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Eric Ripert, who was close friends with Anthony Bourdain, says the late author, chef and television host was “very methodical and very clean” in the kitchen
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Chef Eric Ripert reminisces on his late friend Anthony Bourdain’s cooking skills in an interview with PEOPLE
Ripert makes a cameo in the new movie Tony, which is based on the opening chapters of Bourdain’s 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential
Dominic Sessa stars as a young Bourdain in Tony, in limited theaters Aug. 7 and everywhere Aug. 21
Anthony Bourdain may have been a celebrity chef, but his longtime friend and colleague Eric Ripert says the man behind the memoir Kitchen Confidential and travel and food shows like Parts Unknown did not like to talk up his own cooking abilities.
Ripert, the 61-year-old French chef behind the famed New York City-based restaurant Le Bernardin, recently sat down with PEOPLE to discuss the new movie Tony, based on Bourdain’s first experience working in a restaurant in Provincetown, Mass. during a summer in the 1970s at 19 years old. (Dominic Sessa portrays Bourdain in the movie; the chef, author and television host died at 61 in 2018.)
“I remember vividly one day he made linguini vongole, and I was like, ‘Whoa, man. I don’t know where you learn how to make those pastas, but they are amazing,’” Ripert says, while recalling meals he and Bourdain shared together over the years. “He was actually an excellent cook, an excellent technician. When you were going to his kitchen, it was very much like a professional kitchen, and he enjoyed that very much.”
Ripert shares that Bourdain often recreated what chefs dub the “mise en place” — everything they need to create meals in a restaurant setting efficiently — in his own personal kitchen. “But usually we do that for volume. And he was duplicating that in his own kitchen in his house, which I very amused by. He was really working like a professional chef who’s working in a restaurant, although it was a meal for six people,” Ripert adds, with a laugh. “He was very methodical and very clean and very organized.”
Bourdain famously wrote in his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential that he did not necessarily feel like an expert in cooking Italian food for years into his career as a professional chef. “Anthony very often was very humble about his knowledge in cooking and was downplaying the knowledge,” Ripert says. “He was actually, like I mentioned previously, an excellent, excellent cook. . . The cook is the core of a good chef. He [liked] to downplay his own talent.”
Tony, which also features Antonio Banderas, Leo Woodall, Emilia Jones, Stavros Halkias, Rich Sommer and Dagmara Domińczyk in its cast, is adapted from the opening chapters of Kitchen Confidential. Ripert even makes a cameo in the movie, which comes just over eight years after Bourdain’s sudden death, as an instructor at the Culinary Institute of America, where Bourdain received a formal education in cooking after his time working behind the counter in Provincetown.
When Ripert ponders his friendship with Bourdain today, he says he still considers the man “a dear friend.” “I think about someone who was very smart. I think about someone who was very talented . . . He was someone who had a lot of charisma,” Ripert says. “I felt very safe with him, like nothing wrong could happen. We traveled together in locations that were sometimes interesting; we shot an episode in the middle of the jungle in Peru, and I was not necessarily that comfortable, but next to him, I was like, ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’ And actually, nothing happened.”
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Tony is in limited theaters Aug. 7 and expands everywhere Aug. 21.
Read the original article on People
