Bourdain Quotes

For me, the cooking life has been a long love affair, with moments both sublime and ridiculous. ~ Anthony Bourdain

When dealing with complex transportation issues, the best thing to do is pull up with a cold beer and let somebody else figure it out. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I'm a radical environmentalist; I think the sooner we asphyxiate in our own filth, the better. The world will do better without us. Maybe some fuzzy animals will go with us, but there'll be plenty of other animals, and they'll be back. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Toast your goddamn muffins. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I could do one show after another in China for the rest of my life and still die ignorant. There's a lot of places left to go. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Our movements through time and space seem somehow trivial compared to a heap of boiled meat in broth, the smell of saffron, garlic, fishbones and Pernod. ~ Anthony Bourdain

In that sense, what a great way to live, if you could always do things that interest you, and do them with people who interest you. ~ Anthony Bourdain

If I'm in Rome for only 48 hours, I would consider it a sin against God to not eat cacio e pepe, the most uniquely Roman of pastas, in some crummy little joint where Romans eat. I'd much rather do that than go to the Vatican. That's Rome to me. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Sometimes the greatest meals on vacations are the ones you find when Plan A falls through. ~ Anthony Bourdain

At the time of their deaths, three out of five Russian men, I am told, are found to have a blood-alcohol level exceeding what one needs to qualify for a DWI. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I look at Guy Fieri and I just think, 'Jesus, I'm glad that's not me.' ~ Anthony Bourdain

Maybe that's enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom ... is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go. -Anthony Bourdain ~ Anthony Bourdain

Demi-glace. There are a lot of ways to make demi-glace, but I recommend you simply take your already reduced meat stock, add some red wine, toss in some shallots and fresh thyme and a bay leaf and peppercorns, and slowly, slowly simmer it and reduce it again until it coats a spoon. Strain. Freeze this stuff in an ice-cube tray, pop out a cube or two as needed, and you are in business - you can rule the world. And remember, when making a sauce with demi-glace, don't forget to monter au beurre. Chervil, ~ Anthony Bourdain

Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance, as they say in the army - and I always, always want to be ready. Just like Bigfoot. ~ Anthony Bourdain

And I had my first oyster. Now, this was a truly significant event. I remember it like I remember losing my virginity - and in many ways, more fondly. August ~ Anthony Bourdain

Frighteningly honest. What Anthony Bourdain did to the world of cooking in Kitchen Confidential, Leopold will do to the world of journalism. It's Sid & Nancy meets All the President's Men. ~ Rob Cohen

It was once said that this is the land of the free. There is, I believe, a statue out there in the harbor, with something written on it about "Give me your hungry ... your oppressed ... give me pretty much everybody"-that's the way I remember it, anyway. The idea of America is a mutt-culture, isn't it? Who the hell is America if not everybody else? We are-and should be-a big, messy, anarchistic polyglot of dialects and accents and different skin tones ... We need more Latinos to come here. And they should, whenever possible, impregnate our women. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Everybody should come here. Everyone should see how complicated, how deeply troubled, and yet at the same time, beautiful and awesome the world can be. Everyone should experience, even as the clouds gather, what's at stake, what could be lost, what's still here. ~ Anthony Bourdain

As well, there's the age-old syndrome common to fans of musicians with passionate and discerning cult followings. When the objects of adulation are crass enough to become popular, they quickly become a case of "used to be good. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Turning your nose up at a genuine and sincere gesture of hospitality is no way to travel or to make friends around the world. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I've been fascinated by the world ever since I read 'Kitchen Confidential' by Anthony Bourdain. I've watched 'Top Chef' and watched interviews with chefs on 'Charlie Rose' ... I thought they're really intriguing characters, and they really encapsulate that tension between vision and commerce, art and commerce. ~ Jon Favreau

Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I'm not searching for hard news; I'm not a journalist, but I'm interested in pushing to boundaries of where we can do the kind of stories that we want to do. I mean, it's a big world and CNN has made it a lot bigger and they haven't flinched. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Under 'Reasons for Leaving Last Job', never give the real reason, unless it's money or ambition. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I do have a heart, you see. I've got plenty of heart. I'm a fucking sentimental guy – once you get to know me. Show me a hurt puppy, or a long-distance telephone service commercial, or a film retrospective of Ali fights or Lou Gehrig's last speech and I'll weep real tears. I am a bastard, when crossed, though, no question. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I saw how three or four ingredients, as long as they are of the highest and freshest quality, can be combined in a straightforward way to make a truly excellent and occasionally wondrous product. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful. ~ Anthony Bourdain

When I'm back in New York - and this is a terrible thing to complain about - I eat a lot more really, really good food than perhaps I'd like to. So many of my friends are really good chefs. It's kind of like being in the Mafia. ~ Anthony Bourdain

You realize after you travel enough that there's some things that, no matter how good you are at making television, no matter how good your cameras are, how well it's edited, there's no way the lenses could have captured the moment, and there's no way you will ever be able to write about it and do it justice. ~ Anthony Bourdain

