Bourdain Still Matters

I still miss those weekly visits from Anthony Bourdain, first on No Reservations, then Parts Unknow. On Cape Cod, where I write this from, we took a tiny bit of joy from being the start of his journey. The first place he stepped into a kitchen was as a dishwasher in long gone Provincetown restaurant. He returned to those roots once in this clip, to the Lobster Pot. It stood then and remains a place that when people know you were in P-town will ask, “Did you go to the Lobster Pot?”

Sometimes, it still hurts to go back and watch old clips and episodes. You see a man at ease in any environment, seemingly comfortable in his skin and looking to pull back curtains where and with people we do not get to in our lives. It is an incongruous contrast with the knowledge of his depression. While I am not writing this abut mental health, it is a reminder that for you, me family members or friends, you may not know a lot about what is going on behind the public person you see. Don’t lose sight of that.

This weekend, I caught someone making a passing reference to Bourdain and decided it was time to go revisit. I found on CNN a post-mortem reflection of interviews with people who had worked with him and lots from his own words and perspective of what he is looking to do. One thing caught the very essence of what Anthony Bourdain’s approach was, a basic philosophy of how we shold really approach anything. One of his tattoos, in ancient Greek said it best.

I am certain of nothing.

If you think about all the discussions he had with people, from sitting with Barack Obama in Vietnam to a family in a remote village in a country most of us know little about, or can even find on a map, he went in with the idea that he probably knows nothing. Now, that is different than having some ideas ahead of time, but it is also the acknowledgement that those ideas could be totally wrong. Bourdain cited his trip to Iran and all he learned about what life was really like there for people as prime evidence of that.

Some of us, hell all of us at some time, have a hard trouble with a little cognitive dissonance. I know what I know, I don’t have time, energy or interest in putting what I think to the test. I think it takes more confidence to be able to say, there are things I think I know, but I leave the door open that I can be very wrong, versus a false bravado of never questioning yourself or where your ideas and beliefs come from. If you do not question things, if you just decide this what it is, how can you say you know?

Your life is the lens, the filter from which you see the world. It can be shattering to leave that safe place, to a place where you are certain you know nothing and I constantly need to explore either return from that with a reinforcement of what you thought, or the ability to acknowledge that maybe you were wrong.

I’m trying to take the view of saying to myself, if I knew nothing about this, what questions would I ask? Ask people what their experience is like. Be aware of your surroundings and what story that is telling you. Open your mind.

It’s made me want to go back and watch more of those episodes, see them in another light that I had considered before. Even in doing that, I know there was one empirical truth for Anthony Bourdain, one I deeply share.

Hot dogs are inherently wonderful 🌭😊.

Thanks for the lesson, Tony.