‘I am lonely’: controversial book reveals Anthony Bourdain’s final days

"God gives us meat, but the devil sends us cooks," Anthony Bourdain told the Observer two decades ago. He viewed the phrase as a compliment, and considered kitchens second homes for damned souls and "the degraded and the debauched".

At that moment, he was already well-known in New York, as author of the scandalous bestseller Kitchen Confidential and as chef and co-owner of Les Halles, a French brasserie on Park Avenue that for a time became the favored spot for the creative demimonde.

His notoriety was soon to soar: he refashioned the job of the celebrity chef, puncturing the self-importance of the species; he infused the job with sex appeal and with intensity. He produced three seasons of globe-trotting food adventure, a run that made him a global star.

Yet 17 years later, Bourdain met his end in a provincial hotel in Kaysersberg, France, killing himself at the tail end of doomed relationship with Asia Argento, the actor and daughter of an Italian horror film director.

Bourdain's charismatic approach to cooking and to life, and his spiral down, will be revived four years after his death on publication next week of Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain.

The book is already setting off a wave of controversy among Bourdain's huge fanbase, as well as his friends and relatives, who claim that journalist Charles Leerhsen's account of Bourdain's life is a slur on his memory. But it has also been praised as a frank retelling of a complex man's life.

Either way, it will still keep Bourdain firmly in the spotlight - something that he perhaps once sought but came to hate.