105 Memorable Anthony Bourdain Quotes on Love and Diversity

He had a big appetite, an even bigger heart and a thirst for adventure. Anthony Bourdain spent his life exploring and sharing his revelries with the world. He made it his mission to acquire every experience possible in love and diversity and ultimately educate us all on life, food, happiness and adventure.

Anthony Bourdain was born in 1956 in New York City and was an American celebrity chef, book author and travel documentarian. His love of food was first realised in his youth while working on a family vacation in France. Bourdain tried his first oyster and proceeded to work in seafood restaurants in Massachusetts while attending college. He pursued cooking as a career and graduated from The Culinary Institute of America in 1978.

Bourdain began running restaurant kitchens in New York City including the Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue, Sullivan’s and the more famous Brasserie Les Halls in Manhattan. He became a veteran of a number of professional kitchens through his career before releasing the bestselling book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly in 2000.

Moving into television, Bourdain had a food and world-travel show called A Cook’s Tour through 2002 and 2003. From 2005 to 2013 he hosted the Travel Channel’s culinary and cultural adventure programs Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and The Layover.

His celebrity status continued to rise in 2013 when he became a judge on The Taste and continued with his travelogue programming through CNN. In 2018, Bourdain died by suicide in France.

Bourdain’s death triggered an outpouring of love and tribute as he is forever remembered not only for his passions within food and travel, but his wit and storytelling abilities. Thanks to the initiative he took to make the world a better place, the chef leaves behind nothing but wisdom, and to triumph them all? His quotes on love and diversity which remain ingrained within his fans and the generations to come.

1. Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.

Anthony Bourdain

2. Luck is not a business model.

Anthony Bourdain

3. Like I said before, your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.

Anthony Bourdain

4. I would like to see people more aware of where their food comes from. I would like to see small farmers empowered.

Anthony Bourdain

5. You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.

Anthony Bourdain

6. Looking at these photographs, I know that I will never understand the world I live in or fully know the places I’ve been. I’ve learned for sure only what I don’t know – and how much I have to learn.

Anthony Bourdain

7. You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.

Anthony Bourdain

8. Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.

Anthony Bourdain

9. For a dinner date, I eat light all day to save room, then I go all in: I choose this meal and this order, and I choose you, the person across from me, to share it with. There’s a beautiful intimacy in a meal like that.

Anthony Bourdain

10. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.

Anthony Bourdain

11. Oh yes, there’s lots of great food in America. But the fast food is about as destructive and evil as it gets. It celebrates a mentality of sloth, convenience, and a cheerful embrace of food we know is hurting us.

Anthony Bourdain

12. Don’t lie about it. You made a mistake. Admit it and move on. Just don’t do it again. Ever.

Anthony Bourdain

13. Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.

Anthony Bourdain

14. I love the sheer weirdness of the kitchen life: the dreamers, the crackpots, the refugees, and the sociopaths with whom I continue to work. The ever-present smells of roasting bones, searing fish, and simmering liquids; the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray, the flames, the smoke, and the steam.

Anthony Bourdain

15. Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.

Anthony Bourdain

16. I learned a long time ago that trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times.

Anthony Bourdain

17. I travel around the world, eat a lot of s—, and basically do whatever the f— I want.

Anthony Bourdain

18. I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas – fat, drugged, and completely out of it.

Anthony Bourdain

19. When dealing with complex transportation issues, the best thing to do is pull up with a cold beer and let somebody else figure it out.

Anthony Bourdain

20. Whatever had the most shock value became my meal of choice.

Anthony Bourdain

21. I think people lose sight of the fact that chefs should be ultimately in the pleasure business, not in the look-at-me business.

Anthony Bourdain

22. Without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, and moribund.

Anthony Bourdain

23. People’s choice to become vegan, from people I’ve spoken to, seems motivated by fear.

Anthony Bourdain

24. Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone… Bad food is fake food… food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people’s ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives.

Anthony Bourdain

25. I am in no way supportive of hunting for trophies or sport – would never do it and don’t like it that others do. But if you kill it, then eat it, it’s fine.

Anthony Bourdain

26. Good food and good eating are about risk. Every once in a while an oyster, for instance, will make you sick to your stomach. Does this mean you should stop eating oysters? No way.

Anthony Bourdain

27. Food, it appeared, could be important. It could be an event. It had secrets.

Anthony Bourdain

28. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.

Anthony Bourdain

29. I am not afraid to look like an idiot.

Anthony Bourdain

30. I’d put aside my psychotic rage, after many years being awful to line cooks, abusive to waiters, bullying to dishwashers. It’s terrible — and counter-productive — to make people feel like idiots for working hard for you.

