Very saddened to hear of Anthony Bourdain’s passing. While I’ve never considered myself a “fan” of celebrities, he was one of the few Akemi and I genuinely loved for his honesty, cutting sense of humor, and the obvious empathy he had for others.
Anthony always had a way with words. These are my favorite Anthony Bourdain quotes:
“Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don’t have.”
“And chicken is boring. Chefs see it as a menu item for people who don’t know what they want to eat.”
“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”
“I don’t have to agree with you to like you or respect you.”
“To have a child is to give fate a hostage.”
“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.”
“A proper saute pan, for instance, should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone’s skull. If you have any doubts about which will dent — the victim’s head or your pan — then throw that pan right in the trash.”
“It’s very rarely a good career move to have a conscience.”
“These are the end products of the Masterminds of Safety and Ethics, bulked up on cheese that contains no cheese, chips fried in oil that isn’t really oil, overcooked gray disks of what might once upon a time have been meat, a steady diet of Ho-Hos and muffins, butterless popcorn, sugarless soda, flavorless light beer. A docile, uncomprehending herd, led slowly to a dumb, lingering, and joyless slaughter.”
“The food was what you might expect to find on Air Uganda tourist class:”
“I compared it to taking my first acid trip: Nothing was ever the same for me. I just wanted more of it. If I had to agree to live in one country, or even one city, for the rest of my life, never leaving it, I’d pick Tokyo in a second.”
A sad, sad day.
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