Anthony and Me: Cooking in the Dark

By a fan of people cooking on television

The one group I have unreserved respect for (excluding emergency service professionals) are cooks. There is something about those who cook professionally, in both the hardiness of their attitude, but also their delicacy, which I have always been drawn to. The critic Jay Rayner has described cooking as bending ingredients to one’s will, and I agree. Ingredients can be brittle and difficult, and sometimes they require skill and force to be transformed into something worth eating. I like to think I have respect for food, and by extension, those who care for it. I am not alone in this, or in my fascination with one chef-turned-writer: the late Anthony Bourdain.

There is something about the rawness and honesty Bourdain injected into the fairly pedestrian world of food travel programs. I cannot imagine Gordon Ramsey attending therapy in Argentina, speaking honestly about his own suicidal thoughts, and interspersing them with shots of the same man enjoying slow cooked barbecue and cool beers in the sun. On Parts Unknown, this is what Bourdain did, and rawness seemed to be a theme for Bourdain’s final television project before his death in 2018.

On the 8th of June, Anthony Bourdain hanged himself in Le Chambard Hotel Restaurant Alsace in the French historical town of Kayserberg. It is a strange grief, mourning a television celebrity you do not know. Because I wasn’t necessarily mourning the real man himself; I was mourning the tragedy of his situation. That a man, gifted in his later years with an extraordinary life, could not outrun the darkness of his youth.

There is a particular scene of Bourdain trying to make Coq au vin with tough malnourished chickens, slaughtered by each crew member on a boat on the Congo River. “If you want to eat, you kill it yourself” he yells to the camera crew as the waters become choppy and night sets in. The power keeps cutting out on the boat, leaving Bourdain alone in the kitchen, cooking in the dark. Sweat dripping from his brow, television façade long abandoned, he struggles to bend the ingredients to his will.

I often feel like moments of darkness can be alleviated by better situations. A master’s program, a successful submission to a magazine, another few years aboard. But when I think about Anthony, I fear that no matter how far we travel, how much we try to live, we will always be destined to be left alone cooking in the dark.