gingerhaole:

My dad, all my grown life, will reads stacks of books and then pass them on to me. When I was about 17, one of those books was Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. At that point, even though my mother was a phenomenal cook, I didn’t get food and cooking. I didn’t appreciate or have an interest in it.

That changed. Bourdain changed me. Kitchen Confidential was an adventure, a look into a foreign wonder. He always talked about what a dick he was when he wrote his first testosterone-fueled work of nonfiction, but he wasn’t. From the beginning to the end, you could see his shift, because by then he had seen where he could really go. The chapter about Japan made my head spin, made me forget where I was as I read. He was falling in love with the world, and taking me along.

Dad bought me my first good knife, a Wusthof, which I named Tony. I devoured more books, all food memoirs. I tried anything. Soon I moved to Hawaii to get married, and the rapid expansion of my world was terrifying, but he had proved that there would be wonderful things. I flew with Kitchen Confidential in my lap. There’s a piece of the back page torn out where I wrote my email so the girl who flew next to me could keep in touch. It’s battered and dog-eared and deeply loved, as I’ve loved everything he’s written, everything he’s shared with us.

Bourdain is like a comfortable part of my home. Every time I cook, I think about him, about how to hold a knife, about the goodness in fat and bone and spice, but most of all, the goodness of sharing food with people you love. I recall him saying that his perfect meal was simple grilled chicken, eaten with his bare feet in the sand, next to someone he liked.

He was looking for food, for adventure, for something very special. He was looking for happiness.