“These were the hardest interviews I’ve ever done, hands down,” he told me. In 2019, about a year after Bourdain’s death, the documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville began talking to people who had been close to Bourdain: his family, his friends, the producers and crew of his television series. The singularity of his celebrity and the suddenness of his death have fuelled an uncommonly intense, uncommonly enduring grief-a personal sense of public loss, of a sort usually reserved for popes and Presidents. Bourdain was a television megastar, a fluid and conversational writer, a social-media gadfly, a pointed cultural commentator, and seemingly everyone’s best friend. “I wish Anthony Bourdain was here to see this,” countless people have tweeted over the past thirty-seven-ish months, on occasions as varied as a New York gubernatorial candidate ordering a cinnamon-raisin bagel, the White House serving a McDonald’s banquet, the collapse of the American restaurant industry, and the sputtering attempts to revive the same. It’s been three years since Anthony Bourdain died, by suicide, in June of 2018, and the void he left is still a void.
