[HN Gopher] Anthony Bourdain's Lost Li.st's
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Anthony Bourdain's Lost Li.st's
I read through the years about Bourdain's content on the defunct
li.st service, but was never able to find an archive of it. A more
thorough perusing of archive.org and a pointer from an Internet
stranger led me to create this site. Cheers
Author : gregsadetsky
Score : 200 points
Date : 2025-11-26 07:03 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (bourdain.greg.technology)
(TXT) w3m dump (bourdain.greg.technology)
| yawpitch wrote:
| Hands down the funniest thing I ever saw, live and in person, was
| Anthony Bourdain staring with naked, enraptured joy at the woman
| doing the American Sign Language translation of what he'd just
| said, then stopping just after she did to let us all know that "I
| just had to know what it looks like to sign 'felching Mrs.
| Butterworth.'"
|
| Thank you, Tony, wherever you are... if for nothing else, then
| for the Pho Chay I the Lunch Lady made just for my newly
| vegetarian self in Saigon.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| I went to the 'Obama restaurant' in Hanoi for bun cha (not
| vegetarian) more so because Anthony Bourdain. Like a good
| American I smoked a Cuban cigar afterwards in a cigar bar under
| an image of Che Guevara I passed on the way back to the hotel
| which was out of the way likely guided by Tony's spirit if such
| things exist. Nonetheless, the Bun Cha up in the mountains of
| Sa Pa is better as are Dominican cigars.
| linhns wrote:
| I'm a local from Hanoi, always surprised with Bourdain
| picking that place to eat with pres Obama (I still believe
| because of presidential food safety standards). I'd not pick
| that place any day of the week. Having lived in Singapore as
| well, RIP Anthony, but your picks aren't that great.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| They picked it because it was a spur of the moment decision
| -- not planned. Their concern according to Boudain was not
| having the president in line of sight from the outside of
| the building.
| SoleilAbsolu wrote:
| It's honestly hard to think of a better title for the
| definitive Anthony Bourdain biography then "Felching Mrs.
| Butterworth"!
| deeptishukla22 wrote:
| Bourdain had a way of writing that made even throwaway lines feel
| meaningful, but so much of that era of content is basically
| disappearing. It's nice to see someone do the unglamorous work of
| gathering the fragments before they fade completely.
| t0lo wrote:
| It's funny because his, and Chuck Palahniuk's (fight club, etc)
| way of seeing the world- that brand of anti corporate- pro
| human- enjoy the waste- cynicism seemed so permanent and
| authentic- and like nothing could take it away from you- it
| felt like a staple of the human experience that was a place you
| could go to in your mind.
|
| It's amazing to see how quickly that all got shovelled away and
| replaced with productised, streamlined, sterile groupthink- and
| one in which authentic sexuality and sex jokes are shunned. I
| think in some part he knew which way this world was heading and
| made a decision based off of that.
|
| As a young person who stakes a lot of my headspace in the
| former, it's definitely an interesting, ridiculously two faced
| and contradictory cultural moment we're in right now.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| Have to love the content about how some sociopathic crazy guy
| is so "successful".
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| If you're lumping together Bourdain and Palahniuk I think
| you've completely failed to understand Bourdain.
|
| And then diagnosing his suicide as a result of your apparent
| culture war grievances over sex jokes is just revolting
| behavior.
| t0lo wrote:
| If you've read Bourdain's books and gone beyond just
| skimming his TV shows you'll know they share deeply similar
| writing and irreverent humour- talking about every type of
| escape and prank- from summers tripping on acid rooting
| everyone he could find to working for the mafia as a chef
| to pay off his heroin addiction. And it's reductive to
| think that just because someone is talking about sex jokes
| they're interested in 'culture wars'. Is it revolting for
| him to have essentially predicted his own death in the same
| way?
|
| I miss him a lot, his passing affected me far more than
| that of most public figures, but I won't sanitise my memory
| of him or pretend his humour, or his way of seeing the
| world was cookie cutter. That, to me, is far more
| revolting.
| serf wrote:
| Palahniuk and Bourdain both talk about the fringes of
| 'punk' topics, but they have a totally different voice
| and objectives for doing so.
|
| To me it sounds something like pairing up Brian Cox and
| Neil Degrasse Tyson, I mean they both talk about black
| holes..
