An Anthony Bourdain Mystery

There’s a quote I’m sure you’ve seen floating around before, attributed to the late chef, author and TV host Anthony Bourdain:

Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a Negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.

Every time I see it I get vaguely annoyed. Don’t get me wrong: I like an afternoon beer as much as anyone. But I’ve seen it so many times — swirling about my Twitter timeline and my Facebook feed — that it’s started to tick me off. I feel like I’m being lectured to — and by someone who thinks it never would have occurred to me to have a beer with someone I don’t know.

Every couple of months I forget — but then it appears again. No, I find myself thinking, I don’t want to have a Negroni.

Cards on the table: I never liked Anthony Bourdain. His spite towards vegetarians — flavoured though I’m sure it was with comic hyperbole — stuck in my throat. “To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living,” he wrote in Kitchen Confidential — which has a sort of macho verbal swagger but is actually a really sad thing to admit.

The valorisation of travel has always perplexed me — as if it’s necessarily more enlightening to see a little of a lot of Earth than a lot of a little. I’m ashamed to say it — especially as the poor bloke has died — but every time I see that quote it makes me dislike Anthony Bourdain just a little bit more.

Then again, how many quotes would survive being spammed to death by motivational accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram? If I’d seen that quote once I’m sure I would have shrugged and moved along. A cold pint at 4 o’clock? I wish! Anyways…Seeing it so many times — a phenomenon completely out of Anthony Bourdain’s hands — made it much more annoying. But that was hardly his fault.

Then someone asked on Twitter — did he even say that?

Good question. The quote never comes with a source. It’s just attributed to Anthony Bourdain. Granted, it sounds like him (with the possible exception of the very noughties-era “check in on your friends” bit). But is it?

A quick search of Kitchen Confidential found nothing. A quick Google turned up a Reddit page on which users debated the source of the quote. No one seemed to have one. “‘Eat the cream sauce’ is the line I found curious,” said one user, “Since his first book warned to stay away from it.”

Now I was hooked. I had to find the source. A website called TruthorFiction claimed to have tracked down the first recorded online use of the quote to a post on the forums of WoodenBoat magazine. Intriguingly, the user hadn’t indented it or put it in quotation marks. Perhaps it was his quote and not Bourdain’s after all?

I had to find out. I signed up to the forums:

Weird question but do you recall where this quote came from? A lot of people have been debating its source.

Faux-naive? Perhaps. But I had to get an answer.

A veteran user chimed in to accuse me of being a bot. My heart sank. Perhaps I was too late. I’d missed my chance.

But no! The original poster reappeared:

Quotes are funny things, can you ever have 100% assertion that any quote was directly from one person ? Maybe if you have video or audio but with AI now thats not even possible. What we are left with is the character of the quote. I knew Tony, I hung out with him on a few occasions before he made it big as Anthony Bourdain and I can assure he said something similar to me on many occasions. Maybe not that direct quote but damn near close to the fundamental ideas behind it. It was at the core of his sensibilities and love for culture, food, and life. So yea it’s totally sounds like the Tony I knew.

Unbelievable. The Anthony Bourdain quote being spammed obnoxiously all over the Internet…isn’t even an Anthony Bourdain quote.

This shows how much we just accept — and promote! — as fact online. But I guess it also shows how dumb we’re being half the times that we get mad. There I was, resenting Anthony Bourdain for the ubiquity of something that he never even said.

Then again, it does sound like him.