If I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for everybody.
Open your mind, get up off the couch, move. ~ Anthony Bourdain

No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Having been a chef for some many years, I understand what it's like to work really, really hard to get good at something, only to have someone piss all over it. ~ Anthony Bourdain

People everywhere have been very, very good to me, whether I'm with or without cameras. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Try arguing the virtues of Nello on chowhound.com, or a similar online meeting ground for knowledgeable food nerds, and prepare to get pilloried. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I'm sure that at no point in my life could I ever have shown the kind of focus and discipline and commitment necessary to work a station at elBulli or Le Bernardin. No. That ain't me. ~ Anthony Bourdain

What is love? Love is eating twenty-four ounces of raw fish at four o'clock in the morning. ~ Anthony Bourdain

The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Few things are more beautiful to me than a bunch of thuggish, heavily tattooed line cooks moving around each other like ballerinas on a busy Saturday night. Seeing two guys who'd just as soon cut each other's throats in their off hours moving in unison with grace and ease can be as uplifting as any chemical stimulant or organized religion. ~ Anthony Bourdain

The bible of cooking. The all-time argument ender. Early in my cooking career, I wielded my Larousse like a weapon and it never let me down. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I'll be right here. Until they drag me off the line. I'm not going anywhere. I hope. It's been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn't miss it for the world. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I've been really fortunate in that I guess I was hired to do 'A Cook's Tour;' I was already a known quantity, meaning I had written a really obnoxious book and nobody expected me to be anyone that I wasn't already. ~ Anthony Bourdain

For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we've all had to become disappears, when we're confronted with something as simple as a plate of food. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I think it's a universal truth that most chefs I know are happiest eating simple, unadorned good things. ~ Anthony Bourdain

America's most dangerous export was, is and always will be our fast-food outlets. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Naturally, I'm misanthropic. But the Negronis are helping considerably. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I won't eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. This isn't a hard call. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can't be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like. ~ Anthony Bourdain

There is no other place on earth even remotely like New Orleans. Don't even try to compare it to anywhere else. ~ Anthony Bourdain

The cooking profession, while it's a noble craft and a noble calling, 'cause you're doing something useful - you're feeding people, you're nurturing them, you're providing sustenance - it was never pure. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Early moralists who believed that taking too much pleasure at the table led inexorably to bad character-or worse, to sex-were (in the best-case scenario, anyway) absolutely right. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I couldn't imagine a more unreliable, more unprofitable way to make a living than writing. My advice? Show up, do the best you can. Keep your day job. If you get a lucky break, don't f*** up. It was helpful to be older because I had made all the really stupid mistakes already. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I believe I should be able to treat my hamburger like food, not like infectious fucking medical waste. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I don't snack. I don't generally eat sweets or drink soda. I never eat between meals or even before big ones. ~ Anthony Bourdain

But I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one's own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money. ~ Anthony Bourdain

The fact that over 50 per cent of the residents of Toronto are not from Canada, that is always a good thing, creatively, and for food especially. That is easily a city's biggest strength, and it is Toronto's unique strength. ~ Anthony Bourdain

My last semester at Vassar, I'd taken to wearing nunchakus in a strap-on holster and carrying around a samurai sword - that should tell you all you need to know. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Look at your waiter's face. He knows. It's another reason to be polite to your waiter: he could save your life with a raised eyebrow or a sigh. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Line cooks are the heroes. ~ Anthony Bourdain

In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I am a delightfully evangelical guy about things I love. I am that annoying guy who sits everyone down and forces them to read some book I like. I'm looking across the full spectrum of genres. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I think that if all kids aspire to reach a point where they could feed themselves and a few of their friends, this would be good for the world surely. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one's life. I mean, lets face it:when you're eating simple barbecue under a palm tree, and you feel sand between your toes, samba music is playing softly in the backgroud, waves are lapping at the shore a few yards off, a gentle breeze is cooling the sweat on the back of your neck at the hairline, and looking across the table, past the column of empty Red Stripes at the dreamy expression on your companion's face, you realize that in half an hour you're proably going to be having sex on clean white hotel sheets, that grilled chicken leg suddenly tastes a hell of a lot better ~ Anthony Bourdain

For the rest of my life- to resemble this one: both complex and strangely comforting. ~ Anthony Bourdain

As an art form, cooktalk is, like haiku or kabuki, defined by established rules, with a rigid, traditional framework in which one may operate. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Anything that improves people's expectations of a meal is good for the world. Anything that weans even one kid or one adult away from Chili's or T.G.I. Friday's is definitely a win for the good guys. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Good food is very often, even most often, simple food. ~ Anthony Bourdain

