Michiko Zentoh was Anthony Bourdain’s first fixer. A freelance television producer in Japan, she worked with Bourdain on the initial two episodes of his first series, A Cook’s Tour, which were set in Tokyo and the onsen towns of Atami and Yugawara. It was 2000, and Bourdain was no longer working the same kind of schedule at New York’s Les Halles brasserie as he had before writing his best-selling Kitchen Confidential. Yet in those early shows it’s clear he still thinks of himself as a chef first, expertly evaluating a piece of bluefin and remarking on how much he’d like to get an octopus he sees at Tsukiji Fish Market back into the kitchen. What Zentoh remembers most from those days is his enthusiasm. “He told me, ‘I feel like I won the lottery,’” she recalls. “He spent so many years never leaving the kitchen and now he was traveling the world.”
Bourdain’s enthusiasm is evident in those early episodes. The characteristic intonation is there, but his voice seems an octave or two higher, and as he delights in a kaiseki meal or struggles through a bowl of mucilaginous nattō, there’s a sweetness to his demeanor, a naïveté, that belies the confidence of later years. He’s the quintessential innocent abroad—eager for new experiences but left vulnerable by them, too. On-screen, he admits to feeling intimidated, not only by the sumo wrestlers whose practice sessions he attends but even by the bullet train, where the crew shot him eating a bento lunch of eel. “He was very modest, very cautious about protocol,” Zentoh says. At one point she corrected his bowl handling, gently suggesting that he stop using both palms to cup it. “He asked me at every step, ‘Am I doing it right?’ He was the opposite of arrogant.”
He was also the opposite of profligate. Although at age 44 Bourdain was able, he said, to open a savings account for the first time in his life with the proceeds from Kitchen Confidential, budgets during A Cook’s Tour remained tight. Bourdain traveled in the same van as the rest of the small team, and their accommodations, if not dives, weren’t exactly posh. Zentoh recalls staying in a hotel with rooms so tiny Bourdain barely had room for luggage. “That’s why the geisha in the second episode are so old,” she says. “We couldn’t afford younger ones.”
Behind every bite of Moroccan sheep testicle or sip of high-octane Georgian chacha that Anthony Bourdain took on-screen was a fixer like Zentoh. Before the start of any shoot, from Reykjavík to Congo, the chef turned television star’s production company, Zero Point Zero, hired a local—usually a freelance journalist, or producer—to suggest segment ideas, set up shoots, get permissions, act as Bourdain’s interpreter, and occasionally appear on camera. These fixers may not have written the scripts or edited the footage, but they ultimately played a significant role in what viewers saw on-screen. And because, for the few days or weeks that a shoot lasted, most were also thrust into this suddenly intimate relationship with someone they knew only from TV, they possess a view onto the man that few share.
When news spread in early June that Bourdain had committed suicide at age 61, the shock, rippling across social media, felt seismic. It wasn’t just that he was so influential a figure, though countless viewers learned to eat—lustfully and catholically—from him, and there are legions of chefs today who were drawn to the profession, for better and for worse, by the pirate-ship approach to the kitchen he so vividly described. Nor was it simply the fact of his celebrity, though after nearly two decades spent crisscrossing the globe for his television series, he was recognized on the street everywhere from Beijing to Buenos Aires. It wasn’t even the confounding tragedy of his suicide, that he might choose to end a life so seemingly enviable. Rather, the thing that made his death so terribly traumatic to so many was the loss of connection. It was the loss of a real, if fleeting, sense that Bourdain somehow found time and space for an actual human moment with every person who ever cooked him a meal or even interrupted one to ask for a selfie.
For those who fixed for him, it was so often more than just a moment. Fixing is among the lowest jobs on the production hierarchy, and yet Bourdain not only treated his fixers well, but engaged with them, soliciting their insight into whatever place and people he had landed among that week and gradually coming to call several of them friends. Though most of them never met one another, they formed a sort of unspoken international network, these people who helped Bourdain know the world more deeply and who, in turn, were shaped by his way of experiencing it.
When Matt Walsh began working for No Reservations in 2005, Bourdain’s enthusiasm and curiosity were the first qualities the fixer noticed. An American journalist living in Hong Kong, Walsh had seen A Cook’s Tour, recognized the similarities between the emerging star’s New Jersey heritage and his Long Island own, and decided he wanted to have the kind of fun Bourdain seemed to be having. He pitched himself to No Reservations’ producers and was soon leading Bourdain to a roast-duck restaurant in Beijing and a family meal in Chengdu. “It was all new to him, and he was really hungry,” says Walsh. “He wanted to see it all, do it all, taste it all.”