|
| For what it's worth, and i've read just about everything
| from both of those authors, Palahniuk is usually trying
| to illicit a feeling from the reader, be it disgust,
| ennui and nostalgia for a different time, or anger
| towards whatever 'the system' is at the momnent. He uses
| relatable anecdote to do so. His writing, in that vain,
| is very similar to Phillip Dick (who wrote 'a Scanner
| Darkly' from a lot of first-hand experiences)
|
| Bourdain had similar prose mannerisms and favorite
| topics, but his objective was to instill wanderlust and
| an interest in the human spirit. Camaraderie, and hope
| for future opportunities to experience far away lands. A
| desire to seek more experiences regardless of what lesser
| prices and inconveniences must be paid in order to do so.
|
| as a guy who grew up as a punk rocker in so-cal Palahniuk
| strikes me as the friend that couldn't make the show
| because ,even though he loves the band and the venue ,
| there is homework due tomorrow -- whereas Bourdain always
| struck me as one of the folks i'd have woken up next to
| in someone elses' car the morning after the show and gone
| out to get breakfast with and talk about the night.
|
| There is more difference between those two types of
| personality than I can write about, even if they
| gravitate around the same stuff.
|
| I miss Bourdain.
| bravura wrote:
| Agreed, to me they are very different takes on what is a
| punk attitude.
|
| Palahniuk: Underneath the veneer of the banal, you will
| discover everything is rotten and sycophantic but somehow
| tender and relatable.
|
| Bourdain: Underneath the veneer of the banal, you will
| discover an honest struggle for something far more
| respectable than what is typically venerated. Eat their
| food, dance to their music, and you will enjoy.
| CPLX wrote:
| I'm a dyed in the wool GenX-er and I think the comment
| you're responding to has insight.
|
| For those of us that grew up in the punk-rock anti-
| corporate adbusters rage against the machine WTO protest
| era the current culture around commerce and wealth is a
| disorienting hellscape.
|
| The boomers and their children, the millennials, were wrong
| in their belief that fashion choices and good vibe thinking
| by the affluent set would lead to a better culture.
|
| Should have listened to the Nirvana generation a little
| more. Turns out the cynicism was justified.
| builtawall wrote:
| It was amazing how fast the anti-globalization/anti-
| corporate attitudes evaporated away in the wake of 9/11.
|
| 100,000 mostly normal people traveled to Quebec City to
| protest the FTAA in April 2001.
|
| By the end of that year that kind of thing was anti-
| patriotic, and very much a taboo subject, at least in the
| mainstream culture.
| lurk2 wrote:
| Anti-corporate attitudes were completely normalized in
| the 2000s and arguably only really lulled during the
| mid-2010s. There were several films from that period that
| featured countercultural messaging:
|
| Disney's Incredibles had allusions to Kafka
|
| Monster's Inc. is a commentary on corporate vampirism.
|
| Kingdom of Heaven was if not a commentary on the Global
| War on Terror at least a bold film to have released 4
| years after 9/11.
|
| The second Pirates of the Caribbean film was a (childish)
| commentary on global empire and rationalization
| eliminating places for the human person to live freely.
|
| The Corporation, Capitalism: A Love Story, and Supersize
| Me were all released post-9/11. They screened Supersize
| Me in elementary and high schools when it was released.
|
| Anti-globalization as a movement completely collapsed
| during the Occupy Wall Street protests. These movements
| had attitudes towards international mobility rights that
| completely undermined organized labor. Most of them
| recognized what impacts illegals were having on these
| industries but took the position that labor solidarity
| would somehow make everyone better off. This could have
| worked in theory except that they had no operational plan
| to enact this solidarity and the illegals were never
| interested in it to begin with.
|
| Once the bankers realized that they could just pay off
| the OWS leadership with fake email jobs, you started to
| see the conventional partisan divide on globalism that we
| observe today, with liberals being in favor of it and
| conservatives opposed to it.
| jghn wrote:
| As someone who is of the appropriate age & resonates with
| what you say: this doesn't account for the fact that
| Gen-X is the most MAGA generation.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| At the risk of stepping into USA POL (which is quite
| polarised)
|
| MAGA is a Right wing response to corporates - they put
| all their faith into someone who they thought was going
| to take to the "elites" who they believed were
| responsible for the corporates being able to r*pe and
| pillage through society.
|
| The Left wing response was Occupy Wall street and such.
|
| On a similar note skinheads had a far left branch and a
| far right branch (the far right is what skinheads are now
| primarily seen as)
| jghn wrote:
| On paper, yes. But just like the tea party, and how
| "libertarian" has been completely coopted, they're really
| just tools for the same corporate interests as before.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| I mean, yes, that's where things are ending up (IMO), but
| I am only talking about why people chose that pathway.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > MAGA is a Right wing response to corporates
|
| No, it's a cynical marketing exercise designed to make
| people think that.
|
| They're just selling hats. Hats that are costing way, way
| more than the sticker price, especially for the people
| who buy them.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > No, it's a cynical marketing exercise designed to make
| people think that.
|
| The grandparent comment is referring to MAGA the
| demographic, not MAGA the political machine. How could
| the political machine have sold hats (or immigration
| policy, or tariffs) if no one in the broader movement
| wanted to buy them?
