Anthony Bourdain regularly suicidal after end of first marriage

On TV shows such as “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown,” chef Anthony Bourdain presented the image of an alpha male of the world.

Beneath the swagger and mischievous grin, however, loomed a history of lethally destructive behavior. Soon after his first marriage ended in 2005, as Bourdain related in his book “Medium Raw,” he was “aimless and regularly suicidal” during a stretch in the Caribbean. He recounted getting drunk and stoned — “the kind of drunk where you’ve got to put a hand over one eye to see straight” — and said he would “peel out” in his 4×4 on his way back from nightly trips to the brothels.

His state of mind improved upon meeting a woman in London. At that point, wrote Bourdain, “my nightly attempts at suicide ended.”

But on Friday, the chef-turned-star was found dead from an apparent suicide in a room at the luxurious Le Chambard Hotel in Kaysersberg, France. He was 61 and had reportedly hanged himself with the belt of his bathrobe.

A self-acknowledged reformed addict of heroin and cocaine — “I would have robbed your medicine cabinet had I been invited to your house,” he confessed in a 2013 Ask Me Anything session on Reddit — Bourdain was loved by those in the food world and beyond.

“He taught us about food — but more importantly, about its ability to bring us together. To make us a little less afraid of the unknown,” Barack Obama tweeted. The former president made a memorable appearance on “Parts Unknown,” joining Bourdain for noodles and beer in a Hanoi restaurant with plastic stools.

Adventurous, literary and real, Bourdain redefined the idea of the celebrity chef with his culinary travel shows “No Reservations” on the Travel Channel and CNN’s “Parts Unknown,” both of which emphasized the exploration of global cultures beyond just food. Characterized as “the Hemingway of gastronomy” by British chef Marco Pierre White, Bourdain brought Vietnam’s fetal duck eggs, Italy’s homemade pastas and Japan’s silkiest sushi into millions of homes with cable TV.

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