Quotes

When Tony gets hungry, things die.

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.

I have exactly the same work ethic. I don't see writing as anything more important than cooking. In fact, I'm a little queasier on the writing. There's an element of shame, because it's so easy. I can't believe that people give me money for this shit. The TV, too. It's not work. At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It's a gift. A few months ago, I was sitting cross-legged in the mountains of Vietnam with a bunch of Thai tribesman as a guest of honor drinking rice whiskey. Three years ago I never, ever in a million years thought that I would ever live to see any of that. So I know that I'm a lucky man.

I don't like to see animals in pain. That was very uncomfortable to me. I don't like factory farming. I'm not an advocate for the meat industry.

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.

Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone ... Bad food is fake food ... food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people's ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives. Food that's too safe, too pasteurized, too healthy - it's bad! There should be some risk, like unpasteurized cheese. Food is about rot, and decay, and fermentation.as much as it is also about freshness.

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.

If you're comforting yourself with the dictum "Never trust a thin chef," don't. Because no stupider thing has ever been said.

Nobody will tell you this, but I will: If you're thirty-two years old and considering a career in professional kitchens? If you're wondering if, perhaps, you are too old? Let me answer that question for you: Yes. You are too old.

The organic movement has good intentions, but I doubt in the long term that it'll be sustainable. It's helping people learn where their food comes from and being more aware of what junk corporations put into it, and that's good. My daughter has only been given organic and natural foods since she's been born.

Those days are best left in the past. Sometimes I think about the excitement, the energy, the stress that working a kitchen involved, and I remember how young, naive, confident I was back then. The kitchen is at its best when new, cocky, limber, innovative chefs are in control.

I'm pretty sure that every time Guy Fieri puts barbecue pork inside a nori roll, an angel dies.

[about fast food] In-N-Out Burger is my fast food nirvana. It's the only place I will seek out and eat. The rest I avoid.

As a child growing up in New Jersey, I speak on behalf of every child that ever grew up there in saying that your purpose in life was looking across the bay to New York City and figuring out a way to end up there.

I believe taking your child to McDonald's should be considered grounds for having your parental rights revoked.

If you want to know if a chef has true cooking ability, ask them to make you eggs. That meal will reveal more than anything else.

If I had to choose, I'd pick the hole in the wall dump over the gentrified bistro owned by your average pretentious hipster every time.

Vietnam is my favorite destination. The people are wonderful, the food is fantastic, and there is a lot of mystery and beauty surrounding it. You learn something new every time you go there, and I can't say that about other destinations.

[on Hong Kong (2018)] It has long been my hope to get Chris [Christopher Doyle] on the show as a guest. Little did I know - or ever expect - that he would end up shooting most of it along with our crew. The resulting Hong Kong episode is therefore both unlike any other episode, but ... well ... also ... historic in the sense that never before has such a heavyweight director of photography lent his efforts to a television travel show. [Bourdain's Field Notes from May 30, 2018]

Directors on Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown (2013) are given tremendous license to try just about anything they want in the cause of being different, being creative, upending expectations, destroying conventional story arcs. A director with an idea - for a destination or a new shooting or editing style or new equipment, any new way of telling a story that is likely to cause fear and confusion at the network (and possibly with our audience) - is welcome to try. I have enthusiastically supported shows in black and white, anamorphic, told in reverse, shot on deliberately eroded 16-millimeter film stock, dream sequences, animations, shot completely at night, and in places, I would never otherwise have gone were it not for the passion of the director. I hate nothing more than a competently shot and edited episode. One foot in front of the other, a plodding, well-put-together hour of storytelling that trudges efficiently toward predictably heartwarming closing remarks. [Bourdain's Field Notes from May 30, 2018]

I believe in some basic virtues, you know? Mercy, humility, curiosity, empathy.

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

Good food and good eating are about risk. Every once in a while an oyster, for instance, will make you sick to your stomach. Does this mean you should stop eating oysters? No way. The more exotic the food, the more adventurous the serious eater, the higher the likelihood of later discomfort. I'm not going to deny myself the pleasures of morcilla sausage, or sashimi, or even ropa vieja at the local Cuban joint just because sometimes I feel bad a few hours after I've eaten them.

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.

Anyone who refuses to let you eat your burger at a temperature less than medium is on the side of the terrorists.

You know what's great about New York? The threshold for citizenship as a New Yorker is actually pretty short. If you come to New York and you still like it two years after you arrived here, and you still think it's great and you're having a good time and you haven't been just totally ground down and go limping back to wherever the fuck you came from, you know what? You're in!

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

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.

Don't touch my dick, don't touch my knife.

For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we've all had to become disappears, when we're confronted with something as simple as a plate of food.

When I die, I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantages squandered.

You have to love a town where you can both smoke and gamble in a pharmacy.

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.

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

Given a choice between being trapped on a desert island with a group of writers or a family of howler monkeys, I think I'd pick the monkeys. At least I could eat them.

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.

I believe the words "meat" and "treated with ammonia" should never occur in the same paragraph - much less the same sentence.

Good food does lead to sex. As it should.

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. They're professionals at this in Russia.

I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able - if called upon to do so - to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world.