The One Meal Anthony Bourdain Always Skipped No Matter What

Though he passed away in 2018, Anthony Bourdain — renowned chef, TV host, documentary subject, author of Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, and intrepid eater — remains a legend. His vast knowledge and varied opinions about food are a continuing source of wisdom and amusement. Yet throughout his career, while he ate and talked or wrote about all the foods he loved, Bourdain harbored contempt for one ever-popular meal trend: brunch.

Yes, Mr. Bourdain did not like brunch, especially from a line cook's perspective. "We despise hollandaise, home fries, those pathetic fruit garnishes, and all the other cliché accompaniments designed to induce a credulous public into paying $12.95 for two eggs," Bourdain infamously wrote for The New Yorker in 1999. He doubled down on brunch again in 2017 while appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, saying that, "brunch is a horrible, cynical way of unloading leftovers and charging three times as much as you ordinarily charge for breakfast." 

So, despite brunches' glamorous reputation and association with 10 am cocktails and treat-yourself weekends, according to Anthony Bourdain, it's little more than a cash grab. While it's hard to resist a morning mimosa, given Bourdain's illustrious career and in-depth experience in the industry, we're inclined to take his word on this. 

It wasn't just brunch that Anthony Bourdain took issue with. In fact, he disliked many popular food trends that have swept through kitchens and made their appearance on restaurant menus over the years. One of Bourdain's most hated trends was chefs dismantling premium Kobe beef to turn it into hamburgers — particularly sliders. "The Kobe craze really annoyed me," Bourdain said in an interview with The Seattle Times in 2009. "Most of the practitioners had no real understanding of the product and were abusing and exploiting it in terrible and ridiculous ways. Kobe beef should not be used in a hamburger — it's completely pointless." 

Bourdain also claimed on his appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that he did not understand the juice bar craze and that he thought avocado toast was highly overrated. He was also wary about craft cocktail culture and mixology (noting that a good drink in a bar shouldn't take an age to make) and associated the raw food movement with "angry rabbits" and "flatulence." So, there you have it.