And imbibe it all. Bourdain made no secret of his predilections. “The Tony we used to work with back then was always laughing and drinking. We got loaded all the time,” says Walsh. “By the end of some nights we were all a little slurry.”
His fixers from those early years recall Bourdain as especially happy when he was having the kind of experience that allowed him to connect with a place and its people. After the Khmer Rouge largely destroyed Cambodia’s train system, locals used what they called lorries or norries—basically a platform on wheels, outfitted with a rudimentary engine and a hand brake—to travel the rails in areas where there were no roads. On a shoot there in 2010, the crew took one out for a meal with a family in the rice fields. “It was pouring rain, but it didn’t matter,” Walsh recalls. After “riding back through those electric-green rice paddies, having smoked a lot of weed, with the wind [from] going 30 kilometers an hour—the sensation of all that. I looked at Tony and the expression on his face was exactly what I was feeling: it doesn’t get better than this.”
The lorry trip exemplifies the kind of authentic experience that Bourdain craved and that he attempted to bring to his show. For No Reservations’ second season, Zentoh was charged with coming up with a segment that took the crew to Japan’s Kiso Valley. The only dates available for the shoot fell during Obon, a holiday typically celebrated with family, but the fixer managed to wrangle an invitation with the latest three generations of the family that cares for the country’s sacred hinoki trees. “Tony started drinking shochu and sake with the head of the family,” Zentoh recalls. “After a while, he turned to us and said, ‘Forget about the shoot. I don’t care. I just want to drink with this guy. I want to be 100 percent there.’ That’s why people liked him—he showed up.”
He was also utterly authentic in his own responses. “Tony didn’t do fake,” Zentoh says. “He really would eat what was on the plate, drink what was in the glass.” He would try anything, but if he didn’t like, say, a bite of dried sea-cucumber liver that elicited an “I don’t need to try that again,” he wouldn’t pretend otherwise.
No Reservations gave Bourdain the space to express not only his political and social beliefs, but his artistic passions as well. Lucio Mollica first worked with Bourdain on the Naples episode that aired in 2011. By then, the crew had already produced a Rome episode intended as an homage to Fellini. In Naples, he wanted to shoot in the neighborhood where the film Gomorrah, released a couple of years earlier, had been set. “He wasn’t only a fine connoisseur of Italian cuisine, but of Italian culture, and Italian cinema,” Mollica says. “His knowledge of that was amazing.”
Yet as he made aspects of the show more closely in his own image, others slipped from him. As the crew grew, they increasingly had the budget to stay in nicer hotels. The pressure to produce had increased, too. “As the budget got bigger, the amount of content that was needed grew as well, and we had so little time,” Zentoh says. “It was a brutal schedule for the production team. The whole experience was like a goose being made into foie gras. Tony had no time to digest anything–not the food or the experience.”
At the time Bourdain was well on his way to becoming internationally famous. “I met him about halfway into this journey,” Mollica says. “He wasn’t so famous in Italy then.” Still, the Italian fixer glimpsed a hint of what Bourdain was losing during that first shoot. “It was a Sunday in Naples, and all the places we wanted to bring him were closed. Finally someone asked the driver, ‘Where are you eating?’ And he said, ‘My mom’s house.’ So we all went there, to the driver’s mom’s house, this tiny apartment in the historic part of town. Tony came over when lunch was ready, and stayed for three hours. She made ragù. We had been eating in these fantastic restaurants up and down the beautiful Amalfi Coast. But that was the happiest I saw him.”
In 2012, Bourdain announced he was moving from the Travel Channel to CNN to launch Parts Unknown. By all accounts, he was giddily excited about the opportunities the new show and the network’s resources would afford him; within the first few years, he would shoot episodes in Libya, Tanzania, and Iran. But even to a new fixer such as Alex Roa, a local producer who worked with Bourdain on shoots in Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Cuernavaca in 2014, it was evident that the demands—and the constant attention—were weighing on him. “I think it was not only the demands of the job, but also the intensity of it, the constant traveling and being away–in that moment–from his daughter,” says Roa. “Every episode demanded so much of him, because that was the way he was.”
By then, the eating was the least of it. “He told me that food is just a way to get into people’s bodies and minds,” Roa recalls. “It was a way to talk to someone, to get them to go deeper.” The more superficial food-porn stuff was losing its allure. In Oaxaca, when a director wanted to shoot Tony buying and eating tamales, he was frustrated, Roa says. “He just said, ‘That’s horrible. Do you know how many times I’ve done this before?’” In Mexico City a chef at the Four Seasons hotel where Bourdain was staying so wanted to cook for him that he sent word he was going to close a room of the restaurant for him; Bourdain’s response, according to Roa, was a polite but conversation-ending “No thanks.”
