The Ghost of Bourdain’s Lists

Someone scraped li.st, and out tumbled Anthony Bourdain’s forgotten lists.

Li.st, if you don’t remember it, was a 2015-era app. The kind of thing that lived and died in that brief window when tech bros believed every human activity deserved its own social platform. BJ Novak was involved somehow. The usual suspects used it, then forgot about it, then the servers went quiet.

But Bourdain used it. And Bourdain, being Bourdain, didn’t make lists of productivity hacks or “10 Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read.” He made lists about trepanning instruments and the specific qualities of a cheese crust on onion soup gratinée.

What He Left Behind

There’s something almost uncomfortably intimate about reading these now. Not because they’re revelatory (anyone who watched Parts Unknown knew the man’s obsessions) but because lists are thinking out loud. They’re the architecture of a mind before the prose gets polished.

His Objects of Desire list is pure id:

“Vintage Persol sunglasses… I wear them a lot. I collect them when I can.”

“19th century trepanning instruments… I don’t know what explains my fascination with these devices, designed to drill drain-sized holes into the skull often for purposes of relieving ‘pressure’ or ‘bad humours’. But I can’t get enough of them.”

There’s no posturing here. No justification beyond the wanting. The same man who wrote beautifully about the ethics of eating also wanted antique skull-drilling tools and couldn’t explain why. That honesty, that refusal to sand down the weird edges, is what made him worth paying attention to.

The Canon

His desert island TV picks are exactly what you’d expect from someone who read le Carré the way other people read beach novels:

1. The Wire
2. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (and its sequel, Smiley’s People)
3. Edge of Darkness

No comfort watches. No guilty pleasures. Just slow-burning paranoia and institutional rot. The man wanted to spend eternity watching systems fail and good men get ground down by them.

His spy novel recommendations follow the same logic. Not Clancy. Not Fleming. The quiet stuff:

“If the main character carries a gun, I’m already losing interest. Spy novels should be about betrayal.”

That’s the whole philosophy in two sentences. He wanted stories where the violence was emotional, where the damage happened in conference rooms and safehouses and the silences between old colleagues who’d sold each other out.

The Food Lists (Obviously)

His “Steaming Hot Porn” list is just food. Which is the correct use of the word porn:

• Bun Bo Hue
• Kuching Laksa
• Jamon
• Oily Little Fish
• Meat on a Stick

No descriptions needed. If you know, you know. If you don’t, go eat more.

The “I’m Hungry and Would Be Very Happy to Eat Any of This Right Now” list is more revealing:

“A big, greasy double cheeseburger. No lettuce. No tomato. Potato bun.”

“A street fair sausage and pepper hero would be nice. Though shitting like a mink is an inevitable and near immediate outcome.”

“Some uni. I’ll smear it on an English muffin at this point.”

This isn’t the guy from the shows recommending the perfect ramen shop in Tokyo. This is the guy at 2am, jet-lagged, staring into a hotel mini-fridge and wondering if that cheese is still good. The distinction matters.

The Hotels

“CHATEAU MARMONT (LA): if I have to die in a hotel room, let it be here.”

I’ll leave that one alone.

His hotel list reads like a Graham Greene itinerary: Le Continental in Saigon, The Metropole in Hanoi, Hotel Olofsson in Port au Prince (“Sagging, creaky and leaky but awesome”). He didn’t want comfort. He wanted atmosphere and ghosts.

The Dead Bars

There’s a list of “Great Dead Bars of New York” that functions as a kind of elegy:

“SIBERIA in any of its iterations. The one on the subway being the best.”

“BILLY’S TOPLESS (later, Billy’s Stopless) an atmospheric, working class place, perfect for late afternoon drinking where nobody hustled you for money and everybody knew everybody. Great all-hair metal jukebox. Naked breasts were not really the point.”

“THE BAR AT HAWAII KAI. tucked away in a giant tiki themed nightclub in Times Square with a midget doorman and a floor show. Best place to drop acid EVER.”

These places are gone. Most of them have been gone for decades. He knew it when he wrote the list. The whole point was that they were gone—that the city keeps erasing itself and you can only describe the shape of what’s missing.

The Observations

There’s a list called “Observations From a Beach” that I’ll quote sparingly:

“In which my Greek idyll is suddenly invaded by professional nudists.”

“Endemic FUPA. Apparently a prerequisite for joining this outfit.”

“T-shirt and no pants. Leading one to the obvious question: why bother?”

This is not the voice of a man who took himself too seriously.

Why Any of This Matters

I don’t know that it does. People have written a lot about Bourdain since June 2018. Most of it either hagiographic or uncomfortably speculative. I’m not interested in adding to either pile.

What I’m interested in: somewhere between the shows and the books and the public persona, there was a guy making lists on a forgotten app. Lists about jiu-jitsu gis and R. Crumb collections and the specific joy of Captain Crunch. Lists that nobody was going to read except maybe a few friends who also used the app.

And someone scraped it. And now we can read it. And it’s just… a guy. A guy with very specific tastes and no filter and an obvious death wish for his digestive system.

Warren Zevon told Letterman to “enjoy every sandwich.” Bourdain wrote a list about sandwiches. Pastrami Queen. Eisenberg’s tuna salad on white. The carta di musica with bottarga at John Dory. The nasty sausage and pepper heroes from random street fairs that would have you “shitting like a mink almost immediately.”

He enjoyed every sandwich. That’s the whole sermon.

The original li.st scrape lives here. Go read the whole thing.