Unsurprisingly, Anthony Bourdain Was All About "Girls and Drugs" Back in the Day

Fresh off his eye-opening interview on Opie with Jim Norton, Anthony Bourdain is giving the press a new collection of soundbites through his cover story at Wine Spectator. Chief among them? This casual comment about his past: "I went right to work for as much money as I could get, with friends who did the sort of things that I liked to do, which was drugs. All my decisions were based on who could give me access to girls and drugs."

Though Bourdain makes his decisions based on other things these days, he still had plenty of wild quotes to offer about his current lifestyle. There was of course discussion about his ass-kicking wife, who turned the whole family onto jiu jitsu. ("She's not sitting at home filing her nails or shopping until I come home. She's just fine choking grown men unconscious.") There was also a great fanboy moment when his work with David Simon on Treme came up. ("It was like, you're a lifelong baseball fan and somewhere out of the mists Joe DiMaggio says, 'Hey, you want to come to the backyard and throw the ball around -- in fact, why don't you join the team?'") And as always, Bourdain encouraged people to step outside their cultural comfort zone in the most graphic way possible. ("The minute you say, 'Oh, no, that's OK, I won't have the sheep's eyeball or the shot of moonshine,' that pretty much shuts down the possibility of a deeper relationship.")

But perhaps best of all, when the magazine asked Bourdain how he'd like to be remembered, he offered up one hell of an epitaph: "Maybe that I grew up a little. That I'm a Dad, that I'm not a half-bad cook, that I can make a good coq au vin. That would be nice. And not such a bad bastard after all."

If you don't feel like ponying up to get past the site's paywall, keep a look out for that Bourdain issue on stands now.

Kristin Hunt is a Food/Drink staff writer for Thrillist, and would like Bourdain to write her epitaph. Follow her at @kristin_hunt.