Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/BLsnANbA-LL/
It was 1989. I was 19 and I was a wannabe painter and a dishwasher, the lowest rung on the restaurant ladder. One muggy June afternoon, while on a smoke-break I watched as the guy who trained me, another would-be painter/dishwasher, pulled away from the parking lot of Crook’s Corner on a motorcycle, and drove to New York. I was away from home and I was a kid and for a moment I felt abandoned. But that first summer in the kitchen, I grew to understand more deeply what home really meant. The staff meal. The laughter. The hard labor. The adrenaline that builds lifelong bonds.
That first summer on my own, as I began to feel more at home, Central Americans fleeing from civil wars began filling the kitchen ranks. The Jorges from Nicaragua. Rafaels from El Salvador and Honduras. As I worked my way up the line, I learned how to cook from so many others, from academics and from criminals, from drop-outs and from musicians, (and of course from Bill Neal himself) each of whom had learned to translate their version of home into something you could eat.
More importantly, however, I learned what it meant to have privilege, what it really meant to live with nothing, and truly live far from home, from the Jorges and the Rafaels, who shared their meals with us, their memories of home they could put together on a plate. Those simple recipes (baleadas, pupusas, huevos rancheros, arroz con pollo, and so many others) were all they had brought with them.
Anthony Bourdain was 100% place. Anthony Bourdain was all places. He was an American original but also the son of immigrants, and he knew intimately what it meant to work yourself to death thousands of miles from home: “I rolled out of a prestigious culinary institute and went to work in real restaurants,” he said. “I walked into restaurants and always, the person who had been there the longest, who took the time to show me how it was done, was always Mexican or Central American.”
Bourdain took a platform that could have become predictably stale and flipped it on its head. He became an advocate for those who have little or nothing, for the war-torn and the dying, for whole societies “on the bubble,” for ways of living whose days are numbered. He was in Beirut when the bombs fell. He was in Puerto Rico before and after the rain and the winds came. He found the common thread that runs through all of humanity—the will to live—and he did so by taking us places many of us will never go. Then he made us feel like we have lived there our whole lives. Quebec, Colombia, Azerbaijan, Congo, Libya, Punjab, Mexico City, Beirut just to name a handful. His was a restless soul and he carried us with him everywhere, creating so much energy and passion along the way.
After graduate school I tried to work in a kitchen again. I was married and jobless and I needed the cash. But the kitchen—the place that I remembered so fondly, the place I  hoped would take me back—was long gone. I was clumsy and in the way. I could still wield a knife, but I was slow and awkward on the line. I was older and I was fatter; I had lost my edge.
Twenty years later on a cross-country flight to a corporate engagement, I bought a copy of Kitchen Confidential and I finished it before the plane had landed. I was homesick for a part of me I thought had disappeared, but here were words that brought me home. Regardless of where I was or what I did for a living, I was still (and would always be) kitchen for life.
In a seemingly failing America where immigrant children are ripped from their parents’ arms at the border, where up is down and down is up, we retreat to the places we feel most at home, to the terra firma that we know hope is still there. The corner bar where the beers are a little colder and the pours are a little taller. The sidewalk café where the owner routinely sends over something not on the menu. The taco truck you can walk home from.
We will probably never fully understand why Anthony lost his will to live, but I can speculate. Change is hard for many people, but if you have ever struggled with depression and anxiety, change can feel like the sky is falling.
If you are “on the bubble,” the upending of public discourse, the ever-reversing polarity of truth and falsehood, the methodical dismantling of one’s homeland can feel very much like the end of everything.
Musician, actor, director, and painter, John Lurie, recently sold one of his paintings to Anthony Bourdain, a lush green and  blue meditation on terror and calmness spiked with golden yellow hues, titled “The sky is falling, and I am learning to live with it.”
Waking up on Friday morning and learning that Anthony had taken his own life, left so many of us absolutely gutted, in large part because he changed the meaning of home.
Home is not one single place on a map. Home is the only thing no one can take from you: It’s everything you carry with you in your heart and in your soul.
The sky is falling and to one degree or another we are trying to learn to live with it. We are gritting our teeth and pushing through.
Without Anthony Bourdain, though, it’s just going to be that much harder from here on out.
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