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Marketing. They've got to sell the idea somehow.
|
| Otherwise how would a serial failed businessman get so
| much traction? It's all marketing.
| lurk2 wrote:
| Trump did not create the support for border control and
| immigration enforcement among the American general
| public. He won because these policies were third rails
| for anyone involved in establishment politics, whose
| donors rely on illegal immigrants to undermine organized
| labor.
| woodruffw wrote:
| From my vantage point, Anthony Bourdain is immensely popular
| with friends of all kinds of political and cultural flavors.
| I actually can't think of a single person I know who
| _dislikes_ Anthony Bourdain. If there's some kind of cultural
| headwind against his style, it certainly isn't manifest in
| mainstream consumer culture itself.
| decimalenough wrote:
| I'm personally a fan of Tony, but there's no denying that
| he was quite often an asshole. He was notoriously demanding
| of his crew, dumped his first wife after he got famous,
| dumped his second wife and child when he met an Italian
| actress half his age, nepo'd her to shittily direct some
| episodes and fired his cameraman when he dared complain,
| etc etc.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think he was a nice person. I also don't
| particularly like or dislike him, but I think the idea
| that he's some sort of representative of a lost time in
| American cultural values is basically incorrect -- he
| exists in a large and extremely popular "gonzo" pantheon
| that is basically a direct production of American
| cultural values.
| EnPissant wrote:
| I quite disliked him. He always came off as a smug asshole,
| and I think the evidence backs that up.
|
| His core shtick was being a food hipster which often
| involved putting down others preferences to prove how
| superior he was. For example saying that a Chicken McNugget
| was the most disgusting thing he has ever eaten.
|
| He treated his staff like trash on one hand while publicly
| proclaiming "Mistreat the floor staff and you are dead to
| me." for cool guy points.
|
| Add to that the incredible narcissism of dumping both his
| wives for younger women as soon as he could, but then
| playing the victim when his new younger wife cheats on him.
| rgovostes wrote:
| Awesome. I refer to https://bourdain.greg.technology/#food-im-
| thinking-about about once a year. One of my favorite vacations
| was going to a different hawker stall on his list each night in
| Singapore. Unsurprisingly, his picks are all pretty good, and #1
| is justified in crowning the list.
| t0lo wrote:
| Also for general bourdain tourism- eat like bourdain is a
| really passionate and fleshed out blog that tells you where and
| what he ate in each city/country. I use it pretty frequently.
|
| https://eatlikebourdain.com/
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| I've never ordered it, it always looks so incredibly bland, am
| I missing something here?
| dewey wrote:
| If you would order it once, you could stop wondering if you
| are missing something.
| zrail wrote:
| Chicken and rice is anything but bland. I haven't had
| Hainanese style but the Thai style khao man gai that Nong's
| serves in Portland is a flavor that I still remember more
| than a decade later.
| decimalenough wrote:
| The chicken is indeed bland, although the non-canonical
| roasted version is more flavorful than the traditional
| poached one. The rice, which is cooked in chicken stock and
| spices, is anything but, but it's the fresh chili sauce that
| really makes it zing, in the same way that wasabi makes
| "bland" sushi work.
|
| Tian Tian is overrated and not worth the lines though. Every
| Singaporean has their favorite but I like Loy Kee, partly
| thanks to their amazing slogan, "Chicken Lickin' Good".
|
| https://order.loykee.com.sg/
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Oh! #1 ended up with a Bib Gourmand from Michelin later that
| year.
| M1kelawrence wrote:
| Thanks
| villaaston1 wrote:
| Maybe someone here knows the creators of li.st and we can get the
| missing lists back online?
| barrenko wrote:
| Gentle reminder that the /kitchenconfidential reddit is a fun
| place to occasionally visit.
| specproc wrote:
| As someone who's worked in plenty of kitchens, I can thoroughly
| recommend the book. Totally nails kitchen culture.
|
| There's this one chapter where he just rolls through a day at
| work, it's so good. A phenomenal writer, much missed.
