Getting to know Anthony Bourdain

I have a memory of being on a helicopter with Anthony Bourdain, landing together somewhere terribly arid and dusty. In a moment taken right out of The Mandalorian or Dune, we’re being watched by a pack of nasally desert creatures in a nearby hideout, ready to pounce on us. But Bourdain approaches first, like he’s John Wayne, talks to them in their own language and negotiates something. It’s very tense and tentative, but we all eventually end up sitting chummily around a fire, sharing some delicious and weird food and discussing life.

This obviously never happened.

I must have conjured it up in a dream after watching so many of Bourdain’s travel shows and too many sci-fi films. But it also makes perfect sense, having gotten to know him a little - filming Parts Unknown together and a couple of social dinners.

I met him in Jerusalem in 2013. He’d never visited Israel or Palestine before. He wanted to know everything; he wanted to meet everyone and reach into every corner of a place with more corners than most.

Bourdain met settlers and peace activists, he explored Gaza’s culinary heritage, he talked to a theatre director in a refugee camp, and watched the Speed Sisters in action, the first all-female car-racing team in the Middle East.

A curious spectator, in a genuine attempt to reach out to people and understand them, food being the vehicle for his intrepid bridge-building.

I have always admired this about Anthony Bourdain: his smart instinct to meet people wherever they happen to be, completely on their own terms, even if it felt a bit unusual, occasionally bonkers.

None of that instinct is on screen yet in Tony, a new film about the summer a nineteen-year-old Bourdain started working in kitchens - naive, with zero interest in being there, needing, by his own admission, a good “ass-kicking.”

Set in 1970s Cape Cod, it resists the usual cinematic gloss on kitchen life - there’s grub and chaos and characters who feel plucked out of so many kitchens. A true coming-of-age story, though you can’t quite tell where the memoir ends and the invention begins. Antonio Banderas plays the kindly-stern chef who steals the film. The whole thing is scruffy and very earnest.

Go and watch the movie if you want to get to know him a little more.