12/09/2025
Anthony Bourdain imagined the audience for his 1999 essay “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” about working in restaurant kitchens, would be insular and small. “I thought, I’m going to write something that will entertain other cooks, maybe I’ll get a hundred bucks, and my fry cook will find this funny,” he recalled nearly two decades later, during an appearance at The New Yorker Festival. When the article found its way into The New Yorker—after Bourdain’s mother suggested to a New York Times colleague, Esther Fein, that Fein’s husband, David Remnick, the magazine’s new editor, might want to take a look—“it transformed my life within two days,” Bourdain said.
“The voice he introduced in ‘Don’t Eat Before Reading This’ is not just brash and ballsy; it reverberates with style and poetry,” Hannah Goldfield writes, in a reflection about the essay in this week’s issue. Bourdain grips you from his tantalizing opening lines: “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish.” Revisit the piece that catapulted Bourdain to fame: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jxf5cq
