PHOTO COURTESY CNN / FOCUS FEATURES
From "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain"
On the last day of May, I closed the door of my home in Kirkwood for the last time. There were no boxes to be moved or moving truck waiting. I simply walked out the backdoor to my car (that I sold 10 days later) with a mere carry-on, and, for the past five months, I’ve lived out of that suitcase as I’ve traveled through Central America and landed in Mexico City.
When my mom, still exasperated by my life choices, asked what she was supposed to get me for Christmas, I gave her one item: the new Anthony Bourdain book, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, released earlier this year. If I’m being honest, I don’t have room in my suitcase for the book, but it feels like a way to hang on just a little bit longer to Bourdain and his view on life that resonates with me and so many travelers from across the globe.
I recently met a Mexican film director who travels internationally for work. In one of our first conversations, we shared stories about places we’d visited: India, Paris, Tokyo... The list went on. Bourdain inevitably came up in this conversation.
“That’s my guy,” exclaimed Miguel.
“That’s my guy,” I retorted.
The thing is, though, everyone feels Bourdain is their guy—that’s part of his appeal. I saw Bourdain speak at the Fox Theatre when he came to St. Louis in 2016 and was amazed by the crowd. There were the foodies, the travelers, the rebels... It was an eclectic mix.
It was Bourdain’s approach to life that made you feel like you could have easily been the person sitting across the table from him, throwing down beers and talking about the chaos of U.S. politics. For me, it was the way that Bourdain embraced people with a genuine curiosity. He recognized that there was always something to learn, and he was willing to listen.
“You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together,” Bourdain once famously said.
And when I think back to my most memorable travel moments, they all involve food. There was a dinner in Trabzon, Turkey, where my friend Cigdem was the only other English speaker at the table. Despite this, the five of us laughed ourselves to tears, often at my expense as I tried to keep up with everyone with my consumption of raki, a drink that’ll make your toes curl and hair stand on end. A meal in Thessaloniki, Greece, where my friend’s mom made everything from the moussaka to the bread from scratch, was washed down with a homemade wine.
In India, my daughter and I were invited to eat curry (by hand, of course) in the home of a woman who runs a girls’ empowerment nonprofit in the slums of Mumbai, and then there were the bowls of noodles in the streets of Cambodia shared with fellow academics after a day of work and a night of drinking. (I still jokingly refer to this summer in Siem Reap as spring break for academics.)
I shared lots of Friday night meals with Bourdain—me with my chicken broccoli takeout from Chinese Express and Bourdain with beers and bowls of noodles in Vietnam, tacos in Mexico, or whatever delicacy he was eating in the Parts Unknown episode that I happened to be watching that night.
Bourdain influenced my itineraries and gave me perspective that allowed me to reflect on my own travels in a different way. He even helped me find the courage to try chapulines (crickets) tacos with my friend Fabiola at a mezcaleria in Mexico City.
It goes without saying that the loss of Bourdain hit me hard, in a way that no other celebrity death had. I went on a Bourdain binge after that fateful Friday in June 2018. I rewatched episodes, read all his books, and consumed every article that came across my social media feeds. When Roadrunner, the documentary about Bourdain’s life was released this July, I paid $20 to watch it from my Airbnb in Guatemala. When it ended, I still wanted more. So when I learned of the World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, I knew I had to have it.
The guide, though, wasn’t actually written by Bourdain. It was written by his assistant, Laurie Woolever, with the approval of his estate, “as a way to serve his legacy,” she said in a New York Times article. This is actually the second book, after Appetites, in which Woolever’s name appears just under Bourdain’s on the cover. Bourdain conceptualized the book and was supposed to write it during the summer that he died.
The book is a travel guide with Bourdain’s recommendations for hotels, transportation, and restaurants in 43 countries. The ironic thing is that Bourdain wasn’t actually a fan of guidebooks—he preferred the “atmospherics” of a place. He once said he’d rather read a fiction story set in a distant land than a list of best places to visit. It was through fiction that “you get a real sense of what that place is like,” he said at South by Southwest in 2016.
That a book bearing Bourdain’s name, without him having written it, still has an audience nearly three years after his passing, speaks to his legacy. Bourdain lived his life in a big way, with insatiable curiosity, love, and passion. Perhaps that’s the best way we can honor his legacy: by devouring every aspect of life and by sitting down for a meal with a stranger.