Anthony Bourdain

31. My love for chaos, conspiracy and the dark side of human nature colors the behavior of my charges, most of whom are already living near the fringes of acceptable conduct.

Anthony Bourdain

32. I, personally, think there is a real danger of taking food too seriously. Food should be part of the bigger picture.

Anthony Bourdain

33. I think fine dining is dying out everywhere… but I think there will be—and there has to always be—room for at least a small number of really fine, old-school fine-dining restaurants.

Anthony Bourdain

34. Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don’t have.

Anthony Bourdain

35. Food had power. It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me . . . and others.

Anthony Bourdain

36. Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

Anthony Bourdain

37. Once you embark on a career dictated by the need for immediate cash flow, it never gets any easier to get off the treadmill.

Anthony Bourdain

38. Basic cooking skills are a virtue… the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill. [It’s] as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own a–, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.

Anthony Bourdain

39. Under ‘Reasons for Leaving Last Job’, never give the real reason, unless it’s money or ambition.

Anthony Bourdain

40. Your body is not a temple. It’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.

Anthony Bourdain

41. I had always believed that if somebody who worked with me went home feeling like a jerk for giving their time and their genuine effort, then it was me who had failed them—and in a very personal, fundamental way.

Anthony Bourdain

42. Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.

Anthony Bourdain

43. Everybody should come here. Everyone should see how complicated, how deeply troubled, and yet at the same time, beautiful and awesome the world can be. Everyone should experience, even as the clouds gather, what’s at stake, what could be lost, what’s still here.

Anthony Bourdain

44. Barbecue may not be the road to world peace, but it’s a start.

Anthony Bourdain

45. If you are easily offended by direct aspersions on your lineage, the circumstances of your birth, your sexuality, your appearance, the mention of your parents possibly commingling with livestock, then the world of professional cooking is not for you.

Anthony Bourdain

46. Without new ideas success can become stale.

Anthony Bourdain

47. Vegetarians and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans … are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.

Anthony Bourdain

48. If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. Walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food. It’s a plus for everybody.

Anthony Bourdain

49. For me, the cooking life has been a long love affair, with moments both sublime and ridiculous. But like a love affair, looking back you remember the happy times best.

Anthony Bourdain

50. It’s very rarely a good career move to have a conscience.

Anthony Bourdain

51. Food may not be the answer to world peace, but it’s a start.

Anthony Bourdain

52. Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable and satisfying. And I’ll generally take a standup mercenary who takes pride in his professionalism over an artist any day.

Anthony Bourdain

53. In America, the professional kitchen is the last refuge of the misfit. It’s a place for people with bad pasts to find a new family.

Anthony Bourdain

54. I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.

Anthony Bourdain

55. I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.

Anthony Bourdain

56. Writing anything is a treason of sorts.

Anthony Bourdain

57. I think food, culture, people and landscape are all absolutely inseparable.

Anthony Bourdain

58. Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.

Anthony Bourdain

59. It’s been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Anthony Bourdain

60. I always entertain the notion that I’m wrong, or that I’ll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.

Anthony Bourdain

61. They’re professionals at this in Russia, so no matter how many Jell-O shots or Jager shooters you might have downed at college mixers, no matter how good a drinker you might think you are, don’t forget that the Russians – any Russian – can drink you under the table.

Anthony Bourdain

62. I’ve long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we’re talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime ‘associates,’ food, for me, has always been an adventure.

Anthony Bourdain

63. Frightened people become angry people—as history teaches us again and again.

Anthony Bourdain

64. Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald’s? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head?

Anthony Bourdain

65. It was once said that this is the land of the free. There is, I believe, a statue out there in the harbor, with something written on it about “Give me your hungry…your oppressed…give me pretty much everybody”-that’s the way I remember it, anyway. The idea of America is a mutt-culture, isn’t it? Who the hell is America if not everybody else? We are-and shouldbe-a big, messy, anarchistic polyglot of dialects and accents and different skin tones…. We need more Latinos to come here. And they should, whenever possible, impregnate our women.

Anthony Bourdain

66. What nicer thing can you do for somebody than make them breakfast?

Anthony Bourdain

67. PETA doesn’t want stressed animals to be cruelly crowded into sheds, ankle-deep in their own crap, because they don’t want any animals to die-ever-and basically think chickens should, in time, gain the right to vote. I don’t want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them probably less delicious.

