813: Anthony Bourdain in 2005: Direct From Cassette

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Matt Rodbard** (1:05)
This is TASTE. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard.
Back in 2005, I sat across from Anthony Bourdain at a magazine photo shoot. His first TV show, No Reservations, was only a few months old, and I dug into the contents of his travel bags, which he had brought to the set from his apartment in Hell's Kitchen. Two hours turned into a highly personal conversation, recorded on cassette tape that sat untouched for 20 years. This week, that tape gets its first public airing, and in this episode, Tony and I discuss his preferred sucker punch etiquette, his loyalty to cigarettes and the Chateau Marmont, ayahuasca in Peru, and the talk show he dreamed up with Christopher Walken in mind. Tony was an acquaintance of mine for many years, and this is a rare opportunity to hear from him pre-television fame. I hope you enjoy this episode.
So, Eliza, I want to tell you a little bit about this conversation I had with Anthony Bourdain in 2005 We just transferred it from a cassette tape.

**Aliza Abarbanel** (2:27)
Yeah, I walked into the studio today and Matt held up a miscellaneous object to me and said, Have you ever seen one of these before? Which I knew it was a cassette player, but this is a specific version of cassette player.

**Matt Rodbard** (2:39)
It was a yellow Sony Walkman from 1991, waterproof.

**Aliza Abarbanel** (2:42)
Yeah, it looks like a DeWalt edition cassette player. Yellow, indestructible.
Do you remember having this conversation? What was it for?

**Matt Rodbard** (2:50)
Yeah, I do. I mean, it was a really cool moment in my career. So it was in 2005, I was working in a magazine called Sync. It was a men's magazine. I was an editorial assistant or assistant editor at the time. I had met Anthony Bourdain previously. So I first met him in 2000 I'd interviewed him for my college paper on the phone for the publication of Kitchen Confidential, and he had a reading at the University of Wisconsin. I got to go and meet him at that reading. He was great. And Tony and I, I knew him. Like we knew each other over the years. I ended up working at 0.0, and he'd be in the office, and he blurred my first cookbook. So Tony and I really had a kind of distant relationship, but I always respected his work, and he respected mine. Briefly, I'll say he once called my father on the phone. This story I've told, I looked back, it was the fourth episode of the podcast I told this story when I was speaking with Therese Nelson, and it was the morning he died. And it was just like, it all kind of flowed out that morning. And I'll link to that episode in the show notes. From 2018, it's a long time ago.
Briefly, that story, for those who hadn't heard it, I had known Tony, and my dad was going through some health issues, and it was his 70th birthday, and I had gotten him a mandolin slicer. And I just thought, it was his 70th birthday, he was kind of down, and so I emailed Tony out of the blue. I had his email, his AOL account, and I emailed him over the years. And I just wrote to him, I said, you know, my dad is a huge fan. I've never really done this with literally anyone I've met since or before, it's really not my style.
So the birthday comes and goes, and he doesn't hear from Tony, and I kind of forget about it. So one month later, my dad's at home, and the phone rings, and you know, is Rick there, this is Anthony Bourdain. And he thought it was a joke, it wasn't. And Tony and my dad talked for like five minutes, and it was a really nice, they talked about the slicer, and it was a really nice exchange, and you know, Tony had been in Italy filming, and wrote me back and apologized, but had made that call, and I think my experience with Tony was always, he did so many small things behind the scenes, anonymously, things like calling a random guy's father, who he barely knew, just to be nice. He did that a lot, I think that's like been well documented. So I had, so this was after this interview that we're running here on the show, so that was like in 2014 or 15 But this 2005 interaction was probably the longest time we hung out together for the duration of his life. And basically, No Reservations had debuted his first TV show.