Anthony Bourdain Remembered

I know most people remember Anthony Bourdain as a bad ass, world-traveling accidental journalist, but I had a different relationship to his celebrity.

I knew he was a fellow Vassar alum, though he left the school on not-quite-friendly terms. I read this 2017 New Yorker profile of him that landed Kitchen Confidential on my TBR list, but I never got around to it, since I feel like I learned most of what I needed to know about how amazing he was from reading that profile.

I mean, this description alone:

“Bourdain, who is sixty, is imposingly tall — six feet four — and impossibly lean, with a monumental head, a caramel tan, and carefully groomed gray hair. He once described his body as “gristly, tendony,” as if it were an inferior cut of beef, and a recent devotion to Brazilian jujitsu has left his limbs and his torso laced with ropy muscles. With his Sex Pistols T-shirt and his sensualist credo, there is something of the aging rocker about him. But if you spend any time with Bourdain you realize that he is controlled to the point of neurosis: clean, organized, disciplined, courteous, systematic. He is Apollo in drag as Dionysus.”

I’m a sapiosexual, so I have a thing for brilliant people. But I’m also a little above average height, so my weakness is tall brilliant people. I had a GIGANTIC crush on the Anthony Bourdain I…