It's so cool to get a glimpse of Anthony Bourdain as a person through the eyes of my old college friend, Angela.
Tony continued to support me in small ways to show he was watching and supporting. He called me his hero on Instagram when I responded to an IvankaTrump.com editorial request. He consistently stood up from his dinner table to greet me (which I always thought was too much), and we had a kind of rapport: He let me tease him. After I left my job at Mission last year, I spent a lot more time traveling and didn't see him as often.
I loved this part too:
We talked about places I’d never been that I wanted to see—Greece, Croatia, Portugal, San Sebastian—and places he thought I needed to visit: back to the Philippines, to Berlin to party, to Africa. He said, “You’re going to get people you meet there to teach you more important things than they would teach me because you’re you.” One of my favorite things he said that night was that his show Parts Unknown was a political show masked as travel television. I shared with him that art is important to me because art is inherently political. And, to me, food is an expression of art, and so cooking can and should be a political act too.
Clearly he was a brilliant man who did everything he could to encourage everyone to embrace diversity and other cultures around the world.
The world is a better place because he lived.
