Coastalblog

The death of Tony Bourdain earlier this year came as a nasty shock to the global food community. All those of us who make a living from cooking, running restaurants, writing about food, even from eating it, felt we'd lost one of our own. No writer had ever better expressed the somewhat marginal, slightly out of kilter life of the professional chef with more verve or accuracy, and few have done as much to make us feel as proud of what we do. Bourdain was real, he was a proper cook who came up banging out covers in restaurants of varying degrees of quality, a world away from the idealised aspirational plates of the Sunday supplements, or the latest gushing broadsheet review of some high concept place you'll never in a million years be able to afford. He was emphatically not a celebrity chef. He was a cook. Who along the way acquired a degree of celebrity. He understood in his bones that sometimes it's just about getting it done, and this book collection of his journalism an