Anthony Bourdain

68. The journey is part of the experience – an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.

Anthony Bourdain

69. We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts.

Anthony Bourdain

70. Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

Anthony Bourdain

71. Our movements through time and space seem somehow trivial compared to a heap of boiled meat in broth, the smell of saffron, garlic, fishbones and Pernod.

Anthony Bourdain

72. But I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.

Anthony Bourdain

73. To be treated well in places where you don’t expect to be treated well, to find things in common with people you thought previously you had very, very little in common with, that can’t be a bad thing.

Anthony Bourdain

74. Big stuff and little: learning how to order breakfast in a country where I don’t speak the language and haven’t been before—that’s really satisfying to me. I like that.

Anthony Bourdain

75. The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about – or as a ritual like filling up a car – but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.

Anthony Bourdain

76. Few things are more beautiful to me than a bunch of thuggish, heavily tattooed line cooks moving around each other like ballerinas on a busy Saturday night. Seeing two guys who’d just as soon cut each other’s throats in their off hours moving in unison with grace and ease can be as uplifting as any chemical stimulant or organized religion.

Anthony Bourdain

77. Anyone who’s a chef, who loves food, ultimately knows that all that matters is: ‘Is it good? Does it give pleasure?

Anthony Bourdain

78. I’m not going anywhere. I hope. It’s been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. 

But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Anthony Bourdain

79. Those places I don’t understand, just doing bad food. It takes some doing. Making good pasta is so much easier than making bad stuff. It actually takes quite an effort to make poor linguine pomodora.

Anthony Bourdain

80. I don’t have much patience for people who are self-conscious about the act of eating, and it irritates me when someone denies themselves the pleasure of a bloody hunk of steak or a pungent French cheese because of some outdated nonsense about what’s appropriate or attractive.

Anthony Bourdain

81. In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.

Anthony Bourdain

82. An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins.

Anthony Bourdain

83. I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able—if called upon to do so—to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world. Perhaps omelet skills should be learned at the same time you learn to fuck. Perhaps there should be an unspoken agreement that in the event of loss of virginity, the more experienced of the partners should, afterward, make the other an omelet—passing along the skill at an important and presumably memorable moment.

Anthony Bourdain

84. No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American.

Anthony Bourdain

85. In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

Anthony Bourdain

86. It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after,you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there- with your eyes open- and lived to see it.

Anthony Bourdain

87. I don’t have to agree with you to like you or respect you.

Anthony Bourdain

88. I wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner.

Anthony Bourdain

89. People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice… they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.

Anthony Bourdain

90. There’s something wonderful about drinking in the afternoon. A not-too-cold pint, absolutely alone at the bar – even in this fake-ass Irish pub.

Anthony Bourdain

91. For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we’ve all had to become disappears, when we’re confronted with something as simple as a plate of food.

Anthony Bourdain

92. It’s as if Japanese men, all to aware that deep inside they’d like to stomp Tokyo flat, breathe fire, and do truly terrible and disgusting things to women, have built themselves the most beautiful of prisons for their rampaging ids. Instead of indulging their fantasies, they focus on food, or landscaping, or the perfect cup of tea — or a single slab of o-toro tuna — letting themselves go only at baseball games and office parties.

Anthony Bourdain

93. Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.

Anthony Bourdain

94. The way you make an omelet reveals your character.

Anthony Bourdain

95. Television production is a tough business. Prior preparation prevents piss poor performance.

Anthony Bourdain

96. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

Anthony Bourdain

97. On the battlefield and off. Making art. Every motherfucking day.

Anthony Bourdain

98. Assume the worst. About everybody. But don’t let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious, and corrupt asshole shouldn’t prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them, or finding them entertaining.

Anthony Bourdain

99. You can call me the bad boy chef all you want. I’m not going to freak out about it. I’m not that bad. I’m certainly not a boy, and it’s been a while since I’ve been a chef.

Anthony Bourdain

100. Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime…Please, treat your garlic with respect…Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.

Anthony Bourdain

101. What’s the opposite of suck? Un-suck?

Anthony Bourdain

102. If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.

Anthony Bourdain

103. I love New York. I’m a guy for whom a New York accent is a comforting thing.

Anthony Bourdain

104. I am not a fan of people who abuse service staff. In fact, I find it intolerable. It’s an unpardonable sin as far as I’m concerned, taking out personal business or some other kind of dissatisfaction on a waiter or busboy.

Anthony Bourdain

105. Sometimes the greatest meals on vacations are the ones you find when Plan A falls through.

Anthony Bourdain