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When I'm back in New York - and this is a terrible thing to complain about - I eat a lot more really, really good food than perhaps I'd like to. So many of my friends are really good chefs. It's kind of like being in the Mafia.

Anthony Bourdain

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Anthony Bourdain
Age: 61 †
Born: 1956
Born: June 25
Died: 2018
Died: June 8
Chef
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Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Television Presenter
Television Producer
Traveler
Writer
New York City
New York
Anthony Michael Bourdain
Tony Bourdain
Tony Michael Bourdain
Anthony M. Bourdain
Tony M. Bourdain
Anthony Michael Tony Bourdain
Back
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York
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Mafia

More quotes by Anthony Bourdain

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Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors - that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me.
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'Kitchen Confidential' wasn't a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.
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Most of the time, I'm fighting guys who are 22 years old, former college wrestlers, athletes, kids who are in much better shape than me. Often people who are much bigger and wider than me. It can be dispiriting at first.
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If people are eating mostly pickles after many generations, where did that come from? It's reflective of history, often a painful history. It's central to a culture, to a history, to a personal story. It's communication at its most fundamental.
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Trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times. If you get lost and you just end up eating just anywhere, you know, you see a bunch of Venetians sitting around smoking cigarettes, eating something unrecognizable in a dark alley somewhere, chances are it's interesting.
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Nobody in Singapore drinks Singapore Slings. It's one of the first things you find out there. What you do in Singapore is eat. It's a really food-crazy culture, where all of this great food is available in a kind of hawker-stand environment.
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Free time is my enemy. I recognized early on I'm not a guy who should have a lot of time to contemplate the mysteries of the universe. I need to stay busy... That's just the nature of my demons.
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That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund.
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The notion that before you even set out to go to Thailand, you say, 'I'm not interested,' or you're unwilling to try things that people take so personally and are so proud of and so generous with, I don't understand that, and I think it's rude. You're at Grandma's house, you eat what Grandma serves you.
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Everything important I learned, I learned as a dishwasher.
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I love bacon, but I don't think we need it on everything.
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As Americans, we tend to look at Mexican food as nachos, which is not Mexican food really - they don't eat them.
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Those places I don't understand, just doing bad food. It takes some doing. Making good pasta is so much easier than making bad stuff. It actually takes quite an effort to make poor linguine pomodora.
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Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.
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I'm not besotted with the notion of being on CNN to the point that I'm going to suddenly morph into Anderson Cooper or Christiane Amanpour. I'm not a foreign correspondent.
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There are people with otherwise chaotic and disorganized lives, a certain type of person that's always found a home in the restaurant business in much the same way that a lot of people find a home in the military.
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I'm a guy who should not have a lot of free time. But when it comes to vacation, I like to pull the plug completely. It's all about my daughter - I'm no longer the star of my own movie.
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I'm really good at sleeping on planes. I mean, I smell jet fuel and I'm out I'm asleep for takeoff.
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At the end of a dinner at my house, my kitchen sink is filled with dishes and there's nothing pretty about the garbage.
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You dropped a 500-seat deuce on Times Square.
Anthony Bourdain