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Anthony Bourdain was 44 when he became famous — before that, he was a disgruntled chef who’d spent nearly thirty years in other people’s kitchens, broke, behind on the rent, and half-convinced his best chances were already behind him
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What followed was two decades of line work, sous chef jobs, executive chef jobs, a restaurant that failed, and a change of employer roughly once a year.
He told Woolever he generally owed his own chef that week’s pay, and that the debt was usually cocaine.
By 1998, when he took over the stoves at Brasserie Les Halles, he was a working chef carrying a thin publishing record and no visible exit.
His division runs between conceptual innovators, who arrive with an idea and execute it young, and experimental innovators, who work inductively, accumulate material and produce their best work decades in.
Bourdain spent nearly three decades assuming his best chances were behind him.