Anthony Bourdain Knew Mexican Food Was Never Just Food

What Bourdain Knew That America Didn't

Anthony Bourdain ate everything. Sea urchin in Japan. Warthog rectum in Namibia. A raw seal eyeball in the Canadian Arctic. The man had no borders when it came to food, which is precisely what made his reverence for Mexican cuisine so pointed. Because Bourdain was not easy to impress.

His first professional encounter with Mexico happened while filming A Cook's Tour for the Food Network, when he traveled to Puebla with a Mexican cook from the New York restaurant Brasserie Les Halles, heading to the cook's hometown of Izúcar de Matamoros. What he found there dismantled whatever assumptions he might have carried across the border. He ate escamoles, enchiladas, and mole poblano, and tasted pulque, the viscous pre-Hispanic fermented drink made from maguey sap. An infatuation was born.

He returned to Mexico City twice over the course of his television career, once for No Reservations and again for Parts Unknown. Between those visits, he also spent time in Oaxaca, Baja, Puebla, and the border towns straddling Texas and Tamaulipas. In Oaxaca's Teotitlán del Valle, he ate tlayudas and squash blossom soup with chef Abigail Mendoza, a Zapotec woman who still grinds corn by hand to make her tortillas. Bourdain was genuinely moved. Not in a performative television way. He remarked on the strength of her arms and the precision of her hands. That detail mattered to him because the labor mattered to him.

This is the part where Bourdain diverged from almost every other food personality on television. The reverence was intellectual, not aesthetic. He wasn't just charmed by the flavors. He was offended by how badly American culture had misread them. In a 2014 essay titled Under the Volcano, written to accompany a Parts Unknown episode, he laid it out plainly. Mexican cuisine, he argued, predates the great cuisines of Europe, and a proper mole sauce demands days of labor, freshly prepared ingredients, and an exacting hand. He was particularly unsparing about the American version of Mexican food, the one served in half the strip malls across the country. Melted cheese on a chip. That is what the United States decided to do with one of the most sophisticated culinary traditions on the continent.

Bourdain ate tacos al pastor on the streets of Mexico City's historic center, ate migas and drank micheladas at La Güera in Tepito, and fell for the cerdo en salsa verde and refried beans at Fonda Margarita in Colonia del Valle. He also dined at Máximo Bistrot, where a Guerrero-born chef turned migrant worker was producing food that rivaled anything he had eaten in Europe. In Baja, he encountered seafood tostada vendor Sabina Bandera, called her a genius, and later invited her to demonstrate her cooking at a street food convention in Singapore. That is not tourism. That is advocacy.

The political dimension of his appreciation was never far from the surface. He wrote publicly about the role of Mexican laborers in the American restaurant industry, noting that the entire service economy of most American cities would collapse without Mexican workers, and that in twenty years as a chef and employer, not once did an American kid walk through his door looking for a dishwashing or prep cook position. For Bourdain, separating Mexican food from Mexican people was a category error. The cuisine carried the culture. The culture carried the history. Pretending otherwise was a convenience only the willfully ignorant could afford.

He described Mexico as a brother from another mother, a country inextricably bound to the United States in ways that Americans simultaneously benefit from and refuse to acknowledge. He was not sentimental about it. He was precise. The relationship existed whether or not the United States wanted to claim it, and the food was the most honest evidence of that entanglement.

Bourdain died on June 8, 2018, at Le Chambard hotel in Kaysersberg, in the Alsace region of France, while filming a Parts Unknown episode in nearby Strasbourg. He never finished the episode. The cuisine he spent decades championing continues to be underestimated, flattened, and served with a side of sour cream to people who have never eaten a tlayuda in their lives.

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