He had managed to parlay the success of Kitchen Confidential into total control of his own TV output. More importantly, it put Bourdain in charge. To an audience still expecting “stand-and-stir” cookery programmes, it looked like a combination of rockumentary and combat footage. Bourdain could immerse himself in a culture through its food, and the camera was there, hand-held, grainy and immediate to record the experience. The Food Network TV channel was becoming more popular by the day and looking for new talent, broadcast-quality video was now achievable with a new generation of lightweight cameras, and Bourdain was working on a second book that combined food and travel.Ī Cook’s Tour, broadcast in 2002, the year the book was published, was shot quickly with a tiny crew, entirely on location. He began working with the television producer Lydia Tenaglia, in a collaboration that couldn’t have been better timed.

Perhaps the key turning point in Bourdain’s career followed the success of the book. Bourdain stalked the screen, like a gaunt Joe Strummer, swearing like a longshoreman, occasionally actually drunk For all the rock’n’roll, the easy, sleazy charm, the guy wrote like a poet and, as he got older, he just got better. Not pretentious, not the purple passages of food writers before him, the high prose of the refined connoisseur but the terse, full-auto linguistic firepower of a New Yorker – imagery like crime-scene photos, the flayed raw humour of a morgue attendant, the sort of one-liners a hitman drops as he pulls the trigger, and similes that would make Raymond Chandler eat his own pencils. And when he was on form, Christ, could Bourdain weave words. Alone in the kitchen, a hangover and a double espresso from the still-warm La Marzocco machine, knocking up a scallion and chorizo omelette as you set up your station. For me it was a single passage that resonated most: the description of being the first guy on the line in the morning. It is said to have been rushed into print on the strength of the New Yorker piece, and some of it, in hindsight, feels like filler, but parts are inspired. It is more a collection of essays than a solid narrative.

Kitchen confidential