Bourdain Day and Other Big Ideas: Spilled Milk #114

Good fruit, bad bagels and big adventures.

1. A big day

June 25 is Tony Bourdain’s birthday. Sunday was Bourdain Day, an international day of celebration for all who knew and loved him. The day was the brainchild of José Andrés and Éric Ripert, who wanted to celebrate all the great memories of an amazing, generational human being and to make sure the anniversary of his death five years ago wasn’t fetishized or otherwise exploited. I am so grateful to have known and loved Tony, so I celebrated by eating a lot of Sichuan food and looking at some old pictures and cranking some Iggy in his memory.

I have so many wonderful memories of my friend and I think I have told all the ones that are printable, so I thought of a quote that might serve to remind us all what made Tony, Tony.

I think it’s pretty obvious we felt the same way about life. I miss the BIG adventures and need to remind myself that taking my kid to buy shoes is just as BIG an adventure as negotiating safe passage in rural Colombia with the FARC over a decade ago. This is from Kitchen Confidential, Tony’s most popular and bestselling book.

“I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks—the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world—and I wanted the world to be just like the movies.”

Images of Tony. In the last photo, I'm wearing a pair of boots he gave me.

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