Anthony Bourdain Quotes

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

~ Anthony Bourdain

I wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner.

~ Anthony Bourdain

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.

~ Anthony Bourdain

Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.

~ Anthony Bourdain

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

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

O enchanted land of my childhood, a cultural petri dish from which regularly issues forth greatness. New Jersey, in case you didn't know it, has got beaches. And they're not all crawling with roid-raging trolls with reality shows. I grew up summering on those beaches and they are awesome. Jersey's got farmland, beautiful bedroom communities where that woman from Real Housewives who looks like Dr. Zaius does not live nor anyone like her. Even the refineries, the endless cloverleaves of turnpikes and expressway twisting and unknowable patterns over the wetlands that are to me somehow beautiful. To know Jersey is to love her.

~ Anthony Bourdain

Looking at these photographs, I know that I will never understand the world I live in or fully know the places I've been. I've learned for sure only what I don't know - and how much I have to learn.

~ Anthony Bourdain

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

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

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

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

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

~ Anthony Bourdain

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

~ Anthony Bourdain

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

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, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It's healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I've worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I'll accomodate them, I'll rummage around for something to feed them, for a 'vegetarian plate', if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine.

~ Anthony Bourdain

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

Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.

~ Anthony Bourdain

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

~ Anthony Bourdain

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

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

~ Anthony Bourdain

In another telling anomaly of the meat-grinding business, many of the larger slaughterhouses will sell their product only to grinders who agree to not test their product for E. coli contamination--until after it's run through a grinder with a whole bunch of other meat from other sources...It's like demanding of a date that she have unprotected sex with four or five other guys immediately before sleeping with you--just so she can't point the finger directly at you should she later test positive for clap.

~ Anthony Bourdain

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.

~ Anthony Bourdain

A sampler of England's hottest 'chefs' would include a mostly hairless young blond lad named Jamie Oliver, who is referred to as the Naked Chef. As best as I can comprehend, he's a really rich guy who pretends he scoots around on a Vespa, hangs out in some East End cold-water flat, and cooks green curry for his 'mates'. He's a TV chef, so few actually eat his food. I've never seen him naked. I believe the 'Naked' refers to his 'simple, straightforward, unadorned' food; though I gather that a great number of matronly housewives would like to believe otherwise. Every time I watch his show, I want to go back in time and bully him at school.

~ Anthony Bourdain

I'm asked a lot what the best thing about cooking for a living is. And it's this: to be a part of a subculture. To be part of a historical continuum, a secret society with its own language and customs. To enjoy the instant gratification of making something good with one's hands--using all one's senses. It can be, at times, the purest and most unselfish way of giving pleasure (thought oral sex has to be a close second).

~ Anthony Bourdain

So I didn't have time to craft artful lies and evasions even if I'd wanted to.

~ Anthony Bourdain

Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime. Old garlic, burnt garlic, garlic cut too long ago and garlic that has been tragically smashed through one of those abominations, the garlic press, are all disgusting. Please treat your garlic with respect. Sliver it for pasta, like you saw in Goodfellas; don't burn it. Smash it, with the flat of your knife blade if you like, but don't put it through a press. I don't know what that junk is that squeezes out the end of those things, but it ain't garlic. And try roasting garlic. It gets mellower and sweeter if you roast it whole, still on the clove, to be squeezed out later when it's soft and brown. Nothing will permeate your food more irrevocably and irreparably than burnt or rancid garlic. Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screw-top jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.

~ Anthony Bourdain

Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime...Please, treat your garlic with respect...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

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

Don't lie about it. You made a mistake. Admit it and move on. Just don't do it again. Ever

~ Anthony Bourdain

I, a product of the New Frontier and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed me a living--all I had to do was wait around in order to live better than my parents.

~ Anthony Bourdain

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

~ Anthony Bourdain

And now to sleep, to dream...perchance to fart.

~ Anthony Bourdain

He doesn't yearn for a better, different life than the one he has - because he knows he's got a home in this one.

~ Anthony Bourdain

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

There’s something wonderful about drinking in the afternoon. A not-too-cold pint, absolutely alone at the bar – even in this fake-ass Irish pub.

~ Anthony Bourdain

[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.

~ Anthony Bourdain

Since the very beginning, Emeril's had a sense of humor about me calling him names and poking fun at him.

~ Anthony Bourdain

Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

~ Anthony Bourdain

The fact that over 50 per cent of the residents of Toronto are not from Canada, that is always a good thing, creatively, and for food especially. That is easily a city's biggest strength, and it is Toronto's unique strength.

~ Anthony Bourdain