He went running into the American subconscious with a blowtorch in one hand and a pistol in the other, screaming his goddamn head off.
"I Am Love" fulfilled its erotic duties with that first mouthful of prawn, and, for the heat of carnality, little can match the sequence in which Antonio, long before he strips Emma naked, helps her use a blowtorch, in the kitchen, to crisp the delicate skin of a bonne bouche.
Although he still baits the food press with a steady stream of headline-ready provocations — "Anthony Bourdain: Airplane Food and Room Service Are Crimes"; "Anthony Bourdain Wishes Death Upon the Pumpkin-Spice Craze"; "Anthony Bourdain on Dining with Trump: Absolutely F*cking Not" — he often makes peace with people to whom he has taken a blowtorch in the past.
"If you ask me about Osama, they should have brought him back, put him on the Empire State Building, put a blowtorch in his face and said: 'Suck on that or jump,' because that's the fucking choice he gave my friends".
For their Mexican Piano cocktail, Tim Zohn and Ethan Terry at AQ in San Francisco take a blowtorch to a bay leaf and immediately pour ice over it to trap the smoke in the glass.
The Saharan sun is intense at midday, as relentless as a blowtorch on a mirror.
Meat fruit is a tricky trompe l'oeil starter of chicken liver and foie gras parfait enrobed in mandarin gel? ("A blowtorch is an easy thing just to soften it and get rid of the seam," Blumenthal said nonchalantly of the fusing of two frozen meat spheres).
Blacken the peppers on a gas hob, or using a kitchen blowtorch, then put in a plastic bag or a bowl covered in clingfilm and leave for 20 minutes.
On a recent day, workers with blowtorches in a dusty concrete-chilled building sliced steel pipe into scrap and cut down a 40-foot-high storage tank for emergency coolant.
The old kitchen equipment was thrown out or blowtorched in a cleansing ritual.
