Northerners remember Anthony Bourdain's adventurous spirit

Editor's note: This story contains graphic language.

Anthony Bourdain's work showcased people and their food through his series Parts Unknown — a label that could apply to Canada's North, a place unfamiliar to many around the world.

Bourdain was a chef and TV host best known for his memoir on kitchen life, Kitchen Confidential, and a series of TV travel programs.

He was found unresponsive Friday morning by a friend while they were travelling in France, according to CNN, which airs Parts Unknown. French officials and CNN both said Bourdain died by suicide.

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Bourdain visited Canada several times during his career, including one episode where he ate a seal feast with an Inuit family in Northern Quebec.

The family butchered the seal and shared it with him, giving him the eyeball, which he called "an act of pure generosity and kindness to an honoured guest."

"[It's] a mix of blood-soaked butchery and loving nourishment, a meal unlike any other I've ever experienced," he said in the episode. "I do feel genuinely lucky and grateful to have seen this. That these people have let me into their home and shared this with me."      

He also spoke out against a ban on seal hunting because it "dooms the Indigenous people above the Arctic Circle to death or relocation."

Whitehorse chef Jason McRobb, met Bourdain in Victoria in 2000, when McRobb was a young chef and Bourdain was in town for a reading of his book Nasty Bits.

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"He was super friendly," says McRobb who took his copy of Bourdain's breakout memoir  Kitchen Confidential to have it autographed.  "It was dogeared, and food was on it, and it was falling apart, McRobb said.

"He saw it and laughed, and when he signed it, he wrote, 'To Jay, for fuck's sake buy a new copy!'"

McRobb credits Kitchen Confidential for inspiring him to become a chef in the first place. "His lifestyle and kicking butt in the kitchen, really inspired me to go down the path I have."  

Kim Burke echoed the sentiment.

She works at Bullock's Bistro in Yellowknife, which with its mom-and-pop style would fit in on one of his programs. For the past year she tried to connect with Bourdain's production team about shooting an episode in the Northwest Territories.

"Yellowknife has everything he'd showcase. It has food, it has culture, politics, beauty and a lot of beer," Burke said. "The fact he went all over the world looking a different cultures through food, it's kind of the opposite at Bullocks, all of the cultures from all over the world come here."

Burke first encountered Bourdain through his books while starting her career in Toronto. He inspired her to want to experience other cultures and new people through food.

"It's the easiest way to learn about a culture, talking and eating at the same time, sharing food," she said. "It's a pleasant way to be."