Anthony Bourdain Quotes

Everyone should be encouraged at every turn to develop their own modest yet unique repertoire — to find a few dishes they love and practice at preparing them until they are proud of the result. To either respect in this way their own past — or express through cooking their dreams for the future. Every citizen would thus have their own specialty. Why can we not do this? There is no reason in the world. Let us then go forward. With vigor.

I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books.

Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.

You know, I'll tell you honestly: if you like food and you haven't come here to eat, you're really missing the fucking boat. This is world-class food; this is world-class wine; this is world-class cheese. The next big thing is Croatia. If you haven't been here, you're a fucking idiot. I'm an idiot.

The room smelled like a gust of wind from Satan's anus.

Early moralists who believed that taking too much pleasure at the table led inexorably to bad character-or worse, to sex-were (in the best-case scenario, anyway) absolutely right.

My last semester at Vassar, I'd taken to wearing nunchakus in a strap-on holster and carrying around a samurai sword — that should tell you all you need to know.

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

If experience teaches us anything, it’s that the very last thing a television audience wants to hear or be reminded of is how bad things are, how unhealthy or how doomed — that we’re heading off a cliff and dragging our kids after us. (Unless it’s accompanied by bombastic accusations of conspiracy — and a suitable candidate to blame for the problem.) It’s bad business to be saying all sorts of awful, alarmist shit like that — particularly when it’s true. It is much better business, always, to tell people, over and over again, in a reassuring voice (or, better yet, a loud, annoying one) that everything is just fine. It’ll all work out.

This same gag is used by pastry chefs to swirl chocolate or raspberry sauce through creme anglaise and allows them to charge you another three bucks a plate for two seconds of work that you could easily train a chimp to do. But.

The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts 'fringe elements', people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong.

Life is complicated. It's filled with nuance. It's unsatisfying. If I believe in anything, it is doubt.

"How many'd we do?" is the question frequently asked at the end of the shift, when the cooks collapse onto flour sacks and milk crates and piles of dirty linen, smoking their cigarettes, drinking their shift cocktails,

When outside forces corrupt the desire to do a job well and take pleasure in the doing. It’s an awful thing to watch. It’s awful when it happens to you.

I believe that, as an American, I should be able to walk into any restaurant in America and order my hamburger – that most American of foods – medium fucking rare. I don’t believe my hamburger should have to come with a warning to cook it well done to kill off any potential contaminants or bacteria. … I believe I should be able to treat my hamburger like food, not like infectious fucking medical waste. I believe the words “meat” and "treated with ammonia" should never occur in the same paragraph – much less the same sentence.