Your fantasy BFF Anthony Bourdain is also a hero dad. In a new interview with Made Man, the author and CNN star reveals his passion for cooking for his daughter:
I made chicken katsu for my daughter for her school lunch. I cook for my daughter’s lunch every day that I’m in New York. I cook a lot at home now that I’m a dad. ... I really love it. I’m maniacal about it. When I’m home, I smother my daughter with a choice of breakfast every morning. I try to not repeat myself on the school lunches that I pack her. Dinners are probably a little too elaborate for an eight-year-old and her friend. But I can’t help it.
Perhaps the recipe for Bourdain's lunchbox chicken katsu — or the method behind his enviable sleepover pancake bar — will make it into his upcoming cookbook, Appetites, which is slated to be released in fall 2016. The cookbook, his first in a decade, has been billed as a home cooking and entertaining book; illustrator Ralph Steadman, known for working with renegade writer Hunter S. Thompson, is handling the cover. On the book, Bourdain tells Made Man: "It’s sort of my version of Ina Garten, you know? If Ina Garten had like a gun, it would be this."
In the Made Man interview, Bourdain also reveals his favorite NYC watering hole, The Holland Bar in Hell's Kitchen. "I would highly recommend it. ... Late afternoon, professional drinkers, Deano on the jukebox. It’s perfect," he says. He also discusses his recently adopted hobby of jiu-jitsu, and declines to talk about why so many women find him attractive, noting that "my wife is a mixed martial artist who spends seven hours a day seven days a week figuring out how to maim people’s knees and ankles, so it’s not an area I’d really like to explore."