The Problem with Canonizing Bourdain

Now comes a biography of Anthony Bourdain, the tall, formerly earring-wearing, forever tattoo-bearing, world-weary, cigarette-and-drug-infested chef, sometime novelist, prolific nonfiction chronicler of the kitchen, and persistently popular TV personality, whose cuisine-centric travelogues, including Travel Channel’s No Reservations and CNN’s Parts Unknown, developed a cult following as devoted as the queen’s queue. In the years since his suicide in 2018, his birthday, June 25, has been christened “Bourdain Day.”