Anthony Bourdain famous quotes

I think fine dining is dying out everywhere... but I think there will be - and there has to always be - room for at least a small number of really fine, old-school fine-dining restaurants.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#School #Thinking #Numbers

Wholesome food is wholesome food anywhere. I may not like something but, generally speaking, if it's a busy, street food stall serving mystery meat in India, they're in the business of serving their neighbors. They're not targeted toward a transient crowd of tourists that won't be around tomorrow. They're not in the business of poisoning their neighbors.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Meat #Tourists #India

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.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Travel #Hurt #Memories

You realize after you travel enough that there's some things that, no matter how good you are at making television, no matter how good your cameras are, how well it's edited, there's no way the lenses could have captured the moment, and there's no way you will ever be able to write about it and do it justice.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Writing #Justice #Matter

Anyone who doesn't have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#San Francisco

I'm excited by any food that's prepared by someone who's proud of what they're doing, who puts a personal imprint on food.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Proud #Excited #Prepared

I've seen zero evidence of any nation on Earth other than Mexico even remotely having the slightest clue what Mexican food is about or even come close to reproducing it. It is perhaps the most misunderstood country and cuisine on Earth.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Country #Zero #Mexican

The roots of creativity of cooking are hungry people trying to figure out how to take something that's not particularly fresh or tender and transform it into it something delicious that everyone will love.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Creativity #Roots #People

Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Perfect #Interesting #Together

I'm a guy who should not have a lot of free time. But when it comes to vacation, I like to pull the plug completely. It's all about my daughter - I'm no longer the star of my own movie.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Daughter #Stars #Vacation

If I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Travel #Moving #Ocean

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.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Dream #Track #Hong Kong

In America, there might be better gastronomic destinations than New Orleans, but there is no place more uniquely wonderful. ... With the best restaurants in New York, you'll find something similar to it in Paris or Copenhagen or Chicago. But there is no place like New Orleans. So it's a must-see city because there's no explaining it, no describing it. You can't compare it to anything. So, far and away New Orleans.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#New York #New Orleans #Cities

Trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times. If you get lost and you just end up eating just anywhere, you know, you see a bunch of Venetians sitting around smoking cigarettes, eating something unrecognizable in a dark alley somewhere, chances are it's interesting.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Dark #Vacation #Perfect

Thinking of getting into the leg-breaking business, so I can profitably sell crutches later.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Thinking #Legs #Crutches

When my father passed, I was still an unsuccessful cook with a drug problem. I was in my mid-thirties, standing behind an oyster bar, cracking clams for a living when he died. So, he never saw me complete a book or achieve anything of note. I would have liked to have shared this with him.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Father #Book #Oysters

They're professionals at this in Russia, so no matter how many Jell-O shots or Jager shooters you might have downed at college mixers, no matter how good a drinker you might think you are, don't forget that the Russians - any Russian - can drink you under the table.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#College #Thinking #Russia

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.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Country #Other Cultures #Giving

I don't have much patience for people who are self-conscious about the act of eating, and it irritates me when someone denies themselves the pleasure of a bloody hunk of steak or a pungent French cheese because of some outdated nonsense about what's appropriate or attractive.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Self #People #Cheese

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.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Mean #Years #Discipline

Margarine? That's not food. I Can't Believe It's Not Butter? I can. If you're planning on using margarine in anything, you can stop reading now, because I won't be able to help you.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Believe #Reading #Able

Turning your nose up at a genuine and sincere gesture of hospitality is no way to travel or to make friends around the world.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Noses #World #Gestures

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

#Sweet #Snacks #Meals

I feel that if Jacques Pepin shows you how to make an omelet, the matter is pretty much settled. That's God talking.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Talking #Matter #Shows

The way you make an omelet reveals your character.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Character #Cooking #Way

There is no other place on earth even remotely like New Orleans. Don't even try to compare it to anywhere else.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#New Orleans #Trying #Earth

In that sense, what a great way to live, if you could always do things that interest you, and do them with people who interest you.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#People #Way #Interest

your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Food #Amusement #Body

Everything important I learned, I learned as a dishwasher.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Important #Dishwashers

