It’s been seven years since Anthony Bourdain took his own life at the age of 61.
But it seems that one fellow celebrity chef is still outraged about jokes Bourdain made at her expense.
Yes, a new documentary about Deen’s scandal-plagued career premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, and it shows the 78-year-old still griping about slights from Bourdain.
Paula Deen lashes out at Anthony Bourdain seven years after his death
“Anthony Bourdain did call me the most dangerous woman in America,” Deen says in Canceled: The Paula Deen Story, according to Entertainment Weekly.
The doc corroborates her claim with news clips from 2011 in which Bourdain calls Deen the “worst, most dangerous person in America” (in a tongue-in-cheek way, of course).
“Let me tell you something, girlfriend. Maybe [my food] is bad for you, but I don’t go around eating or serving unwashed anuses of wildebeests,” Deen says to Joy Behar in another clip feaured in the film.
For the record, Bourdain never ate wildebeest anuses (at least on camera), but he was known to sample the cuisine of local indigenous peoples during his travels, a practice that Deen apparently found repugnant.
From there, we see old footage of Bourdain remarking on some of the shade Deen threw his way:
“I like the quote, it was, ‘Well, he has had his demons, I hope he had them under control.’ ‘He’s probably still shooting dope,’ is probably what she’s saying in a nice kind of Southern way,”
Sounds to us like it was more or less squashed at the point, but apparently, Paula is still fuming all these years later.
“He started something with me, and I’d never even met him,” Deen remarked in the documentary.
Deen, of course, has a long history of picking fights and making obnoxious comments.
In 2013, Deen was sued for racial discrimination amid allegations that she’d used slurs in front of staff and wanted Black waiters dressed as “slaves” to serve guests at a plantation-themed wedding.
In 2019, Deen was accused of cracking insensitive jokes about the death of fellow TV chef Carl Ruiz.
But at 78, Deen remains defiantly unapologetic.
In the film, Deen’s lawyer, Bill Glass, says that people “should not take any issue” with racial slurs.
“Yes, of course I’ve used that word,” Deen remarks in the documentary.
Sounds like Paula should probably spend more time working and less time reigniting old feuds.