Anthony Bourdain's history with Houston
By Jody Schmal and Greg Morago
June 8, 2018
In 2001, Houston barbecue pitmaker David Klose got a call from a TV producer asking if he would be willing to host a New York chef at his pit factory and take him out for great barbecue at a local joint.
"Just don't send me a chef with that froufrou hair, because we'll tear him apart," Klose said, referencing the rough-and-tumble welders and crew at his shop.
He need not have worried: That chef was Anthony Bourdain, who at the time was working on a barbecue-focused episode of his still-fairly-new Food Network show, "A Cook's Tour."
Klose had never heard of Bourdain, who died Friday at 61, but felt an immediate kinship when they met.
"I looked at his eyes," Klose recalled. "I said, 'yep, you are one of us.' He was crazy as a loon. He'd been around, you know what I mean? He was sharp. I don't think there was very much in life that got past him."
That was one of several visits Bourdain made to Houston over the years, for both TV shows and speaking engagements. While he was in town he dabbled in our restaurant scene – Klose took him for ribs at Burns BBQ in Acres Homes, by the way – and made an impression on many people he encountered.
During a trip in the 1990s, Bourdain dined at Mai's restaurant in Midtown. Years later, he said it was his favorite place to eat in Houston.
"From my limited time in Houston," he told the Chronicle in a 2010 interview, "I've come to believe it has some of the best Vietnamese (food) in the country, if not the best."
The acknowledgment profoundly affected business, said Mai's general manager Anna Pham.
"That he remembered his experience here was such an honor," Pham said of her mother Mai Nguyen's restaurant. "In our history at Mai's we will always go back to that time when we were truly a hole in the wall restaurant. It put us on the map."
Later that year, she was able to tell him how much his words meant to her family – who were in the process of reopening the restaurant after a devastating fire – during one of his speaking engagements presented by Society for the Performing Arts at Jones Hall.
"He helped bring notice to the Vietnamese community in Houston and allowed people to embrace it," Pham said. "He had such enthusiasm."
In 2012, Bourdain returned to Jones Hall, this time with chef Eric Ripert on a tour called "Good vs. Evil." Ripert found Bourdain unresponsive in his hotel room Friday morning in France. His death was called a suicide.
Kathryn Lott, Society for the Performing Arts' then-director of operations, was struck by the closeness between the two men.
"They were genuine friends," she said. "He opened up so much more around Eric. When they were in their dressing rooms, they were nonstop inseparable."
Lott also noted that Bourdain always made sure he had local craft beer in his dressing room, and commented positively to her on the selection from Saint Arnold.
More:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/restaurants-bars/article/Anthony-Bourdain-s-history-with-Houston-12978378.php