The biggest empty space, the biggest gap in what should be a premier and always vibrant food scene in America is that we don't have hawker centers like they do in Singapore, basically food courts where mom and pop specialists can set up shop in fairly hygienic little stalls all up to health code making one dish they've been doing forever and ever.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Mom #America #Space

I couldn't imagine a more unreliable, more unprofitable way to make a living than writing. My advice? Show up, do the best you can. Keep your day job. If you get a lucky break, don't ***** up. It was helpful to be older because I had made all the really stupid mistakes already.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Jobs #Stupid #Mistake

If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Travel #Sleep #Two

I admire vegetarians who refuse to eat nothing but vegetables in their homes, but I also admire those who put aside those principles or those preferences when they travel. Just to be a good guest.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Home #Vegetables #Principles

Few things are more beautiful to me than a bunch of thuggish, heavily tattooed line cooks moving around each other like ballerinas on a busy Saturday night. Seeing two guys who'd just as soon cut each other's throats in their off hours moving in unison with grace and ease can be as uplifting as any chemical stimulant or organized religion.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Beautiful #Uplifting #Moving

One of my few virtues - I don't have a lot of them - would be a deep sense of curiosity. I'm interested in how other people live in other places; I'm interested in other cultures.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Other Cultures #People #Curiosity

I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Travel #Thinking #Vacation

I've been very careful about what I say yes to and what I say no to. And I think seriously always about... this may be a good idea right now or it may be a lot of money right now, but will it be good for me five years from now? Will it be fun? Will it make me hate myself? I think about all of those things.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Fun #Hate #Thinking

There is no Final Resting Place of the Mind.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Mind #Finals

I travel 250 days a year. There are chef friends who I only see every couple of years. By conventional standards I'm a bad friend. I'm not there to remember your birthday or to offer you words of support through Twitter. I'm not up on what you're doing in New York because I'm not in New York. I'm not what people call in parenting circles "present."
-- Anthony Bourdain

#New York #Couple #Bad Friend

Nobody in Singapore drinks Singapore Slings. It's one of the first things you find out there. What you do in Singapore is eat. It's a really food-crazy culture, where all of this great food is available in a kind of hawker-stand environment.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Travel #Crazy #Culture

My French definitely improves the more I drink, as I worry less and less about absolutely perfect grammar. I do speak and understand the language, just not particularly well.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Perfect #Worry #Language

Those places I don't understand, just doing bad food. It takes some doing. Making good pasta is so much easier than making bad stuff. It actually takes quite an effort to make poor linguine pomodora.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Effort #Pasta #Stuff

I write quickly with a sense of urgency. I don't edit myself out of existence, meaning I'll try to write 50 or 60 pages before I start rereading, revising and editing. That just helps with my confidence.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Writing #Editing #Trying

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

#Believe #Race #Salvation

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Teacher #Book #People

We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Suicide #Baby #Blow

I wouldn't want to compare myself to David Byrne whom I consider a genius, but what I think what we have in common is that he's also a guy who is very interested in the world and who has a lot of passions beyond singing and playing guitar.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Passion #Thinking #Guitar

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.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Fashion #Light #Race

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.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Book #Guy #Down And

I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas - fat, drugged, and completely out of it.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Food #Vegas #Feelings

But I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Growing Up #Men #Thinking

In my house, neither my wife nor my daughter are impressed that I'm on television, and they remind me of that frequently.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Daughter #Wife #House

PETA doesn't want stressed animals to be cruelly crowded into sheds, ankle-deep in their own crap, because they don't want any animals to die-ever-and basically think chickens should, in time, gain the right to vote. I don't want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them probably less delicious.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Animal #Thinking #Stressed

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

#People #Cameras #Very Good

Luck is not a business model.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Luck #Models

If I were trapped in one city and had to eat one nation's cuisine for the rest of my life, I would not mind eating Japanese. I adore Japanese food. I love it.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Cities #Mind #Cuisine

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.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#People #Abuse #Fans

When I cook, I generally stick with what I know, what I'm comfortable with, and what I feel I've paid my dues learning, and am good at.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Sticks #Cooks #Feels

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

#Dream #Hard Work #Appreciate

As incisively pointed out in the documentary Food Inc.," an overwhelmingly large percentage of "new," healthy," and "organic" alternative food products are actually owned by the same parent companies that scared us into the organic aisle in the first place. "They got you comin' and goin'" has never been truer.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Parent #Healthy #Alternatives

