Anthony Bourdain’s Top 5 Boldest Food Opinions — And Why He Was Likely Right

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The name Anthony Bourdain can stir up a lot of feelings in the culinary world — from chefs, diners, and travel enthusiasts alike. The late chef who passed away in 2018 was no stranger to sharing strong opinions about food, restaurants, other chefs, and anything else that he felt passionate about. Whether it was through his books (“Kitchen Confidential,” “A Cook’s Tour,” or “Medium Raw”) or his television shows (“No Reservations,” “Parts Unknown”), Bourdain had some savage takes. Though they may have raises some eyebrows, they often proved to be pretty spot on, too.

So if the mark of a person is how much their words linger after their passing, Bourdain’s legacy still holds a lot of weight years after his death. Looking back on his life, we wanted to share five of Bourdain’s most savage opinions and why most of them still probably ring true.

In 1999, Anthony Bourdain was entrenched in the Manhattan dining scene as the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles. His writing career hadn’t taken off yet, but later that same year, he authored “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” — an essay for the New Yorker that spilled a few trade secrets about the dining scene.

That essay later became the foundation for “Kitchen Confidential,” a New York Times bestselling memoir. As part of the famous essay and book, Bourdain shared a litany of foods to avoid at restaurants. Some examples include well-done steak or fish, “a flavourless, leathery hunk of carbon,” and chicken, “an option for customers who can’t decide what they want to eat.” While a bit provocative, it’s hard to disagree. And that was just the beginning of Bourdain’s long list of menu red flags.

If you think Anthony Bourdain was a culinary snob, you couldn’t be further from the truth. His opinions crossed the gamut of both the brilliance of Michelin star food and the simple flavor hit from a fast food joint. Case in point — fast food mac and cheese.

Specifically, Bourdain was adamant about his love for Popeye’s mac and cheese. In an interview with culinary legend Jacques Pépin, Bourdain said he loved to disguise himself and visit Popeye’s (via YouTube). He would go in the early morning and get “that nasty macaroni and cheese … that nuclear orange stuff and it’s microwaved and I just love that stuff.” We can’t deny that a simple microwaved mac and cheese hits the spot sometimes.

Anthony Bourdain was open about his disdain for chicken on a menu. While that’s partly true, most of his anger toward chicken dishes centered around American-raised chickens. In his famed New Yorker essay, Bourdain famously said that people who think “swine are filthy animals” have never visited a poultry farm.

The chef called American-raised chicken “slimy and tasteless” compared to the birds raised in Europe. To add insult to injury, Bourdain simply thought American chicken spoils easily and is just flat out boring. And he was onto something. The United States processes poultry differently than in Europe, including the use of chlorine in the facilities. Accordingly, Bourdain usually encouraged his fans to order pork when dining out instead.

Once again disquieting the notion that he was a culinary snob, Anthony Bourdain couldn’t help expressing his love for the Southern breakfast chain Waffle House — the famous 24-hour eatery with over 1,900 locations in the United States. The chef first visited the greasy chain in 2015 with James Beard award-winning chef Sean Brock.

Bourdain called Waffle House “an irony-free zone where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts … A place of safety and nourishment. It never closes, it is always, always faithful, always there for you” (via YouTube). He even called his experience better than eating at Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry, and we’ll just let you be the judge of how serious he was about that savage take.

Though Anthony Bourdain became a celebrity chef himself, he was quite open about expressing his displeasure with the celebrity chef world. Over the years, he went after quite a few famous chefs with some controversial but sincere opinions. For one, he called Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant a “terror dome” (via Eater) and criticized the spiky haired chef for being “52 years-old and still rolling around in the flame outfit” (via Atlanta).

Of Paula Deen, Bourdain said, “When your signature dish is hamburger in between a doughnut, and you’ve been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you’ve got Type 2 Diabetes … It’s in bad taste if nothing else” (via Eater). As he wrote in his book “Medium Raw,” Bourdain also allegedly called television chef Sandra Lee the “hellspawn of Betty Crocker and Charles Manson,” and he was particularly critical of how often store-bought ingredients factored into her recipe.