Grand Forks, North Dakota, food critic Marilyn Hagerty, whowent viralin 2012 after penning aglowing review of her local Olive Garden, has nothing but kind things to say aboutAnthony Bourdain, who was one of the first people to publicly support her.
After being sent to New York, where the food columnist appeared onTodayandAnderson Cooper 360, she had a meeting with Bourdain, who had previously defended her against online trolls, praising her “triumph over the snarkologists(myself included).” Helater wrotethat “Marilyn Hagerty’s years of reviews” represented “a history of dining” that “too few of us from the coasts have seen.”
“I think he wanted to know how kooky I was,” Hagerty explains.
Recalling their meeting, the food writer says they met for coffee at a hotel, and after spending an hour or two together, “he decided he wanted to publish a book of my reviews.”
“I thought he was a very handsome [man]. He [was] very nicely dressed and just very easy to sit with,” she shares with PEOPLE. “He was a very pleasant person to be with.”
“He said at first he thought it was just weird that I would write about the Olive Garden coming to Grand Forks, but then he said the more he thought about it he believed I was telling the story of how people eat in this area of the country, in the Midwest, in the small towns and what foods are important or interesting to them,” she explained, adding that Bourdain “knew that I had been writing this column for 10 to 20 years.”
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Marilyn Hagerty and Anthony Bourdain
“We talked about everything,” she continues, describing their conversation aboutBourdain’s daughter Ariane, now 11, who had just celebrated her 5th birthday.
“He had a party for her and she didn’t have a good time, and that was because he had invited adults and she didn’t enjoy that. So he planned another party for the next Saturday and he was going to invite kids,” she remarks.
Source: Anthony Bourdain Instagram
Anthony Bourdain and Ariane
“It was something very great that happened to me because I had the chance to meet Anthony Bourdain,” Hagerty explains.
In the book’s introduction, Bourdain praised Hagerty for her “flinty, dry, very sharp sense of humor,” adding that “she misses nothing” and he “would not want to play poker with her for money.”
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Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert
Describing their dinner together, Hagerty recalls “it was a wonderful evening.”
“I think we went there about 6 p.m. and we were there until after 11 p.m. We had six or seven different courses,” continues the food writer. “And we had a sommelier there to describe each wine. I was able to go back in the kitchen and talk to people. It was a mind-boggling experience to me.”
Hagerty adds that she extended an invitation to Bourdain “to come to North Dakota to have lutefisk and lefsa, our local Norwegian specialties.”
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Anthony Bourdain
Of course, Hagerty says she “was very sad” to hear about Bourdain’s death.
“I was very sad. My contact with Anthony Bourdain was always so positive,” she says.
“He was more on the humorous side. He would talk and laugh about things. He wasn’t down and out or he didn’t seem to have set, staid opinions. He was a person who was very pleasant to talk to. I can’t imagine him taking his own life,” she adds.
Speaking with PEOPLE, French prosecutor Christian de Rocquigny previously said there wasno evidence of violencein Bourdain’s death.
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), text “help” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or go tosuicidepreventionlifeline.org.
source: people.com
