Inside Look At The Controversial Spat Between Anthony Bourdain And The Food Network

Bourdain was always a good chef, but his writing skills and dry humor made him a star. In 1999 he wrote an article for New Yorker magazine called, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” and it focused on the seedy underbelly of the culinary world. And yeah, it wasn’t positive about the industry.

According to Bourdain, “Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional. We’ve all chosen to turn our backs on the 9-to-5, on ever having a Friday or Saturday night off, on ever having a normal relationship with a non-cook. Being a chef is a lot like being an air-traffic controller: you are constantly dealing with the threat of disaster.”

Bourdain went on, “Since we work in close quarters, and so many blunt and sharp objects are at hand, you’d think that cooks would kill one another with regularity. I’ve seen guys duking it out in the waiter station over who gets a table for six. I’ve seen a chef clamp his teeth on a waiter’s nose.” He also added, “I’ve seen plates thrown – I’ve even thrown a few myself...”

Towards the end of the article Bourdain said, “I used to be a terror toward my floor staff – particularly in the final months of my last restaurant. But not anymore. Recently, my career has taken an eerily appropriate turn: these days, I’m the chef de cuisine of a much loved, old-school French brasserie/bistro where the customers eat their meat rare, vegetarians are scarce, and every part of the animal – hooves, snout, cheeks, skin, and organs – is avidly and appreciatively prepared and consumed.”

You get a pretty good sense of Bourdain’s personality from his 1999 article. He was extremely passionate about his work. The cook wanted everything done right and desired for people to have the same love of food that he did. These were all things that Bourdain would carry with him as he became a Food Network star.

TV executives began to take interest after Bourdain started publishing books about his experiences. Two reality show producers – Lydia Tenaglia and Chris Collins – decided to approach him. So, they called Bourdain up at his restaurant in New York, Les Halles, and asked if he would be interested in a meeting with them.

Tenaglia always remembered that first phone call. In 2018 she told website The Ringer, “[Bourdain was] like, ‘Yeah, sure, whatever.’ He was very nonplussed about the whole thing.” The legendary cook apparently didn’t seem particularly interested in becoming a television star, but he did very much want to talk about food and enjoy it with the wider world.

This was in 2000 – before the concept of “the celebrity chef” had really reached its full height. Chris Collins mused in the interview with The Ringer, “[Bourdain] jumped on a train that started to move very, very fast.” But unfortunately it wasn’t necessarily one Bourdain wanted to be on.

The Food Network purchased two seasons of Bourdain’s first show – titled A Cook’s Tour. But the chef didn’t enjoy it at first, according to Tenaglia. She remembered, “There was almost a deep reticence and a slightly adversarial relationship between what we were trying to capture and what he was trying to capture.”

Tenaglia explained, “… In [Bourdain’s] mind he was a writer and he was gonna go into that Edo-style sushi place and he was gonna have this experience and then he was gonna go back to his hotel room and then he was gonna write about it. That’s a very different exercise than taking your experience and then translating that for an audience in a visual medium.”

Tensions were unsurprisingly high on the set of A Cook’s Tour. Years later in the 2021 Bourdain documentary Roadrunner, members of the crew remembered what their star was like. Director Tom Vitale said, without accusation, “He was a control freak in a lot of ways. You couldn’t win an argument with him.”

And then there was the issue that Bourdain just didn’t want to be a TV star at all. He told magazine The Caterer in November 2001, “God not TV – no. I don’t want to be a TV personality loved by civilians. I want to be loved by chefs...” But he was getting more famous no matter what.

Bourdain went on, “… I won’t be totally miserable if the whole writing thing goes sour in a couple of years and I end up cooking eggs benedict in some little restaurant where no one knows who I am. I wouldn’t be unhappy with that at all.” Though as we now know, that clearly wasn’t going to happen.

