane, born on April 9, 2007; the couple wed on April 20, 2007. Busia has appeared in several episodes of No Reservations — notably the episode on Sardinia, her birthplace; the Tuscany episode, in which she plays a disgruntled Italian diner; the Rome episode, and the Naples episode.
In Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain describes how his love of food was kindled in France when he tried his first oyster on an oyster fisherman's boat as a youth while on a family vacation. Later, while attending Vassar College, he worked in the seafood restaurants of Provincetown, Massachusetts, which sparked his decision to pursue cooking as a career. Bourdain graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978, and went on to run various restaurant kitchens in New York City — including the Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue, and Sullivan's — culminating in the position of executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles beginning in 1998. Brasserie Les Halles is based in Manhattan, with additional locations in Miami and, at the time of Bourdain's tenure, Washington, D.C. and Tokyo, Japan. Bourdain says he does not miss working the kitchen and believes it to be a profession "for the young and limber — of mind, body, and emotion."
Bourdain gained immediate popularity from his 2000 New York Times bestselling book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, an outgrowth of his now famous article in The New Yorker called "Don't Eat Before Reading This". Bourdain subsequently wrote two more New York Times bestselling nonfiction books: A Cook's Tour (2001), an exotic account of his food and travel exploits across the world, written in conjunction with his first television series; and The Nasty Bits (2006), another collection of exotic, provocative, and humorous anecdotes and essays mainly centered on food. Bourdain's additional books include Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook; the culinary mysteries Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo; a hypothetical historical investigation, Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical; and No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach. His latest book, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, the sequel to Kitchen Confidential, was published in 2010.
Bourdain's articles and essays have appeared many places, including in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Observer, Gourmet, Maxim, Esquire (UK), Scotland on Sunday, The Face, Food Arts, Limb by Limb, BlackBook, The Independent, Best Life, the Financial Times, and Town & Country. On the Internet, Bourdain's blog for Season 3 of Top Chef was nominated for a Webby Award for best Blog – Cultural/Personal in 2008. According to one critic, Bourdain "writes like he talks, except the writing is peppered with the F-word and similar technical terms presumably used in commercial kitchens. The pages flow in a stream-of-consciousness way that gives one the impression that the author is almost forced to purge these thoughts from his head to the page so he can manically move on to more adventure, which is what he seems to make a living doing on the Travel Channel."
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