Don’t Eat Before Reading This - Anthony Bourdain for The New Yorker (1999):

I love the sheer weirdness of the kitchen life: the dreamers, the crackpots, the refugees, and the sociopaths with whom I continue to work; the ever-present smells of roasting bones, searing fish, and simmering liquids; the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray, the flames, the smoke, and the steam.

This was the article that started it all. Bourdaine was a special writer, human.