If you’re paying attention, you’ll start to notice them — little altars to chef Anthony Bourdain scattered across America’s restaurants, displayed with something close to religious conviction. A St. Tony votive tucked beside the register at a New York taqueria. A mural on the alleyside of a pub in southern Indiana. A framed black-and-white portrait — the now-iconic one where he faces the camera but looks away, eyes downcast — hung above a Chicago bar like a patron saint of appetite.
Social media is too fractured now to agree on much, but one thing you can still count on, especially in the days leading up to June 25, is a good Bourdain quote.
That day — his birthday — has become an unofficial holiday of sorts since Bourdain's death in 2018, a moment of reflection for those who admired the way he moved through the world: with curiosity, irreverence and a deep, abiding respect for culinary pleasure.
One quote, in particular, tends to surface around this time each year. You’ve probably seen it — shared in restaurant Instagram captions, posterized on Etsy and (according to a deep internet image search) as the basis for at least one tattoo:
"Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride."
It’s often attributed to Anthony Bourdain, and honestly, you understand why. It sounds like him—or at least, like the version of him people hold onto. Wry, romantic, unsentimental. A little drunk. Someone who believed in the pleasures of the table and the moral act of being curious.
I’ll admit: I fell for it, too.
Not in a big way, just — quietly, personally. It was an early summer afternoon, and I found myself at a local restaurant at exactly 4 o’clock, seated across from a man I adore. It was one of those old-school neighborhood pasta joints: maroon pleather booths, oak bar, white paper over sticky red-check tablecloths. I ordered the cream sauce, naturally. There was something about the light, the timing and the Negroni on the next table over. The quote flickered across my mind like a little internal monologue, uninvited, but oddly comforting. “When did he say that?” I wondered, days later.
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I’d just reread “Kitchen Confidential” and couldn’t remember it tucked in there. It felt plausible as a voiceover from “Parts Unknown,” though I couldn’t conjure which episode.
Eventually — fortunately, and unfortunately for the guy with the tattoo — a little Googling cleared things up. Once you sift past the Reddit contingent who are certain they remember him saying it, the origin of the quote consistently points to a specific post that came long after Bourdain’s death.
It first appeared on June 27, 2021, in a thread on the WoodenBoat forum, a corner of the internet where fans had been trading reflections about Bourdain for years. The post came from a user named “Joe (SoCal),” who never claimed Bourdain said the words. He presented them as his own—a personal homage, an imagined set of instructions that might have sounded like Bourdain, had he lived to say them.
This, it seems, is the first known appearance of the passage online.
Upon closer examination, the quote starts to fall about a bit. One particularly dedicated Redditor, “WannaBeDeveloper92,” created a public nine-page Google Doc breaking down the entire misattributed quote line by line, comparing each element to confirmed excerpts from Bourdain’s work. The fan categorized each passage as “aligned” or “inconsistent,” citing contextual nuance and linguistic patterns like a literary scholar. The line “check in on your friends, check in on yourself” was flagged as suspect — a little too soft, a little too self-care. “More of a modern wellness trope,” the fan noted, than something Bourdain would’ve actually said.
But this isn’t a gotcha. I’m not here to shame anyone for getting swept up in something that feels true.There are real Bourdain quotes that echo this same note. “Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.” Or: “If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can… The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes, or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody.”
The fake quote, though invented, captures the rhythm of something Bourdain often returned to: the idea that pleasure, especially when shared with strangers, is a kind of ethic. That trying new things, listening closely, ordering the good stuff off the menu—these are not luxuries, but ways of being alive with intention.
The fake quote, though invented, captures the rhythm of something Bourdain often returned to: the idea that pleasure, especially when shared with strangers, is a kind of ethic.
Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve found ourselves hungry for new Bourdain words, however we can get them.
In 2021, the documentary “Roadrunner” sparked some controversy for using an AI-generated version of Bourdain’s voice to narrate lines he had never actually spoken aloud. The moment unfolds quietly: the artist David Choe, a friend of Bourdain’s, begins reading an email from him—“Dude, this is a crazy thing to ask, but I’m curious…”—and then, without warning, the voice shifts.
It becomes Bourdain’s. Or something close enough to fool you. “. . . and my life is sort of shit now. You are successful, and I am successful, and I’m wondering: Are you happy?”
Director Morgan Neville later explained to the New Yorker’s Helen Rosner that there were a few moments in the film where they wanted Bourdain’s voice but didn’t have the audio, so they made it. They fed hours of recordings — TV, radio, podcasts, audiobooks — into a software program and built an AI model of him.
On the softer side of that same impulse is comedian Jonathan Kite, who’s gone viral for his pitch-perfect Bourdain impression. In one clip, he uses it to deliver a gravelly, reverent takedown of Chuck E. Cheese: “A casino for the juice box crowd, where the ATM is your dad and the mouse always wins.”
Part of what makes all this hit so hard — this invented quote, the AI voice, the impersonations, the votives — is the fact that we’re living in a time of real social and political fracture. Tension simmers everywhere. Everyone seems mad: mad at the world, mad at each other. And in the midst of it, we’re watching our neighbors, the people who keep our neighborhood joints running, live in fear, especially amid a rise in ICE arrests and political scapegoating.
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The mythos of Bourdain lands differently in a moment like this.
He was a complicated man, no doubt, but through “Parts Unknown,” “No Reservations” and his own writing, he modeled something rare and generous: a way to move through the world that was both deeply curious and politically aware. He understood that food doesn’t exist in a vacuum. That knowing where a dish came from—its colonial history, its cultural significance, the labor behind it—doesn’t ruin the experience. It enriches it.
“There is nothing more political,” he told CBC News in 2016.
There’s one image of him I come back to often, one you’ve probably seen. Bourdain and President Barack Obama, seated on low electric blue plastic stools in a noodle shop in Vietnam, drinking cold beer and eating bun cha.
That photo is nearly a decade old now, but its resonance is immediate every time I walk through my neighborhood— Chicago’s Little Vietnam —where it hangs proudly in six or seven restaurant windows, displayed with the same kind of reverence you’d give a saint.
We feel very far away from that image now.
Bourdain probably would’ve rolled his eyes at the fake quote, maybe the candle, definitely the AI voice. But he also might’ve understood the impulse. We don’t need saints — we just need someone who reminds us to stay curious, order the cream sauce and tip well.
He never said those words. But he made us hungry for them.
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