Were the fame, the pressure, and weariness from all that travel—and all that food—getting to him? Bourdain remained the consummate professional. “We had to ask his driver to delay and make detours so that he wouldn’t show up too early,” the fixer says. But he didn’t seem to be having as much fun. “He only went out with us one night during the whole 10 days,” Roa recalls. “Otherwise, he would just show up for a call, do the shoot, and go straight back to the hotel. He’d stay in and order room service.”
Bourdain’s enthusiasm is evident in those early episodes. The characteristic intonation is there, but his voice seems an octave or two higher, and as he delights in a kaiseki meal or struggles through a bowl of mucilaginous nattō, there’s a sweetness to his demeanor, a naïveté, that belies the confidence of later years. He’s the quintessential innocent abroad—eager for new experiences but left vulnerable by them, too. On-screen, he admits to feeling intimidated, not only by the sumo wrestlers whose practice sessions he attends but even by the bullet train, where the crew shot him eating a bento lunch of eel. “He was very modest, very cautious about protocol,” Zentoh says. At one point she corrected his bowl handling, gently suggesting that he stop using both palms to cup it. “He asked me at every step, ‘Am I doing it right?’ He was the opposite of arrogant.”He was also the opposite of profligate. Although at age 44 Bourdain was able, he said, to open a savings account for the first time in his life with the proceeds from Kitchen Confidential, budgets during A Cook’s Tour remained tight. Bourdain traveled in the same van as the rest of the small team, and their accommodations, if not dives, weren’t exactly posh. Zentoh recalls staying in a hotel with rooms so tiny Bourdain barely had room for luggage. “That’s why the geisha in the second episode are so old,” she says. “We couldn’t afford younger ones.”
Behind every bite of Moroccan sheep testicle or sip of high-octane Georgian chacha that Anthony Bourdain took on-screen was a fixer like Zentoh. Before the start of any shoot, from Reykjavík to Congo, the chef turned television star’s production company, Zero Point Zero, hired a local—usually a freelance journalist, or producer—to suggest segment ideas, set up shoots, get permissions, act as Bourdain’s interpreter, and occasionally appear on camera. These fixers may not have written the scripts or edited the footage, but they ultimately played a significant role in what viewers saw on-screen. And because, for the few days or weeks that a shoot lasted, most were also thrust into this suddenly intimate relationship with someone they knew only from TV, they possess a view onto the man that few share.
When news spread in early June that Bourdain had committed suicide at age 61, the shock, rippling across social media, felt seismic. It wasn’t just that he was so influential a figure, though countless viewers learned to eat—lustfully and catholically—from him, and there are legions of chefs today who were drawn to the profession, for better and for worse, by the pirate-ship approach to the kitchen he so vividly described. Nor was it simply the fact of his celebrity, though after nearly two decades spent crisscrossing the globe for his television series, he was recognized on the street everywhere from Beijing to Buenos Aires. It wasn’t even the confounding tragedy of his suicide, that he might choose to end a life so seemingly enviable. Rather, the thing that made his death so terribly traumatic to so many was the loss of connection. It was the loss of a real, if fleeting, sense that Bourdain somehow found time and space for an actual human moment with every person who ever cooked him a meal or even interrupted one to ask for a selfie.
For those who fixed for him, it was so often more than just a moment. Fixing is among the lowest jobs on the production hierarchy, and yet Bourdain not only treated his fixers well, but engaged with them, soliciting their insight into whatever place and people he had landed among that week and gradually coming to call several of them friends. Though most of them never met one another, they formed a sort of unspoken international network, these people who helped Bourdain know the world more deeply and who, in turn, were shaped by his way of experiencing it.
When Matt Walsh began working for No Reservations in 2005, Bourdain’s enthusiasm and curiosity were the first qualities the fixer noticed. An American journalist living in Hong Kong, Walsh had seen A Cook’s Tour, recognized the similarities between the emerging star’s New Jersey heritage and his Long Island own, and decided he wanted to have the kind of fun Bourdain seemed to be having. He pitched himself to No Reservations’ producers and was soon leading Bourdain to a roast-duck restaurant in Beijing and a family meal in Chengdu. “It was all new to him, and he was really hungry,” says Walsh. “He wanted to see it all, do it all, taste it all.”
And imbibe it all. Bourdain made no secret of his predilections. “The Tony we used to work with back then was always laughing and drinking. We got loaded all the time,” says Walsh. “By the end of some nights we were all a little slurry.”
