Brunch isn’t a real meal

Brunch might be a good excuse to catch up with friends during the day, but Bourdain would not have been impressed with avocado toast. “[Dedicated cooks] despise hollandaise, home fries, those pathetic fruit garnishes, and all the other cliché accompaniments designed to induce a credulous public into paying $12.95 for two eggs,” he wrote in The New Yorker. “You can dress brunch up with all the focaccia, smoked salmon, and caviar in the world, but it’s still breakfast.”

It’s not all about what’s on your plate

Not only did Bourdain have a deep appreciation for good food (to say the least), but he also understood the power of sharing a meal. In Vietnam and Mexico, for instance, the amount of time it takes just to pull a meal together is a strong bonding experience in and of itself, he wrote in A Cook’s Tour. “Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me,” he wrote. “The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.”

Keep it simple

There’s something exciting about tasting exotic ingredients or a creative take on classic dishes, but Bourdain never claimed that food needs to be complex be worth eating. “Good food is very often, even most often, simple food,” he wrote in Kitchen Confidential.