Anthony Bourdain's Five Favourite Dishes on the Planet

Cacio e Pepe — Ristorante Roma Sparita, Rome
Bún bò Huế soup — Bún Bò Huế Kim Chau, Hue
Roasted bone marrow on toast — St. John, London
Mortadella sandwich — Bar Do Mané, São Paulo
Lièvre à la Royale — Restaurant Paul Bocuse, Lyon

Anthony Bourdain, who has just been immortalised all over again in sizzly A24 film ‘Tony’, had a tattoo on his forearm quoting the writer Michel de Montaigne: “I Suspend Judgement.” The cook-turned-writer meant judgement about other people, of course, wherever he happened to encounter them. “In the breaking of bread, he found a way to close the distance between himself and strangers the world over,” Patrick Radden Keefe once wrote. But when it came to food, his judgement was entirely unsuspended, thrillingly present — spicy, salty, laced with a strange combination of gallows humour and high philosophy. He made you yearn again for the lost prawn brains you’d never had; crave even the purple Czech blood sausage with its “touch of nutmeg; its notes of sweetness, longing and death.” And that was just a Tuesday. When Bourdain discussed his most beloved dishes on the planet, things got positively rapturous. Here are five of those.

1. Cacio e Pepe — Ristorante Roma Sparita, Rome

During an episode in season six of ‘No Reservations’, Bourdain visited Roma Sparita in the Trastevere neighbourhood of Rome and ordered their signature cacio e pepe, one of the four traditional Roman pastas. After one bite, he said: “I’m sure this is illegal somewhere.” After two: “this could be the greatest thing in the history of the world.” Realising what he had encountered, he tried to conceal the identity of the trattoria, branding it ‘Restaurant X’. But pretty much straight away the word got out, and queues now form daily in the little square by Roma Sparita — an example of the tension Bourdain felt in the work he did, that act of “killing what you love.”

2. Bún bò Huế soup — Bún Bò Huế Kim Chau, Hue

Bourdain’s recipe for happiness was simple. “Low plastic stool, check. Tiny little plastic table, check. Something delicious in a bowl, check.” He might also have added ‘a former President’, after being memorably joined at a shaky plastic dining spot by Barack Obama in Hanoi for some pork belly noodle soup. (“This is killer!” Obama said.) But it was a spot in Dong Ba Market in Hue, Vietnam, that he placed on his own Mount Rushmore of dishes. “In the hierarchy of delicious, slurpy stuff in a bowl, bún bò Huế is at the very top,” he said. “An elaborate broth of mixed bones scented with lemongrass, spice, and fermented shrimp paste, with rice noodles heaped with tender, slow-cooked beef shank, crabmeat dumplings, pig’s foot, and huyet-blood cake. It’s the greatest soup in the world — as sophisticated and complex a bowl of food as any French restaurant. It really is just the top of the mountain.”

3. Roasted bone marrow on toast — St. John, London

St. John was perhaps Bourdain’s “favourite restaurant in the world.” After finishing his first meal there, he got down on his knees and bowed to the kitchen. It was Fergus Henderson’s bone marrow on toast, which Bourdain first tried in 1999, which specifically stuck with him. "Angels sing, celestial trumpets play, six generations of one's ancestors smile down from heaven,” he wrote. “It's butter from God." Years later, he would claim the dish — “simple, austere, and luxurious” — as his preferred last meal on earth: “that roast bone marrow with parsley and caper salad, with a few toasted slices of baguette and some good sea salt,” all served “in the dining room of St. John in London, after-hours, with a cold pint of Guinness.”

4. Mortadella sandwich — Bar Do Mané, São Paulo

Bourdain called the mortadella sandwich at the almost 100-year-old Bar do Mané as São Paulo's "guilty pleasure" — a simple portuguese bun, heaped with an ungodly amount of fried, brick-pink mortadella, and then topped with optional melted cheese. It is a "rite of passage —a beloved heap of oozing awesomeness, a reflection (or mutation?) of Brazil's proud and powerful Italian dimension." Later, Bourdain was inspired to create his own version in ‘Appetites’ (2016) — this time with a kaiser roll, a little mustard and mayonnaise, and a slab of provolone melted atop the fried mortadella.

5. Lièvre à la Royale — Restaurant Paul Bocuse, Lyon

Bourdain was fascinated by the grandeur, tradition, and Lyonnais strangeness of Restaurant Paul Bocuse — a cradle of French haute cuisine, helmed by its eponymous head chef in a white hat as tall as a traffic cone. Among such gloriously gouty dishes as a black truffle soup and a truffle-stuffed chicken poached in a pig’s bladder, Bourdain fell in love with “the legendary lièvre à la royale,” a dish of wild hare, hunted by Bocuse and his pals, that has been “coated by a sauce of its own minced heart, liver and lungs, that has been thickened with its own blood … the rich glorious sauce finished with truffles and chartreuse.” The dish, adorned with cartoonish eyes upon the carcass and glistening like a chocolate fountain, was, he said, “absolutely the Lost Ark of the Covenant of cuisine ancienne.”

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