What Kind of Man Was Anthony Bourdain?

“Travel isn’t always pretty,” Anthony Bourdain once said, wrapping up an episode of one of his shows in his distinct staccato voice-over. “It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts; it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you.” Over his 15 or so years on television, Bourdain took Americans to places they were unlikely to go and introduced them to people they were unlikely to meet. At his best, he stripped away the filters that a superpower imposes on the world—good and evil, victor and victim—and found an essential humanity that we all share. In a time when social media elevates bombastic voices certain of their righteousness, Bourdain offered ambiguity that was somehow reassuring: It’s possible, his shows suggested, to look honestly at the world’s diversity, complexity, and occasional depravity, and be better for it.

Americans tend to reserve a place in the culture for a particular kind of man (and it’s almost always a man) who makes his own way: the self-destructive striver who succeeds outside the lines of any recognized rule book or established convention. All the better to, a gonzo-journalism trip through 20 or so years working in kitchens. He excelled as a celebrity, ready with a provocative quip and projecting a bemused demeanor that winked at the audience when he was the guest of some gossip journalist or overcaffeinated talk-show host: . And yet he went on to produce earnest and searching television shows, taking audiences everywhere from West Virginia to the Democratic Republic of Congo, finding a unique voice and a form of expression that managed to break through the incessant noise of our culture.