PARIS: The American TV celebrity and food writer Anthony Bourdain has been found dead in his hotel room in France while working on his CNN series on culinary traditions around the world. He was 61.
CNN confirmed the death, saying in a statement that Bourdain was found unresponsive on Friday morning local time in his Strasbourg hotel by his friend Eric Ripert, the executive chef of the elite New York restaurant Le Bernardin. Bourdain's paternal grandparents were French.
A gifted storyteller, Bourdain explored haute cuisine and street food alike in his travels, passionately encouraging viewers to "eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice".
He often drank on the air and was public about his struggle with own demons, including drug abuse.
"We ask very simple questions: What makes you happy? What do you eat? What do you like to cook?" Bourdain said in an acceptance speech for a Peabody Award in 2014 for his work in television.
Bourdain achieved celebrity status after the publication in 2000 of his best-selling book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. It combined frank details of his life and career with behind-the-scenes observations on the culinary industry.
CNN said Bourdain was in Strasbourg filming an upcoming segment in his series Parts Unknown.
“It is with extraordinary sadness we can confirm the death of our friend and colleague,” the CNN statement said. "His love of great adventure, new friends, fine food and drink and the remarkable stories of the world made him a unique storyteller. His talents never ceased to amaze us and we will miss him very much."
Strasbourg police, emergency services and regional authorities did not immediately have information about the death. Bourdain's assistant Laurie Woolever would not comment on what happened.
The CNN statement expressed condolences to Bourdain's teenage daughter Ariane, from his relationship with his ex-wife Ottavia Busia. He had been dating the Italian actress Asia Argento since 2017. No details about a memorial were available.
Bourdain's death drew new attention to celebrity suicides. It came three days after fashion designer Kate Spade died of apparent suicide in her Park Avenue apartment in New York. Spade's husband and business partner said the 55-year-old had suffered from depression and anxiety for many years.
In the preface to the latest edition of Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain wrote of his shock at the success off his book, which he wrote by getting up at 5am to steal a couple of hours at the computer before appearing at the saute station for lunch.
In everything he did, Bourdain cultivated a renegade style and bad-boy persona.
For decades, he worked 13-hour days as a line cook in restaurants in New York and the Northeastern US before he became executive chef in the 1990s at Brasserie Les Halles, serving steak frites and French onion soup in lower Manhattan. He had been the chef there for eight years when he sent an unsolicited article to The New Yorker magazine about the underbelly of the restaurant world and its deceptions.
To his surprise, the magazine accepted it and ran it — catching the attention of book editors. It resulted in Kitchen Confidential, which elevated Bourdain to celebrity status and a new career on TV.
Before he joined CNN in 2012, he spent eight seasons as the globe-trotting host of No Reservations, a travel and food show on the Travel Channel.
Bourdain said he never intended to write an expose or to "rip the lid off the restaurant business." He said he liked the restaurant business the way it was.
"What I set out to do was write a book that my fellow cooks would find entertaining and true. I wanted it to sound like me talking at say ... ten o'clock on a Saturday night, after a busy dinner rush, me and a few cooks hanging around in the kitchen, knocking back a few beers."
Bourdain said he really had no idea that anyone outside the world of chefs would even pay attention to his comments. It seemed to startle him, that a book intended for professional cooks would have such mass appeal.
"The new celebrity chef culture is a remarkable and admittedly annoying phenomenon. While it's been nothing but good for business -- and for me personally -- many of us in the life can't help snickering about it," he wrote.
"Of all the professions, after all, few people are less suited to be suddenly thrown into the public eye than chefs."
One of Bourdain's more memorable programmes involved a low-budget lunch with Barack Obama when the US president visited Vietnam in 2016. In the video below he discusses the episode with CNN anchor Anderson Cooper.