Anthony Bourdain was born in New York City in 1956. He studied at Vassar College and graduated from the Culinary Institute of America before running kitchens at New York City's Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue and Sullivan's.
His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Times of London, Gourmet, Black Book and The Independent, and he is a contributing authority for Food Arts magazine.
Bourdain had written two crime novels, Bone in the Throat (1995) and Gone Bamboo (1997), when his exposé of New York restaurants "Don't Eat Before Reading This" was published in The New Yorker in 1999. The article attracted huge attention in America and the U.K. and formed the basis of his memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. In 2002, the Food Network broadcast a 22-part series in which Bourdain traveled the world in search of 'extreme cuisine.' The resulting book, A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal, became a bestseller in the U.S. and the U.K. and won the 2002 Guild of Food Writers Award for Food Book of the Year.
In May 2006, he published The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Useable Trim, Scraps, and Bones. In it, he serves up stories from his worldwide misadventures, including the best of his previously uncollected nonfiction and new, never-before-published material.
Bourdain's No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach (2007) is an illustrated chronicle of his travels through 28 countries that highlights his encounters with their cuisines and curiosities. His latest book, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine (2010), an insider's perspective on the changes in the restaurant business -- from the bad old days to the present -- is a New York Times bestseller.
As host of the Travel Channel's Emmy-winning travel and food series Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, currently filming its eighth season, Bourdain travels the world seeking the authentic experiences and food that flavor the world's cultures. He also is the host of the Travel Channel series The Layover, a high-octane travel series that follows him to cities around the world as he gives viewers the inside skinny on where to eat, where to drink, and things to experience when on a 24-hour layover.
He is also the "chef at large" at Brasserie Les Halles. In 2004, he published Les Halles Cookbook, a guide to the strategies and techniques of classic bistro cooking, all delivered in the ribald style of Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour. Bourdain continues to entertain and educate with the lessons learned from the kitchen trenches through various articles on team building and crisis management. In his Harvard Business Review piece "Management by Fire: A Conversation with Chef Anthony Bourdain," he imparts his drill sergeant approach to running a kitchen stating that "the fantastic mix of order and chaos demands a rigid hierarchy and a sacrosanct code of conduct, where punctuality, loyalty, team work and discipline are key to producing consistently good food." His other books include the urban historical Typhoid Mary (2001) and the 2003 crime novel The Bobby Gold Stories.
He lives in New York City with his wife Ottavia and their daughter Ariane.
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