Anthony Bourdain

The Fredericksburg Forum with Anthony Bourdain

September 23, 2010

Speaker Biography

Anthony Bourdain, host of Travel Channel’s Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, explores exotic places worldwide, seeking authentic experiences and the foods that flavor global cultures. A 28-year veteran of professional kitchens, most of them in New York City, Bourdain has worked as a dishwasher, line cook, and chef.

In 1999, The New Yorker published Bourdain’s exposé of New York restaurants, Don’t Eat Before Reading This. The article drew enormous attention in the U.S. and U.K., and it formed the basis of Bourdain’s New York Times bestselling memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. This year’s much-talked-about Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook – another New York Times bestseller – continues Bourdain’s journey from work-a-day chef and author to food-TV star. In it, he addresses the personal, but he also speaks plainly, and sometimes harshly, about his famous fellows in the food world.

Bourdain’s writing has graced the pages of The Times and The New York Times. He is executive chef of Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan and author of Les Halles Cookbook: Strategies, Recipes, and Techniques of Classic Bistro Cooking. In 2002, he traveled the world in search of extreme cuisine for a Food Network Series. The resulting book, A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal, hit the bestseller list and won the 2002 Guild of Food Writers award for Food Book of the Year. Bourdain’s 2007 book, No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach, chronicled the chef’s travels through 28 countries.

A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, Bourdain lives in New York City with his wife, Ottavia, and his daughter, Ariane.

Moderator Biography

Joe Yonan is editor of Food and Travel sections of The Washington Post, where he has worked since moving to Washington, D.C., from Boston in 2006. Under his leadership, The Post has twice received the James Beard Award for the nation’s best newspaper food section.

In addition to editing, Yonan writes occasional features for both Food and Travel, including the monthly column Cooking for One. His work has appeared in three editions of the bestselling anthology Best Food Writing.

He is the author of Serve Yourself: Nightly Adventures in Cooking for One, which will be released in March by Ten Speed Press. He and Boston chef Andy Husbands coauthored The Fearless Chef.

Yonan is a 2000 graduate of the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts in Massachusetts, and he earned a bachelor of journalism degree in 1989 from the University of Texas at Austin. Yonan grew up in West Texas.