Anthony Bourdain Quotes

I do the meatball recipe a lot. I think the army stew probably too. It's the most useful dish because it was born out of necessity and poverty and any idiot can make it in 20 minutes on a hot plate. It's cheap and uses readily available commercial ingredients. And it's delicious. It should be the great American dish - perfect late-night stoner dorm food for college kids on a budget.

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.

Just because I like sushi, doesn't mean I can make sushi. I've come to well understand how many years just to get sushi rice correct. It's a discipline that takes years and years and years. So, I leave that to the experts.

For a dinner date, I eat light all day to save room, then I go all in: I choose this meal and this order, and I choose you, the person across from me, to share it with. There's a beautiful intimacy in a meal like that.

I am not a fan of people who abuse service staff. In fact, I find it intolerable. It’s an unpardonable sin as far as I’m concerned, taking out personal business or some other kind of dissatisfaction on a waiter or busboy.

My house is run, essentially, by an adopted, fully clawed cat with a mean nature.

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.

I'm sure one of the frustrations of being a Western enthusiast of Japanese food and culture is you're confronted every day with the absolute certainty that you will die ignorant.

As a chef I’m not your dietitian or your ethicist, I’m in the pleasure business.

When you have a child you're no longer the star of the movie.

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

I was a journeyman chef of middling abilities. Whatever authority I have as a commenter on this world comes from the sheer weight of 28 years in the business. I kicked around for 28 years and came out the other end alive and able to form a sentence.

When you're shooting that fast end to end, you wake up in a hotel and you don't know where you are. You're dreaming of Singapore, you wake up in Hong Kong. Or you just lose track. It's one of the reasons I'm staying in hotels that I know I've stayed in before, and they don't look like other hotels.

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.

Assume the worst. About everybody. But don't let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn't prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining.

In America, there might be better gastronomic destinations than New Orleans, but there is no place more uniquely wonderful.

The Italians seem to have a better attitude with kids and the food is great!

Without new ideas success can become stale

I'm in no position to try to tell people how to live their family life.

Street food, I believe, is the salvation of the human race.

Understand, when you eat meat, that something did die. You have an obligation to value it - not just the sirloin but also all those wonderful tough little bits.

I guess my whole life, as much as I might have wanted a child for the reason that everybody wants one, I always recognized that at no point until I was 50 was I old enough or up to the job. I thought, you know what, I not only really want a child, but at this point, finally in my life, I think I'm up to the job and I'm the type of person who could do the job well and I'm financially prepared to look after a child.

I have the best job in the world.

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.

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

When do you stop to de-douche?

Most of the time, I'm fighting guys who are 22 years old, former college wrestlers, athletes, kids who are in much better shape than me. Often people who are much bigger and wider than me. It can be dispiriting at first.

I'm not trying to explain other cultures, or to give a fair and balanced account of a country, or the top ten things you need to know. I'm not trying to spread world peace and understanding. I'm not an advocate or an activist or an educator or a journalist. I'm out there trying to tell stories the best I can.

I urge you to travel - as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to.

There are people with otherwise chaotic and disorganized lives, a certain type of person that's always found a home in the restaurant business in much the same way that a lot of people find a home in the military.

Whatever everyone else has asked you to do or never let you do, and let's do that.

Even on the Serengeti, it ain't a barbecue if there ain't some kind of beer.

Every chef I know, their cholesterol is through the roof. And mine's not so great.

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.

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

I'd like to make a show with Keith Richards.

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.

'Kitchen Confidential' wasn't a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.

To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.

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

Everything important I learned, I learned as a dishwasher.

Very few restaurant workers could even dream of eating in the restaurants they work in. Many do not make a living wage.

That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund.

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.

It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there - with your eyes open - and lived to see it.

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. Most of the time, those marks - on your body or on your heart - are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.

Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a "decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention.

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.