Bourdain again stated his dissatisfaction in a December 2001 interview with Entertainment Weekly magazine. He said, “Oh, I really hate the concept of celebrity chefs. I know chefs who are getting voice coaches now! I have enough reasons to hate myself without looking at myself in the mirror and saying, ‘I employ a hairstylist.’”

And Bourdain went on, with his typical humor, “I’m not exactly prime-time material. I can only guess that some sinister cabal of criminally deranged anarchists within the Food Network let this in under the radar.” He did, however, concede that the show had provided him new opportunities and financial security.

Bourdain told Entertainment Weekly, “It’s bittersweet. I miss my cooks, I miss the life, but at the end of the day, this is a hell of a lot easier than cleaning squid for the lunch rush. What, I’m going to complain about having a book that did well when I get to go to Vietnam and order boat drinks by the pool and eat fabulous foods?”

Yet the Food Network was another unstoppable train. Unfortunately, though, it wasn’t always about the cuisine. Sure, the culinary arts played a large part in the success of the channel, but people were also tuning in to see the stars. Or more specifically, they wanted to follow their feuds and scandals.

And there’s been a lot of headline-grabbing Food Network battles over the years. Take Martha Stewart vs. Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten, Emeril Lagasse’s spat with Rachael Ray or Sandra Lee’s nightmare with that infamous Kwanzaa Cake. And that’s not even getting started on the various allegations the stars have thrown at each other.

Bourdain’s feud with the network apparently started off with something fairly small, although it had big repercussions. While still working on A Cook’s Tour, Bourdain met acclaimed Spanish chef Ferran Adria of El Bulli and wanted to film an episode with him. But the Food Network said no – wanting Bourdain to stick with American cooking. Sadly, it went downhill from that moment on.

As it turned out, Bourdain and his team filmed an episode with Adria anyway, but it wasn’t ever to air on the Food Network. Bourdain sold it to the Travel Channel instead, and it formed the basis of a new TV show: No Reservations. From then on, Bourdian was done with the Food Network, and he made it pretty clear why.

In 2011 Bourdain wrote on his Tumblr blog, “It all began with Ferran Adria in more ways than one… It was because of him – and [the] Food Network’s lack of interest in an El Bulli show – that Chris Collins, Lydia Tenaglia and I went out on our own, reached into our pockets and funded that first bare bones trip to Spain to shoot what later became the film (and subsequent episode of No Reservations), Decoding Ferran Adria.’”

The following year Bourdain went into more detail on the blog, writing, “I’ve referred only half jokingly over the years to the early days of my television career when, after two seasons of making shows around the world for A Cook’s Tour, I was advised that audiences just didn’t respond to all those foreign locations where people talked funny and sometimes – horror of horrors – even had to be subtitled.”

Bourdain went on, “My cruel masters sat back in their chairs and with dreamy, wistful looks suggested how wonderful it would be if I could just confine my interests to shows about tailgate parties, pony rides and... barbecue. ‘Exotic’ locations were problematic, they suggested. They didn’t fit in with their ‘current business model.’”

And Bourdain seemingly never got over that slight – not least because he saw it as a critique of an entire culture of food. After he left the network, Bourdain never stopped throwing criticism and sometimes outright insults against the channel and its stars. And there were some people in particular he had big problems with.

The feud between Bourdain and Guy Fieri is legendary by this point. They had very different attitudes to not only cooking, but life as well. Bourdain absolutely couldn’t stand the outlandish star. In 2011 he told TV Guide magazine, “I look at Guy Fieri and I just think, ‘Jesus, I’m glad that’s not me.’”

Some thought Fieri’s strike back at Bourdain following the latter’s criticism went a bit too far, mind you. During Bourdain’s 2012 roast party Fieri had plenty of things to say about him – few of them repeatable. He also asked the star directly, “... Why do you hate me so much brother?... Is it because you went to a fancy culinary school and I didn’t?”

