In June each year the Goons of Tough Guy Book Club meet up with their local Chapters for annual Bourdain Day dinners at their favourite restaurants, bistros, and watering holes. Anthony Bourdain believed that the best conversations happened over a fantastic meal, and it’s safe to say that he hasn’t been proven wrong about this yet.
For some of us here at TGBC, our culinary experience begins and ends with our overused air fryers and grimy microwave ovens. Cooking truly is up there with creative feats like writing and painting. Bourdain knew this, and used food as a medium to strike up conversations in some truly inspiring ways, meeting figures like Barack Obama, Chuck Plahniuk, and Alice Cooper.
Anthony Bourdain himself is a world-famous chef, having hosted many a successful television show, written books about his culinary experience, and has been openly vocal about his history with narcotics and mental health challenges. Bourdain passed away in 2018 at the age of 61. His life story is one worth well exploring even if you aren’t remotely interested in the culinary scene and cannot be done justice in a summary like this. Bourdain Day was started by some of his closest friends to celebrate his life and legacy. Here at the TGBC, we’ve adopted this brilliant idea, marking Bourdain Day as one our finest traditions, meeting on June 25 (or as close as we can), his birthday, for an evening out focused on good food and great company.
It is a genuine highlight being able to see how well everyone’s dinners went, most posing pictures and videos from the night in Pool Hall, TGBC’s private social media page. We had some insight into the varied locations, their meals, topics of conversations, choice of poems! Poetry reading is an added bonus for Bourdain Day, with the TGBC Challenge for the month being #Poetry26, pushing our Goons to read a poem out loud to an audience. A perfect setting to tick this one off!
It was cool to see some of our Goons from Los Angeles pose in front of a mural artwork of Bourdain during their dinner, well done guys! Reading stories of Goons recreating dinners Bourdain enjoyed while visiting Melbourne almost two decades ago is a commitment too. A special shout out goes to the Goons from Nhulunbuy who set up a quiet spot along the beach, built a fire, and cracked open a few cold ones. You guys rocked.
We like to think that all Chapter Bourdain Day dinners deserve their place in the sun, so if you know the person who organised your evening out, send him a message or buy him a beer; Organising those reservations can sometimes be deceptively hard! Be sure to send those magnificent photos to the Pool Hall if you haven’t already.
All in all, it’s the company that you enjoy most, and it’s always a genuine pleasure to find an excuse to hang out with these awesome people one more night of the month. We’ve all got a few more pages to add to our story because of these dinners, and it’s always exciting to see what’s happening at other Chapters tables, as well as your own.
By Mitchell T Porteous
