Q & A with Anthony Bourdain: From Hell’s Kitchen to Butterfly Mobiles

 Nina Metz a special contributor to the Chicago Tribune recently has a Q & A session with Anthony Bourdain.  It’s fun to learn a little bit more about him and see how having a little baby girl at home has changed him.

There are some funny and “awww” moments in his responses:

Anthony Bourdain never has shied away from telling it like it is. The chef, best-selling writer and star of the Travel Channel series “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations” is a man who doesn’t need a lot of pampering. He has a soft spot for dive bars and dangerous foods. Seedy is just fine. Preferable, even. That used to apply to his neighborhood — until recently.

For years (he told us via e-mail), he lived in a fourth-floor walk-up in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen.

But these days, home for the author of “Kitchen Confidential” is on “the dreaded Upper East Side” in a building he describes as “New York functional. The building was probably built in the ’70s, in the classic Upper-East-Side-Can’t-Believe-I’m-Living-Here-Style. Call it ‘Late-era Jeffersons.’”

He and wife Ottavia have a baby girl, Ariane, who is 8 months old. And so, he wrote sardonically, “Proximity to a Baby Gap is now a priority.” But the doorman building has some unexpected perks, now that Bourdain, 51, doesn’t have to “run to UPS offices or the post office every time I miss a package.”

The apartment doesn’t leave much room to entertain, he said, but it has “two bathrooms with good water pressure in the showers (a particular delight after my most recent digs).”

The home is filled with “a lot of Asian bric-a-brac accumulated over time on trips. Travel mementos. A BIG TV. And of course, ‘pink world’ with butterfly mobiles and crib, etc., for my daughter. … These days, it looks like a toy store.”

To learn more about Bourdain’s reading material, furniture tastes, childhood keepsakes and what he would save from his home read Nina’s interview with Bourdain and click here.