His fixers from those early years recall Bourdain as especially happy when he was having the kind of experience that allowed him to connect with a place and its people. After the Khmer Rouge largely destroyed Cambodia’s train system, locals used what they called lorries or norries—basically a platform on wheels, outfitted with a rudimentary engine and a hand brake—to travel the rails in areas where there were no roads. On a shoot there in 2010, the crew took one out for a meal with a family in the rice fields. “It was pouring rain, but it didn’t matter,” Walsh recalls. After “riding back through those electric-green rice paddies, having smoked a lot of weed, with the wind [from] going 30 kilometers an hour—the sensation of all that. I looked at Tony and the expression on his face was exactly what I was feeling: it doesn’t get better than this.”
The lorry trip exemplifies the kind of authentic experience that Bourdain craved and that he attempted to bring to his show. For No Reservations’ second season, Zentoh was charged with coming up with a segment that took the crew to Japan’s Kiso Valley. The only dates available for the shoot fell during Obon, a holiday typically celebrated with family, but the fixer managed to wrangle an invitation with the latest three generations of the family that cares for the country’s sacred hinoki trees. “Tony started drinking shochu and sake with the head of the family,” Zentoh recalls. “After a while, he turned to us and said, ‘Forget about the shoot. I don’t care. I just want to drink with this guy. I want to be 100 percent there.’ That’s why people liked him—he showed up.”
He was also utterly authentic in his own responses. “Tony didn’t do fake,” Zentoh says. “He really would eat what was on the plate, drink what was in the glass.” He would try anything, but if he didn’t like, say, a bite of dried sea-cucumber liver that elicited an “I don’t need to try that again,” he wouldn’t pretend otherwise.
No Reservations gave Bourdain the space to express not only his political and social beliefs, but his artistic passions as well. Lucio Mollica first worked with Bourdain on the Naples episode that aired in 2011. By then, the crew had already produced a Rome episode intended as an homage to Fellini. In Naples, he wanted to shoot in the neighborhood where the film Gomorrah, released a couple of years earlier, had been set. “He wasn’t only a fine connoisseur of Italian cuisine, but of Italian culture, and Italian cinema,” Mollica says. “His knowledge of that was amazing.”
Yet as he made aspects of the show more closely in his own image, others slipped from him. As the crew grew, they increasingly had the budget to stay in nicer hotels. The pressure to produce had increased, too. “As the budget got bigger, the amount of content that was needed grew as well, and we had so little time,” Zentoh says. “It was a brutal schedule for the production team. The whole experience was like a goose being made into foie gras. Tony had no time to digest anything–not the food or the experience.”
At the time Bourdain was well on his way to becoming internationally famous. “I met him about halfway into this journey,” Mollica says. “He wasn’t so famous in Italy then.” Still, the Italian fixer glimpsed a hint of what Bourdain was losing during that first shoot. “It was a Sunday in Naples, and all the places we wanted to bring him were closed. Finally someone asked the driver, ‘Where are you eating?’ And he said, ‘My mom’s house.’ So we all went there, to the driver’s mom’s house, this tiny apartment in the historic part of town. Tony came over when lunch was ready, and stayed for three hours. She made ragù. We had been eating in these fantastic restaurants up and down the beautiful Amalfi Coast. But that was the happiest I saw him.”
In 2012, Bourdain announced he was moving from the Travel Channel to CNN to launch Parts Unknown. By all accounts, he was giddily excited about the opportunities the new show and the network’s resources would afford him; within the first few years, he would shoot episodes in Libya, Tanzania, and Iran. But even to a new fixer such as Alex Roa, a local producer who worked with Bourdain on shoots in Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Cuernavaca in 2014, it was evident that the demands—and the constant attention—were weighing on him. “I think it was not only the demands of the job, but also the intensity of it, the constant traveling and being away–in that moment–from his daughter,” says Roa. “Every episode demanded so much of him, because that was the way he was.”
By then, the eating was the least of it. “He told me that food is just a way to get into people’s bodies and minds,” Roa recalls. “It was a way to talk to someone, to get them to go deeper.” The more superficial food-porn stuff was losing its allure. In Oaxaca, when a director wanted to shoot Tony buying and eating tamales, he was frustrated, Roa says. “He just said, ‘That’s horrible. Do you know how many times I’ve done this before?’” In Mexico City a chef at the Four Seasons hotel where Bourdain was staying so wanted to cook for him that he sent word he was going to close a room of the restaurant for him; Bourdain’s response, according to Roa, was a polite but conversation-ending “No thanks.”
Were the fame, the pressure, and weariness from all that travel—and all that food—getting to him? Bourdain remained the consummate professional. “We had to ask his driver to delay and make detours so that he wouldn’t show up too early,” the fixer says. But he didn’t seem to be having as much fun. “He only went out with us one night during the whole 10 days,” Roa recalls. “Otherwise, he would just show up for a call, do the shoot, and go straight back to the hotel. He’d stay in and order room service.”
by Lisa Abend, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: William Mebane
