Tony Bourdain died six years ago, ending the near-decade I spent as his assistant. I have yet to disable my “ Anthony Bourdain ” Google Alert, which is how I became aware of Omnivore , the Apple TV+ deep-dive food series executive produced by René Redzepi, chef of the world-renowned Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, and writer Matt Goulding, who published three books under Bourdain’s imprint. Tony was also an investor-partner in Roads & Kingdoms, the travel website Goulding started with journalist Nathan Thornburgh.
Being associated with an icon like Bourdain opens lots of doors. It also invites lopsided comparisons and near-impossible expectations. There will be no “next Bourdain,” no show that picks up where Parts Unknown left off, because he was a singular phenomenon, forged in a specific time in American media, with an unreproducible combination of experience, charisma, and a darkness that, at its best, could be harnessed for comedy (and at worst, caused him to take his own life).
Each episode of Omnivore focuses on a single ingredient — chiles, salt, tuna, bananas, pigs, rice, coffee and corn — moving with it from production to distribution to sale and consumption. In its reverence for hard-working people making honest things, and in the way it uses the lens of worldwide food cultivation practices to ask open-ended questions and disavow easy answers, it shares DNA with Bourdain’s work. But it owes a far larger (and openly acknowledged) debt to Sir David At.