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.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Travel #Eye #Reality

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.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Grandma #Feelings #Tribes

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

#Food #Trying #Static

An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Sauce #Sin #Multitudes

Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don't have.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Character #Skills #Taught

One of life's terrible truths is that women like guys who seem to know what they're doing.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Guy #Truth Is #Terrible

Anyone who's a chef, who loves food, ultimately knows that all that matters is: 'Is it good? Does it give pleasure?'
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Giving #Doe #Matter

I'd learned something... Food had power. It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me... and others. This was valuable information.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Inspire #Delight #Information

I think of [street food] as the antidote to fast food; it's the clear alternative to the king, the clown and the colonel.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Kings #Thinking #Alternatives

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.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Meat #Littles #Tough

Good food and good eating are about risk.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Risk #Eating #Good Food

Don't dunk your nigiri in the soy sauce. Don't mix your wasabi in the soy sauce. If the rice is good, complement your sushi chef on the rice.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Soy Sauce #Sushi #Chef

On the plane, I like to read fiction set in the location I'm going to. Fiction is in many ways more useful than a guidebook, because it gives you those little details, a sense of the way a place smells, an emotional sense of the place. So, I'll bring Graham Greene's The Quiet American if I'm going to Vietnam. It's good to feel romantic about a destination before you arrive.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Emotional #Smell #Giving

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one's life.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Memories #Powerful #Food

For me, the cooking life has been a long love affair, with moments both sublime and ridiculous.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Long #Cooking #Sublime

As you move through this life...you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Moving #Return #This Life

I've long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we're talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime 'associates,' food, for me, has always been an adventure
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Food #Adventure #Oysters

Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom...is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go. -Anthony Bourdain
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Mind #Enlightenment #Finals

Being a vegan is a first-world phenomenon, completely self-indulgent.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Self #World #Firsts

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

#Food #Meat #Pork

Only Texans and Jews understand brisket
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Brisket #Texan #Jew

The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Travel #Journey #Expression

The worst, most dangerous person to America is clearly Paula Deen. She revels in unholy connections with evil corporations and she's proud of the fact that her food is f---ing bad for you. If I were on at seven at night and loved by millions of people at every age, I would think twice before telling an already obese nation that it's OK to eat food that is killing us. Plus, her food sucks.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Night #Thinking #America

I'm not afraid to look like an idiot.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Reality #Looks #Idiot

Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Food #Oil #Lazy

When your signature dish is hamburger in between a doughnut, and you've been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you've got Type 2 Diabetes... It's in bad taste if nothing else,
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Type 2 Diabetes #Knowing #Signatures

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

#Chef #Pleasure

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Food #Cooking #Enemy

Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Food #Simple #Fabulous

You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Cheesy #Cheese

Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Drink

Without new ideas success can become stale
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Ideas #Stale

Only desperation can account for what the Chinese do in the name of 'medicine.' That's something you might remind your New Age friends who've gone gaga over 'holistic medicine' and 'alternative Chinese cures.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Names #Medicine #Chinese

Recognise excellence. Celebrate weirdness and innovation. Oddballs should be cherished, if they can do something other people can't do.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#People #Innovation #Excellence

When I'm doing a book tour in the States, I'll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don't know where I am right away. I'll go to the window, and it doesn't help there either, especially if you're in an anonymous strip and it's the usual Victoria's Secret, Gap, Chili's, Applebee's.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Book #Secret #Usual

You have an impeccable argument if you said that Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo are food capitals. They have a maximum amount of great stuff to eat in the smallest areas.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Stuff #Hong Kong #Tokyo

You'd have a hard time finding anything better than Barcelona for food, as far as being a hub. Given a choice between Barcelona and San Sebastian to die in, I'd probably want to die in San Sebastian.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Hard Times #Choices #Want

I like the fact that Melbourne always seems to support their chefs and promote them in ways I find really admirable.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Support #Way #Facts

Where once they used to say, 'Cocaine is God's way of saying you have too much money' - now, maybe EDM is. Come ye lords and princelings of douchedom.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Too Much #Way #Cocaine

It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
-- Anthony Bourdain

#Mean #Mind #Enlightenment