Anthony Michael Bourdain was born in New York City on June 25, 1956. He graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978, and ran several restaurants in New York, eventually becoming the executive chef of the French restaurant Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan. He gained fame after a 1999 article in The New Yorker called “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” which he expanded into Kitchen Confidential, a New York Times bestselling memoir. The book’s acclaim led the Food Network to offer Bourdain his own show, A Cook’s Tour, in 2002, which became the first of many food travelogue shows hosted by him.
Bourdain crossed over into comic books in 2012, writing the Vertigo graphic novel “Get Jiro!” with Joel Rose. The stylish and violent comic, drawn by Langdon Foss, depicted sushi cooks at war in Los Angeles, and spawned a 2015 sequel, “Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi” (with art by Alé Garza). Bourdain and Rose reteamed at the start of 2018 for the Berger Books miniseries “Hungry Ghosts,” a horror anthology inspired by the Edo period game of Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai.
Bourdain was considered a culinary bad boy, because he often swore and made sexual references in his writing and TV hosting. He often spoke candidly about his drug and alcohol abuse as a young chef in the early ’80s. He was married to his high school girlfriend, Nancy Putkoski, from 1985 to 2005. In 2007, he married Ottavia Busia, and had a daughter, Ariane, that year: they divorced in 2016. He was dating actress Asia Argento last year, and strongly spoke out in support of her after she made sexual allegations about producer Harvey Weinstein. Bourdain was found unresponsive in his hotel room on Friday morning by his close friend, French chef Eric Ripert.
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