Anthony Bourdain

In April 1999 The New Yorker ran an essay titled Don't Eat Before Reading This, warning readers off the fish special on a Monday and off anything sitting in a breadbasket. Its author was Anthony Bourdain, then running the kitchen at the Manhattan brasserie Les Halles and unknown outside it. He expanded the piece into Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (2000), an account of professional kitchens as he had actually worked in them, his own years of addiction included. He had trained at the Culinary Institute of America, graduating in 1978, and spent two decades on the line, publishing two crime novels along the way that almost nobody read. Medium Raw (2010) picked the subject up ten years on, from the other side of celebrity, and revised a fair number of the opinions the first book had made him famous for. Television took what was left of his working life, through A Cook's Tour, No Reservations and Parts Unknown, which brought several Emmy Awards and a Peabody. Born in New York in 1956, he died in France on 8 June 2018, aged 61.