In 2008 Bourdain slammed chef Sandra Lee via Britney Spears, who was experiencing mental health issues at the time. He said to the Kansas City Star newspaper, “So you’re talking someone that’s as stupid and talentless and messed up as Britney Spears cooking?... I think we have a pretty good idea what that creature would look like if that happened. It would be called Semi-Homemade, and she has a show on Food Network already.”

Bourdain didn’t let up on Lee, though. In 2009 the cook told Eat Me Daily that he considered her “pure evil” and went on, “Her death-dealing, can-opening ways will cut a swath of destruction through the world if not contained.” And that famous Kwanzaa Cake, he said, made him “mad for all humanity.”

Interestingly, Lee never actually bit back at Bourdain. In 2008 she told OK! magazine that she would invite him over for dinner, because he needed “to have a cocktail and lighten up.” Lee went on, “I would cook him a yummy, mommy comfort food meal, like something with meat and mashed potatoes in it. It’s good comfort food. We all need good comforting.”

But Bourdain’s 2010 book brought out even more sick burns against the Food Network, and all the other things which angered him, of course. The book – titled Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook – was absolutely packed full of vicious kitchen-related drama.

Bourdain brought up “the humiliating, painful-to-watch Food Network Awards [and] the clumsily rigged-looking Next Food Network Star...” He also claimed that every “knock-off they slapped on the air would go on to ring up sky high ratings and an ever-larger audience of cherished males 22 to 36 (or whatever that prime car-buying demographic is).”

It seemed Bourdain also thought the Food Network was making cooks want to be stars instead of getting better at their craft. He wrote in the book, “I am frequently asked by aspiring chefs, dreamers young and old, attracted by the lure of slowly melting shallots and caramelizing pork belly, or delusions of Food Network stardom, if they should go to culinary school. I usually give a long, thoughtful and qualified answer. But the short answer is ‘no.’”

And then there was the feud between Bourdain and one of the Food Network’s biggest stars: Paula Deen. In 2011 he slammed the personality for using so many unhealthy ingredients in her cooking. Bourdain told TV Guide, “I would think twice before telling an already obese nation that it’s okay to eat food that is killing us. Plus, her food sucks.”

When Deen went public with a diabetes diagnosis in 2012, Bourdain slammed her as a hypocrite. He told Eater magazine, “When your signature dish is hamburger in between a donut, and you’ve been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you've got type-two diabetes... It’s in bad taste if nothing else.

Needless to say Deen was not happy about these remarks. She slammed Bourdain not just for his comments against her but against the talent’s fellow stars. Deen told Page Six magazine, “Anthony Bourdain needs to get a life. You don’t have to like my food, or Rachael [Ray]’s, Sandra’s and Guy’s. But it’s another thing to attack our character.”

Deen said that those Food Network stars had given “so much of their time and money to help the food-deprived, sick children and abandoned animals. I have no idea what [Bourdain] has done to contribute besides being irritable.” She added, “You know, not everybody can afford to pay $58 for prime rib or $650 for a bottle of wine. My friends and I cook for regular families who worry about feeding their kids and paying the bills.”

Yet despite everything, many people at the Food Network did actually mend ties with Bourdain – even the ones he’d slammed in the media. In 2010 Bourdain told The Hollywood Reporter, “Rachel Ray sent me a fruit basket. And I had an uncomfortable meeting with Sandra Lee, where she pretty much had me for breakfast.”

In a 2011 interview with New York Magazine, Lee argued that Bourdain’s comments were “just shtick” and she couldn’t “even be mad at him.” After her old enemy’s death in 2018, she told People magazine, “[Bourdain] was a larger than life personality with so much talent, and even though he could be incredibly critical of others somehow that was part of his charm.”

Perhaps the main problem is that throughout his entire association with the Food Network, Bourdain thought he was selling out, which surely meant all their other stars were, too. He wrote in his 2002 book A Cook’s Tour, “When I signed on the dotted line, any pretense of virginity or reluctance – of integrity (I don't even remember what that is) – vanished.”