To Tony, with (even more) love.

a certified special: honoring Anthony Bourdain.

June 8, 2025. 7am.

The journey changes you.

The journey changes everything.

This is what I’m thinking about when the train I take daily arrives at my station.

I guess you’re right, the journey changes everything, even the smallest train ride you take from here to there at 7am. You taught me to cherish that, even though this is being the hardest train ride of my life, you taught me to see what’s beautiful and what’s raw about being human everywhere, even in the most mundane places.

June 8.

June 8 is a Sunday. Sundays are Certified days, aka the happiest days of my week, when being a writer is more than looking at words you didn’t write and editing them out or being miserable at your office job. Here, I have a job I love, I write for friends and for fellow writers, and in between fashion innovators, cool people I meet everyday and, of course, my love for literature, comes June 8. I stop everything I’m doing when June 8 comes.

June 8.

I was 8 when I’d lift my own mattress up and drag it to my parents’s bedroom so i could watch “Parts Unknown”, as my readers probably have heard.

I’m leaving this train a different woman because of you, as I am a different woman every time I’m courageous and assertive and bold and fun, very different from the anxious eight year old who knew you almost as a father figure. Not really the best example, but goddamn, you were funny, and I loved you for that.

Eighteen.

My parents probably didn’t know what to do with me, my friends didn’t understand why I was the way I was, so that’s why you search for yourself in the unknown, where you take parts of other people to create a secret third thing you can’t name, a secret third thing that will be with you forever.

That’s you.

“I don’t know what the fuck is going on but I’m glad to be alive”, as it is written in my teenage diary, as it is engraved in my heart, as you taught me, and just like that, all the words in Kitchen Confidential will shape the way I write my own words forever.

In your memories, I made my own. Now my memories will be where you live on.

The journey changes everything, as the eight year old kid who dreamt of traveling with you and as the eighteen year old who cried when you famously wrote about eating your first oyster as a kid while on vacation in Arcachon, now has a platform to share with people how much she misses you, you bastard.

I hate June 8.

but I feel obliged to be here every June 8 to tell people how much you mean to me, and to show people a little bit of your legacy, how you inspired me to do things that are interesting to me, without an elaborated plan or anything, and it fucking changed my life, more than anything I could ever learn from a textbook. Not living your life in the best way you can and not treating yourself once in a while is for pussies!!!!

The journey changed everything, and it only started because of you.

As my train just stopped, I think about all the places you’ve been to, all the lives you changed forever and all the lives you will change in the future because your essence is fucking everywhere and I hate the fact that you’re not here to see people making moodboards about you and adding charli xcx and dark chocolate to it. You’d live for that shit.

I arrived at my destination, but it will never stop expanding because you taught me that every ending is just the beginning of another search, and I feel that this is exactly what happens every June 8, when I go through everything you taught me and I all can feel is love and gratitude for the person you were. You shaped the person I am. You taught me so many bad words.

But you also taught me how to live my life to the fullest, how to enjoy every moment, how to cherish every experience.

You were my sophomore year presentation hero. I still can’t cook for shit.

Anyway, whatever. I guess. Too many feelings.

I love you always.

To tony,

with (even more) love,

AMANDA