The meme-ification of Anthony Bourdain
After Anthony Bourdain committed suicide in June 2018, the internet was awash with content in his memory: obituaries, remembrances, mournful tweets from celebrities and everyday citizens alike. But one post in particular foretold the chef’s afterlife on social media. Kyrell Grant, who tweeted as @imbobswaget, suggested that Bourdain had the charisma of someone you might expect to be well-endowed — except she said she was coining a pithy new catchphrase that would quickly enter the popular lexicon and earn its own entry on Dictionary.com.
That Twitter post (now X) may have marked a shift in the way people remembered Bourdain. He was remembered primarily as someone sweet and approachable: candid, salt-of-the-earth, as thoughtful as he was devil-may-care. There was a genuine sadness surrounding his loss, and he inspired the same kind of posthumous adoration that so many figures do, complete with wisecracks plastered over photos of nature. But it soon became just as common to see posts playing on his drinking habits or salty comebacks; people began using images of him in the same way we use images of pop culture characters like SpongeBob SquarePants or Homer Simpson. Anthony Bourdain, in short, became a meme.
Last month, a new Bourdain meme went viral. The chef had been giving out a series of oft-quoted pieces of advice urging people to explore and enjoy the world: “If you’re 22, physically fit, hungry to learn and improve, I encourage you to travel,” or, “Open your mind, get off the couch, move.” But this new meme combined a pensive portrait of Bourdain with increasingly parodic versions of that sentiment. “Go to a [expletive] restaurant. I don’t care what. Go to a [expletive] restaurant and order a [expletive] beer.” A less profane version urged the reader to take a chance on a Hinge date: “Show her a picture of your cats. Show her two of them. Give her a tissue while she cries about her ex. Jump a fence to impress her. Break your ankle. Never hear from her again.” Another tribute hits like whiskey left on a virtual grave: booty shorts emblazoned with the words I MISS ANTHONY BOURDAIN.
If you miss Anthony Bourdain too, and you want to get serious about his work, there’s a ton of media out there to satisfy your cravings: 11 books, several essays and graphic novels, hours and hours of television. He’s done countless interviews, appeared on podcasts, played characters based on himself in guest appearances on TV. You might want to check out the subreddit r/Anthony Bourdain, which, with its 61,000 members, is in the top 2 percent of Reddit communities in terms of size; that forum, much more serious than X, is often involved in desperate discussions.
But even that sacred space, memes can’t help but infiltrate. Another variation on faux Bourdain advice recently surfaced there, imploring the viewer to eat at Chili’s and get an entree combo. Some commenters expected moderators to remove the parody; after all, it did not ‘honor’ the subject of the group. Others argued that they should not do so. Bourdain was a prolific Twitter user and a funny one; his afterimage in most minds is that of someone who could laugh at himself. People thought he must have appreciated the lightheartedness of a good Bourdain meme.
It’s true that Bourdain didn’t seem to accept it himself too serious – but when he got serious, he was all in. His last show, “Parts Unknown” on CNN, was praised for its political and anthropological dexterity, and won or was nominated for Emmys for episodes set in Kenya, Iran and Borneo. Bourdain was a fervent advocate on behalf of migrant restaurant workers and the #MeToo movement. The viral internet remembers this side of his work, too. When Henry Kissinger died, a line from Bourdain circulated repeatedly: “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop beating Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”
According to some, Bourdain’s character was constructed much more self-consciously.
Social media can make it feel like our lost loved ones are still alive off-screen, just out of reach; with celebrities we’ve never met, that phenomenon can be even more apparent. In the age of the parasocial relationship, is it any wonder that people continue to preoccupy themselves with Bourdain’s image? He is far from the first person to emerge into the public consciousness in this way; John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, for example, are fashion icons of the moment, 25 years after their deaths. But Bourdain’s deification feels like something new: a parasocial relationship in which the living, longing for a man who felt like a friend, try to communicate with him through parody.
Modern Bourdain meme is playful, ironic, and deliberately unserious. One common meme uses a still from the 2006 Beirut episode of “No Reservations,” in which Bourdain announces, “I have a serious lust for shawarma.” (One user shares it with the two-word caption: “ovulation week.”) An enduring meme called “Bourdain on a train” features him wearing sunglasses and headphones while looking out a window between two trains; people use it to joke about the smug worldliness of learning about the food of another culture. (One of the most viral examples reads simply, “white people pronounce pho correctly.”) Other popular images are even more relatable: in a March 2024 Instagram postDrake famously added a screenshot of Bourdain saying, “It’s 11 a.m., I got six drinks in me.”
This meme-like Bourdain persona fits the popular story of his origin: the unknown chef who stumbled into public life laughing. But Bourdain’s character was, by some standards, far more self-consciously constructed than that. His first article in The New Yorker, “Don’t eat before you read this” — a 1999 piece that remains one of the magazine’s most popular pieces — was not pulled from the slush pile by editor David Remnick, as has often been reported (including by Bourdain himself). Bourdain’s mother was an editor at The Times; It was she, as a biographer notes, who somewhat shyly asked Remnick’s wife to pass on the essay. Bourdain took a writing seminar with famed editor Gordon Lish. He returned from a trip to France and marveled to his kitchen buddies that chefs there were treated like rock stars. He knew he wanted to be someone and he steadily worked toward that outcome, even while using heroin and overseeing brunch services with 300 guests. He was obsessed with stories: A 2013 episode of “Parts Unknown” in Congo shed light on oft-ignored atrocities, but Bourdain was more eager to visit because of his identification with Joseph Conrad and “Heart of Darkness.” Colleagues said he often imagined himself at the center of a movie, in which he was the star; today we could say he helped invent the “main character energy.” He had set up a Google alert for his own name to receive push notifications.
Bourdain began to shy away from the spotlight toward the end of his life, but he had already become someone who strangers felt comfortable introducing themselves to as if they were the best of friends. The idea that he had created his own persona is perhaps somewhat at odds with the man who said, “I don’t care [expletive] is a fantastic business model for television.” But this self-mythologization not only served a purpose in his career; it has cemented its place in a canon. There is a genre tweet that presents Bourdain as an analogue for desire. ““Girls don’t miss their exes,” someone wrote four years ago, “they miss Anthony Bourdain.” The line still appears regularly on social media. That people have turned the beloved character he constructed into a beloved caricature is no surprise. It’s a natural progression: man becomes character, and character becomes meme.
Becca Schuh lives in Brooklyn. She writes ‘Idiots, go ahead’ a newsletter about media and internet culture.