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| Didn't know he was such a fan of rap, interesting point about
| brioche buns.
|
| Also: "Karaoke should only be performed with people who have
| already seen your genitals." :D
| astura wrote:
| I absolutely love brioche buns but I only eat veggie burgers,
| and they make a lot more sense for veggie burgers.
| kawie wrote:
| thank you!!!
| gausswho wrote:
| In the SCARY SHIT!!! Things I find genuinely terrifying section:
|
| > Switzerland: I think I must have experienced some awful
| childhood trauma in view of a mural of snow capped peaks and Lake
| Geneva. I live with a persistent dread of alpine vistas, chalet
| architecture, Tyrolean hats, even cheese with holes in it. You
| will notice I have never been there. That's because Switzerland
| frightens me.
|
| Huh. He was just over the border from there when he was finished.
| pimlottc wrote:
| It looks like the original URL for Anthony's profile on li.st was
| https://li.st/Bourdain/
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20181204232645/https://li.st/Bou...
| fredoliveira wrote:
| One of the few people that has a voice (written and otherwise) so
| distinctive that even reading those lists, I read them in his
| voice. I miss that guy.
| pimlottc wrote:
| There used to be a mirror of the Wayback Machine [0][1] hosted at
| the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt [2]. Sometimes you could
| pull pages from them that otherwise errored out on the main
| archive.org site. Sadly, it seems the mirror has been offline [3]
| for some years now.
|
| 0:
| https://www.bibalex.org/en/News/Details?DocumentID=1550&Keyw...
|
| 1:
| https://www.bibalex.org/isis/frontend/projects/ProjectDetail...
|
| 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina
|
| 3: http://web.archive.bibalex.org
| W-Stool wrote:
| Was there ever a cooler guy who could actually write? I don't
| think so.
|
| Anyone who rates "Dr. Strangelove" as a great movie is OK by me.
| bink wrote:
| For those who haven't read it yet, the book "In the Weeds" does a
| pretty good job of showing the hidden side of Bourdain (if there
| was such a thing). He was as imperfect as you might imagine. I
| personally enjoyed learning how cruel he could be as I always had
| a tremendous amount of respect for him and it made him more human
| to me.
|
| They even cover an incident where the crew played a practical
| joke on him with a clown (his fear is mentioned in a li.st).
| randycupertino wrote:
| Down and Out in Paradise by Charles Leersen about Bourdain was
| also very interesting, highlighted how predatory his ex Asia
| Argento was with him (financial abuse- he constantly wired her
| money and paid her 400k sexual assault settlement for her
| statutory raping a 17-year old, cheating on him with multiple
| people including Hugo Clement, constant drama, supplying him
| with drugs, emotional neglect when he was struggling with
| depression).
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59366129-down-and-out-in...
|
| His final text to her was "you were reckless with my heart."
|
| https://people.com/food/anthony-bourdain-asia-argento-last-t...
| jonah wrote:
| So very very sad.
|
| Take care of your loved ones (but also take care of
| yourself)!
| EnPissant wrote:
| He dumped his wife and abandoned his child to be with this
| woman 18 years younger than him, and he used drugs his entire
| adult life, long before he met her. No, I would not describe
| her as a predator.
| bink wrote:
| What's the source on the claim that he used drugs his
| entire adult life? I thought he had been sober from heroin
| for decades and only drank alcohol. Additionally, I'm not
| sure doing drugs alone qualifies one as a bad person.
| thadk wrote:
| It seems like li.st was founded by
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._J._Novak#The_List_App --
| unlikely to show on HN but maybe someone knows him.
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| I got to cross something off my bucket list - I just LinkedIn
| message'd B. J. Novak about this.....! Thanks for digging!
|
| If anyone can find a contact for Devin Flaherty, let me know!
| Cheers
| walletdrainer wrote:
| devflaherty at the google email service, linked to a now-
| deleted LinkedIn account
| lurk2 wrote:
| > The app allowed users to make lists.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRNEUc5k7Jw
| adamm255 wrote:
| WUPHF
| DocTomoe wrote:
| As someone who was mildly familiar with Bourdain ("some sort of
| American TV cook", some badly-dubbed shows in our private TV
| channels which didn't really catch on, because 'cooking show')
| until he decided to end it ...
|
| ... it is fascinating to me that one person, especially in a very
| niche profession, has had that kind of cultural impact that his
| random writing is being discussed seven years after his death.
| comrh wrote:
| He was really more of a writer then a celebrity TV chef. His
| travel shows caught on because of his eloquence and PoV.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| his show was what inspired me to leave san Francisco and travel
| the world fulltime.
|
| rest in peace king.
| rishabhaiover wrote:
| If there's anyone who can sell you to travel, it's Bourdain.
| Travel deep, travel in mundane streets without the thirst to
| capture each moment.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| greg.technology is a great person for putting time and effort
| into this. Faith in humanity restored!
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