Anthony Bourdain killed himself a couple of months ago and it has left me and a lot of other people feeling pretty bummed out. In a world of cooks that value presentation over flavour and TV food ‘personalities’ that want their followers to feel the same empty sense of loss that the many house decorating shows have successfully exploited to flog banisters and over-priced paint, Tony told us to eat it all and to find our selves in the experience of cooking and eating with others.

Reading Bourdain’s books and watching his shows for the last twenty years, it strikes me that cooking and eating can be a form of therapy. A way of feeding (pun intended) and honing your better instincts and impulses. A structure but not a dictatorship that nurtures individuality but with a social contract.

I think it is fair to say that the world of food saved Tony Bourdain. It seems that like many of us he was swimming around in a mire of confusion and self-loathing getting his kicks from defining himself against things, damning the man. The great news is that you can be a petulant, unsettled teenager and even twenty something and maybe even thirty something and then find something that you give a shit about. Even better you still can and should damn the man.

Lovers of good food and drink don’t need to conform, in fact it’s generally a bad thing, but as one descends into a world of hedonism it becomes clear that there are, in fact, rules and they are important. I watched ‘The Mind of a Chef’ because Bourdain hosted the thing and encountered David Chang of Momofuku. Chang embodies the duality of respecting tradition but feeling free to fuck with it, recognising that if you take it too far you could and should be given some shit. There is a perfect segment with Sean Brock (another cool guy) where Chang really gently describes how a Mornay sauce relates to the canon of great sauces, coming from the ‘mother sauce’ béchamel. It is a perfect bit of unpretentious educational TV, he makes it clear that you don’t need to feel bound by the tradition but only a total dick would just jump in and freestyle without knowing where it all comes from.

The Mind of a Chef series is emblematic of Bourdain’s open-hearted enthusiasm for people who care about food and, as he said himself, have genuine talent as opposed to him as a jobbing cook. He used his profile to host a series that ties together many of the threads of good food across the world through a network of chefs who are individually excellent but are even better as a group. The foraging course hosted by Rene Redzepi of Noma is a perfect example. Chef Sean Brock is transparently feeling performance pressure, he wants to show what he can do, not for self-aggrandisement but because he wants to keep his end up. He respects the other chefs too much not to put out something fitting for the occasion. The series returns to this theme again in the music / pot luck episode where each of the pretty starry (not Michelin) chefs involved wants to pull out something that is going to enchant and excite their fellow enthusiasts and take them somewhere new and unexpected. Nobody is bringing a tried and tested standard from their restaurant, they are bringing something adventurous and outside the normal realm. Pushing themselves and their friends. There is such a healthy tension in the kitchen and you just want to be there.

No doubt these talented people would have, and in many cases already had, found an audience but Bourdain surely sped things up and pulled this global group together in a way that the viewer can see that this is not a bunch of disconnected stuff but a movement. I once went to see a beautiful exhibition in Copenhagen of the work of the Dane, Asger Jorn and the American, Jackson Pollock. The two artists were working concurrently but unaware of the other’s work. The two sets of work, although different, make it clear they were running in parallel, thinking some of the same things and finding some of the same answers. Bourdain used his celebrity status to show to people outside the industry that in the world of food the connections are explicit and that two people on opposite sides of the world can not only think the same thing but get together hang out and maybe get even better together.

I see a parallel movement in my own world, wine. Michael Sager from the London wine bar Sager & Wilde tearing up Europe with Rajat Parr, a winemaker with many projects on the west coast of the US and visiting producers such as Jean-Marc Roulot, one of the best white winemakers in the world, a guy who would be more accustomed to visits from fusty guys in red trousers. I remember fondly a night at Sager & Wilde with Jean-Marc Roulot walking table to table and chatting to people who were drinking his wines but didn’t have a fucking clue who he was. This guy is the Seve Ballesteros or Ayrton Senna of white Burgundy but he wears it lightly and just wants to know what people think of the wines.

In an epoch where status has become a way of life, Tony Bourdain shifted the needle towards deeper connections and meaning but wasn’t a prick about it.

In a world with half arse despots turning petty minds in on themselves and others, Tony Bourdain asked us to look around us and open ourselves up to the new and challenging. His milieu was food but there a lot more to it than that.

I didn’t know Tony but he had a big impact on me. He made me want to cook and made it cool to give a shit and to want others to give a shit.