Felt he needed a thread separate from the suicide one. In his book Kitchen Confidential, he gave a voice to not just a generation, but to a whole trade. Chefs and cooks everywhere finally had someone who understood them, and put their feelings, for better or worse, into the limelight. It can't be spoken enough what he did for my trade and for my people.
Rest in peace Chef...
“So who the hell, exactly, are these guys, the boys and girls in the trenches? You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base. The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts 'fringe elements', people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong. Maybe they didn't make it through high school, maybe they're running away from something-be it an ex-wife, a rotten family history, trouble with the law, a squalid Third World backwater with no opportunity for advancement. Or maybe, like me, they just like it here. ”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly