Anthony Bourdain was long the thoughtful keeper of the cool in the culinary world. And since his passing in 2018, he has been elevated to something like sainthood. Bourdain was a fierce defender of street food and cheap beer and dive bars before it was a cool thing to do. If something came with pomp and circumstance, it likely received the sonorous brunt of his silver tongue (save for the occasional Michelin starred meal). So it really isn’t all that much of a surprise that he loved shitty coffee.
His preferences recently came back to light via the Takeout, who looked back at some of Bourdain’s more famous hot takes on coffee. In June of 2016 he told ABC News that “I like my coffee in a cardboard cup with a picture of the Acropolis on the side, from the guy who sells donuts in the street. The cardboard flavor is an important component of my New York coffee drinking experience,” and that “If it takes you longer to make my coffee than for me to drink it, then we have a basic problem.”
A month prior, he expressed similar, though snarkier, sentiments about coffee to Bon Appetit. “There are few things I care about less than coffee. I have two big cups every morning: light and sweet, preferably in cardboard cup. Any bodega will do. I don’t want to wait for my coffee. I don’t want some man-bun, Mumford and Son motherf*cker to get it for me. I like good coffee but I don’t want to wait for it, and I don’t want it with the cast of Friends. It’s a beverage; it’s not a lifestyle.”
The last quote certainly generated a bit of buzz in the coffee world. At the time, coffee was exploding in popularity, and engaged in something like a cultural dog fight to establish itself as a legitimate pursuit on a par with food and wine. Then everyone’s favorite thoughtful food uncle comes in a basically shits on the thing that they love, seemingly missing the point the entire time. We wrote about it back then, it was a big deal, and the Mumford & Sons jab wasn’t taken lightly. (Though in retrospect, St. Tony wasn’t wrong to mock the stomp-and-clap era of popular music.)
But here we are almost 10 years later and we can look back on what Bourdain said with time having healed all wounds. And he’s certainly right about one thing: shitty coffee is a thing unto itself. I can’t help but love the stuff, especially in airports and diners. For Bourdain it was part of this quintessential New York thing, to be cheap and quick and undertaken without spectacle. It was a means to an end. And if drinking specialty coffee means you can’t also accept the other when it is offered to you, then yeah, Bourdain is right.
But the histrionics about shitty coffer are, of course, fraught. Because that very same cheap coffee was likely produced by individuals who weren’t paid enough to survive. These are the folks Bourdain goes out of his way to protect and highlight their contributions when they are to the culinary world, but wasn’t quite able to see the same thing in coffee.
One would like to think that, were Bourdain still around, his tune might have changed somewhere along the way. Specialty coffee has embraced convenience to a remarkable—some might even say concerning!—degree over the last decade, and in the process put the chemistry sets away. And the price of coffee on the C market has become front page news, which may have caused even Bourdain to think twice about the cheapest possible commodity coffee that he so fervently loved. Maybe it’s not a binary thing—maybe someone would have served him a cup of really great coffee that might have turned him on, without all the Mumford posturing and pomp. You can love both things, actually—in 2025 shitty coffee can be great, and great coffee can be for everyone.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