O enchanted land of my childhood, a cultural petri dish from which regularly issues forth greatness. New Jersey, in case you didn't know it, has got beaches. And they're not all crawling with roid-raging trolls with reality shows. I grew up summering on those beaches and they are awesome. Jersey's got farmland, beautiful bedroom communities where that woman from "Real Housewives" who looks like Dr. Zaius does not live nor anyone like her. Even the refineries, the endless cloverleaves of turnpikes and expressway twisting and unknowable patterns over the wetlands that are to me somehow beautiful. To know Jersey is to love her. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Is it a good hot dog? That's all I want to know ... I don't think the personal health and purity of my colon is that important compared to pleasure. As a chef, I'm not your dietitian or your ethicist. I'm in the pleasure business ... . My responsibility is to give you the most delicious tomato that I can afford, given the circumstances, and maybe increase the likelihood that you get laid after dinner. ~ Anthony Bourdain

For their own good, vegetarians should never be allowed near fine beers and ales. It will only make them loud and belligerent, and they lack the physical strength and aggressive nature to back up any drunken assertions. ~ Anthony Bourdain

These are the end products of the Masterminds of Safety and Ethics, bulked up on cheese that contains no cheese, chips fried in oil that isn't really oil, overcooked gray disks of what might once upon a time have been meat, a steady diet of Ho-Hos and muffins, butterless popcorn, sugarless soda, flavorless light beer. A docile, uncomprehending herd, led slowly to a dumb, lingering, and joyless slaughter. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I'm definitely looking forward to the day when I stop working - if I ever stop working. I like the idea of keeling over in my tomato vines in Sardinia or northern Italy. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I think people lose sight of the fact that chefs should be ultimately in the pleasure business, not in the look-at-me business. ~ Anthony Bourdain

As incisively pointed out in the documentary Food Inc.," an overwhelmingly large percentage of "new," healthy," and "organic" alternative food products are actually owned by the same parent companies that scared us into the organic aisle in the first place. "They got you comin' and goin'" has never been truer. ~ Anthony Bourdain

You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base. ~ Anthony Bourdain

How many'd we do? is the question frequently asked at the end of the shift, when the cooks collapse onto flour sacks and milk crates and piles of dirty linen, smoking their cigarettes, drinking their shift cocktails, ~ Anthony Bourdain

The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about - or as a ritual like filling up a car - but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you. ~ Anthony Bourdain

If you have a good experience in a restaurant, you tell 2 people. If you have a bad experience, you tell 10 people. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I love New York. I'm a guy for whom a New York accent is a comforting thing. ~ Anthony Bourdain

You have an impeccable argument if you said that Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo are food capitals. They have a maximum amount of great stuff to eat in the smallest areas. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I can unload my opinion on anybody at anytime. ~ Anthony Bourdain

The mishandling of food and equipment with panache was always admired; to some extent, this remains true to this day. Butchers still slap down prime cuts with just a little more force and noise than necessary. Line cooks can't help putting a little English on outgoing plates, spinning them into the pass-through with reverse motion so they curl back just short of the edge. Oven doors in most kitchens have to be constantly tightened because of repeatedly being kicked closed by clog-shod feet. And all of us dearly love to play with knives. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Everyone should be encouraged at every turn to develop their own modest yet unique repertoire - to find a few dishes they love and practice at preparing them until they are proud of the result. To either respect in this way their own past - or express through cooking their dreams for the future. Every citizen would thus have their own specialty. Why can we not do this? There is no reason in the world. Let us then go forward. With vigor. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Shortcut.' The word filled me with dread. When has a shortcut ever worked out as planned? The word – in a horror film at least – usually precedes disembowelment and death. A 'shortcut' almost never leads to good times. ~ Anthony Bourdain

And now to sleep, to dream...perchance to fart. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I'm always secretly the most pleased when a show just really, really looks good and when my camera guys are really happy with the images they got. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Don't dunk your nigiri in the soy sauce. Don't mix your wasabi in the soy sauce. If the rice is good, complement your sushi chef on the rice. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I believe - to the best of my recollection, anyway - that I soon made the classic error of moving from margaritas to actual shots of straight tequila. It does make it easier to meet new people. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I'm a big believer in winging it. I'm a big believer that you're never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I'm always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me. ~ Anthony Bourdain

An employer of mine back in the '80s was kind enough to take me on after a rough patch, and it made a big difference in my life that I knew I was the sort of person who showed up on time. It's a basic tell of character. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I'm at my most productive before I even have my first cup of coffee. I only get slower and stupider as the day progresses. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Regret is something you've got to just live with, you can't drink it away. You can't run away from it. You can't trick yourself out of it. You've just got to own it. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I don't think people should be encouraged to look like Kate Moss; I think that's unreasonable. I think the normal human body should be glorified. By the same token, if you need a stick to wash yourself, you're not healthy. ~ Anthony Bourdain

If you're twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go. ~ Anthony Bourdain

What is left of the poor? Try to buy a fresh f**king vegetable in West Baltimore. It is a not completely inconceivable scenario in the future, we'll all look like that ... Waddling from convenience store to fast food outlet, chewing mindlessly on 99 cent hamburgers. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I hated the Naked Chef. Fine, yes, he did good things for school food or whatever, but, you know, I don't want my chefs to be cute and adorable. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I'm a control freak. If you're going to slap my name on something, I would like to control it. ~ Anthony Bourdain