Anthony Bourdain Would Happily Forget About Dessert And Eat This Instead

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The late, great Anthony Bourdain was a man of many opinions. Many of them were so strongly and eloquently worded that people couldn't help but have their tastes influenced by them. From his iconic grandma rule for eating during travels to his potato bun manifesto for burgers, Bourdain's thoughts on food were worth taking seriously. This is why it was so surprising when he said that if he were to lose one course for the rest of his life, it would be dessert.

His reason for doing away with the course, however, isn't because he found it disgusting; Bourdain had eaten plenty of horrendous things throughout his storied career and was pretty vocal about his experiences, so we'd have known if he thought it was gross. In fact, he's talked about his favorite dessert. The actual reason he would've preferred to skip dessert, surprisingly, is ambivalence, plain and simple. He just didn't care for it: "I just don't like dessert. I'm not good at pastries. I can't bake... I also don't expect people to listen to me when I talk about desserts. I'm on record as saying I don't care about them," he shared with Publishers Weekly. In that same interview, he said he'd rather linger after the meal with some port wine and stinky cheese. Bourdain felt so strongly about the matter that, in his book "Appetites," the chapter on desserts consists of just one page telling readers to serve a cheese course instead.

Anthony Bourdain made it clear that his preferred meal ender would be a glass of port and stinky cheese, but given how open he was about experiencing different foods, it's easy to imagine how else he might have capped off his dinner. Stinky cheese can be paired with a variety of wines, for instance, so it's possible he would have enjoyed a glass of gamay to go with something like a Limburger. If we approach it by building around Bourdain's top wine picks, then we'd have an assortment of Burgundies served with cheeses from the same region, such as a Reblochon, or a goat cheese, such as Charolais. He also liked a good bourbon, which pairs with cheese rather nicely itself.

Bourdain's well-documented outspokenness is probably the best legacy he could've left behind for his fans, since it lets us get a feel for how he might've appreciated food. While his views on dessert can be considered unconventional, knowing what his alternative would have been gives us all something new to try. If you want to finish a meal the way he would've preferred, just make sure you do it without making some of the more common wine and cheese pairing mistakes. It would still have to pass his standards, after all.