Anthony Bourdain’s popularity and influence have grown exponentially since his phrases and TV show clips have been turned into sound bytes for short form videos.
He is attractive to people because of his honesty, philosophy on life, political commentary, and his elite taste in foreign cuisine. But watching the recent biopic about his life (Tony, 2026), I was reminded of why he means so much to me.
It is because Anthony shows, better than any other example I’ve seen, how a writer’s life is more about the experiences you have and less about your time spent behind a keyboard – that to be a writer is truly more about the living than the writing.
The film covers his young adulthood in the culinary world. It begins by showing Anthony’s home life as a spoiled kid who dreams of becoming a successful writer, but has too much angst and teenage rebellion in him to actually write anything at all.
He proclaims he is a writer and is confident that he managed to bullshit his way into a writing fellowship. But he is too proud to admit it when he is turned down. He follows a girl he is pursuing, Nancy, to Provincetown. There, after seeing her with another man, he gets drunk, robbed, and is left with basically no options.
This lands Anthony in his first kitchen out of pure desperation, where he forms a friendship with a skilled Portuguese chef, Jose Vatel, and is forced to actually work hard for probably the first time in his life.
Then comes one particular scene in the movie, after Anthony encounters Nancy again, that inspired me to write this article as perhaps the most important part of the whole movie for writers to see.
One evening, he is hanging out with Nancy and bragging about his life as a writer on fellowship. He regales her with his “writer’s life.” As he tells it, he wakes up, types at the typewriter until lunch, takes a walk alone on the beach, then returns to type in solitude without coming in contact with a soul before he goes to sleep without even having seen the sunset.
During this explanation of how drab and secluded the life of an esteemed writer like him is, a montage plays on screen of what Anthony actually spends his days doing during this time.
It shows him waking up at the crack of dawn with Chef Jose, bumbling around in the kitchen mastering new skills and laughing with his crew of cooks. It shows him walking along the beach and shopping for fresh ingredients while having lively conversations with the Chef Jose. It shows him sitting around the table after a long dinner rush, eating stew and shooting the shit with the work family he found in the kitchen. And as the montage wraps up, it shows Anthony watching the sunset.
And to me, who knew Anthony Bourdain first as a writer/journalist and then as a chef, this scene was striking because while there wasn’t any writing happening at that time per se, the most successful book he ever published came out of it. Rather than live this “ideal” writer’s life behind the typewriter, Anthony lived a raw and real life that gave him the experiences that would eventually fuel his writing success. That is the key to a writer’s life. Living to have something to write about.
Without the really rather unfortunate series of events that landed Anthony in the dish pit of that restaurant, he would never have formed the relationships he formed, experienced the deep range of emotions that we saw by the end of the movie, or engaged with enough real people in a serious manner to have anything to say at all.
Without this part of his life, Anthony would likely have continued to write or pretended to write the next great American novel his whole life but never had anything real to draw on and just continued being a spoiled kid and a mediocre writer.
When I first read Kitchen Confidential, I felt a lot like young Bourdain. I was spoiled and arrogant and thought I was smarter than everybody. I even, in that time, wanted to become a chef like him and make myself into some kind of badass behind the grill. I, of course, got my first job as a line cook and realized I wasn’t cut out for it (which in the back of my mind, I knew from the beginning).
But what I did take with me then was a determination to face life head on, relentlessly seek new experiences, and soak in as much of it as I could.
Periodically, I pick that book up again as a reminder that life is not lived behind a screen or a keyboard or in your thoughts alone at night. It is lived with the people you love, with people who have lived long lives and have wisdom to share, at work forging new skills, outside trying new things, or traveling to far away places.
And while the quote that is going around on the internet of Anthony Bourdain’s is:
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.
I think the quote from him that writers really need to hear is:
I happen to believe that everybody in this world, at one point in their life, needs an ass kicking. It is an enlightening experience.
For some further reading/watching, I highly recommend checking out the Tony movie as well as Kitchen Confidential, both of which I drew on heavily for this article:
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