Andrew Zimmern recently reflected on his friendship with the late chef Anthony Bourdain.
The Bizarre Foods host told PEOPLE Now that their last conversation before Bourdain died of suicide in June revolved around personal happiness.
“He was telling me about pursuing my own happiness and he gave me his long sort of speech about it, that I deserved to be happy and I was like, ‘That is so great, where did you get that little nugget?’” Zimmern said.
He continued, explaining that Bourdain reminded him that the advice he was sharing once came from Zimmern himself. “I had said the same thing to him about five years earlier, which is great because sometimes you even know things yourself but you need to have a friend repeat it back to you,” he says.
Zimmern says he thinks about Bourdain “all the time.”
“I always gave him a lot of grief about his desert boots. He was wearing cowboy boots a lot early on — these beige, leather cowboy boots — for the first four or five years that we were friends and then he kind of switched over to the desert trekking boot,” Zimmern says. “He thought that was so funny and he sent me a pair that I have, and yeah, I look at them every day that I’m home.”
On the day that Bourdain died, Zimmern wore the boots in his honor.
“I’m so angry this morning. Life is f—— hard and crazy and Tony I love you,” Zimmern posted on Twitter with a picture of Bourdain’s beige boots. “I’m wearing your boots that I never wore because they were yours, and going to work. Everyone should hug some extra people today. My heart is heavy.”
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In June, Zimmern told Eater that he has dealt with his own mental health issues and the Parts Unknown host was an “incredible sounding board” in his life.
“He was epic in every sense of the word and I think he’s one of those people when they’re writing about culture today now, 100 years from now, they’ll be talking about him as well,” Zimmern told PEOPLE. “Everyone wanted to be around him and he was just a symphony of a human being.”
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