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.

The Cut:

When Mission Chinese Food’s executive chef Angela Dimayuga publicly shared her response to Ivanka Trump asking to feature Dimayuga on her website, she had no idea it would be a big deal. […]

Dimayuga’s Instagram post, which was picked up by the New York Daily News, Elle, Bustle, and the Daily Mail, featured a handful of screenshots showing her response to a request from IvankaTrump.com’s contributing writer Adi Heyman. “As a queer person of color and daughter of immigrant parents,” she wrote, “I am not interested in being profiled as an aspirational figure for those that support a brand and President that slyly disparages female empowerment.” […]

“As a woman, as a queer Filipino with immigrant parents, all the things within my personal politics are important to me: women’s rights, immigrant rights, gay rights,” she said. She hopes that Ivanka will see people fighting those battles against her father’s administration and start speaking up in her role as his adviser. “If she is trying to move in a positive direction, we need to see action faster,” Dimayuga added. “I feel like there are these small steps but just barely. I want her to acknowledge that she hears us.”

I haven't spoken to Angela since college but it's damn good to see her doing so well and not being afraid to speak up.