Celebrity chef Bourdain dead

Washington: US celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, host of CNN's food-and-travel-focused Parts Unknown television series, killed himself in a French hotel room, officials said on Friday, in the second high-profile suicide of a US celebrity this week. He was 61.

Bourdain, whose career catapulted him from washing dishes at New York restaurants to dining in Vietnam with President Barack Obama, hanged himself in a hotel room near Strasbourg, France, where he had been working on an upcoming episode of his programme, CNN said.

Investigators were treating the death in Kaysersberg, France, as a suicide, local prosecutor Christian de Rocquigny said in a telephone interview. His death comes three days after American designer Kate Spade, who built a fashion empire on her signature handbags, was found dead of suicide in her New York apartment on Tuesday.

Bourdain climbed the culinary career ladder to become executive chef at New York's former Brasserie Les Halles restaurant.

His fame began to grow exponentially in 1999 when the New Yorker magazine published his article Don't Eat Before Reading This, which he developed into the 2000 book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.

Brash and opinionated, he also spoke openly about his use of drugs and addiction to heroin earlier in his life.

He went on to host television programmes, first on the Food Network and the Travel Channel, before joining CNN in 2013. "His love of great adventure, new friends, fine food and drink and the remarkable stories of the world made him a unique storyteller," the network said. "His talents never ceased to amaze us."

Bourdain told the New Yorker in 2017 that his idea for Parts Unknown, which was in its 11th season, was travelling, eating and doing whatever he wanted.

The show roamed from out-of-the-way restaurants to the homes of locals, providing what the magazine called "communion with a foreign culture so unmitigated that it feels practically intravenous".

When Obama went to Hanoi, Vietnam in May 2016, he met Bourdain at a casual restaurant for a $6 meal of noodles and grilled pork.

"He taught us about food, but more importantly, about its ability to bring us together," Obama tweeted on Friday, along with a picture showing the two drinking beer in Hanoi. "To make us a little less afraid of the unknown. We'll miss him."