After his suicide in a hotel room in Kayserberg, France, only a few of Anthony Bourdain’s friends subsequently claimed to have noticed his mood darkening over the preceding weeks. Most had no idea he was in crisis, perhaps he did not know himself. Even for those that knew him, the shock seemed more acute because here was someone who had beaten drug addiction and risen from the obscurity of a rather average New York kitchen to make his fame and fortune as an international food writer and television presenter. If anyone seemed to have made it, he did, and yet, he had not.
Worlds away from the neon signs of the food markets in Singapore and Hong Kong that Bourdain helped to publicise for Western audiences, previously under the dimmer glow of office strip-lighting in law firms up and down the country, and now working at home on hastily
