If you’ve tracked the career of Anthony Bourdain, you already know that the last 18 years of his life were marked by sustained success as an author, world traveler, culinary authority and cable TV star.
Bourdain had toiled in relative obscurity as executive chef at Manhattan restaurant Les Halles until Kitchen Confidential, his breakout insider’s look at the raunchy, substance-fueled, bad-boy culture taking place inside restaurant kitchens and outside the view of an oblivious dining public, was published in 2000.
In 2017, in response to the Me Too movement, Bourdain expressed remorse that Kitchen Confidential “... celebrated or prolonged a culture that allowed the kind of grotesque behaviors we’re hearing about all too frequently.” Even so, in 2018 Kitchen Confidential topped the New York Times nonfiction paperback and nonfiction combined e-book and print lists.
His is also a story of personal evolution ending in tragedy. Over time, the focus of Bourdain’s hugely successful culinary series’ such as No Reservations and Parts Unknown shifted from edgy travelogues to deeper examinations of the struggles of the people whose countries he visited, and to a shedding of his Western biases when experiencing their cuisines.
Anthony Bourdain committed suicide on June 8, 2018 at age 61, leaving a literary legacy of eight works of nonfiction and six works of fiction that he authored or co-authored, as well as a string of successful media projects.
“World Travel – An Irreverent Guide (ECCO),” authored by Bourdain and his longtime assistant Laurie Woolever and completed by Woolever after Bourdain’s death, is a fitting coda to Bourdain’s dedication to understanding a culture through its cuisine. An alphabetic world tour that begins in Argentina and concludes 450 pages later in Vietnam, World Travel synthesizes essential advice on getting to a destination and Bourdain’s impressionistic, highly personal take on what to do – and what to avoid – during your stay.
If you’re looking for a straight ahead travel guide, look elsewhere. A typical example; Bourdain notes of Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital city, that “It’s got sort of a mournful, sad, sweet quality that I like. Fits with the architecture.”
Woolever has augmented World Travel with essays from those close to Bourdain with their own illuminating travel tales to tell, such as impressions of revisiting childhood haunts along the Jersey Shore from Chris Bourdain, Anthony’s brother. Upon returning to Atlantic City in 2015, Chris notes that “... most of the boardwalk casinos were closed and empty… Instead of a promised rebirth, Atlantic City looked to be facing a redeath.” Clearly, a Fodor’s travel guide this ain’t.
In a recent interview, Woolover notes that of all the countries he visited, Vietnam left the deepest impression on Bourdain, where he developed a profound connection, respect, even love, for the country, its food and its people. “It (Vietnam) grabs you and doesn’t let you go,” he notes. “I keep coming back. I have to.”
Following Bourdain’s death, President Barack Obama, who dined with Bourdain in Vietnam on an episode of “Parts Unknown,” wrote on Twitter: “He taught us about food – but more importantly, about its ability to bring us together. To make us a little less afraid of the unknown.”
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