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With the exponential rise of public attention focused on cooking, the meaning of the chef profession has changed. At the 2008 StarChefs International Chefs Congress, culinary author Michael Ruhlman moderated a chat between two very different food personalities. Marco Pierre White arguably began the era of chef publicity with the 1990 publication of the gritty White Heat cookbook/memoir. Anthony Bourdain won the industry over with his talent and candor, but he admitted that he hadn’t worked as a chef for nine years and was entrenched in the “undignified business” of television.

White, a former quintessential “bad boy chef” who spoke in flowery terms about the romance of food, stood in contrast with the irreverent Bourdain, who always had a finger on the pulse of the culinary world and enough perspective to laugh at it. The two argued over the expectation that the chef whose name is on the restaurant door should be in the kitchen every night and what it meant to be a food media personality.

During questions with the audience, Bourdain was asked about the harrowing Beirut episode of No Reservations that had just aired and would earn him an Emmy. Suddenly, Bourdain seemed to take on some of the emotion that colored all of White’s statements. “The best thing about doing the show is I get to do stuff– I mean, I get to do stuff that I–” he struggled but finished the thought with, “I get to live out my dreams.” But sometimes, despite the bubble of production and the perfect lighting, he would bump up against a real world where bad things could happen. A decade later, Bourdain died of suicide during a filming trip in Strasbourg and left the industry devastated with his passing.