If anything is good for pounding humility into you permanently, it’s the restaurant business.

Over the weekend, the news on Anthony Bourdain’s suicide broke, percolated, and eventually hit me like bad tequila on ladies night. Being a wine professional, I have foodie/chef/mixologist/wino friends, some of which are in the same industry (some treated Bourdain with a similar reverence as I did)… Which meant that my feed was heavily saturated with articles about the man’s life and death.

As I’ve written about ages ago, the man was an icon… My hero. Heaven knows (and I’m hoping he now does, too) that his candor, wit, humility, and verbal genius have saved me from horrible spells of writer’s block. Whenever I’d hit the proverbial literary wall (as I’m prone to do because as I’ve said before, I’ve never received training in the literary arts), I’d tune in to an episode of No Reservations, kick back with a pint, and miraculously churn out something readable.