Anthony Bourdain Hated This Chain Restaurant With A Passion

There was very little Anthony Bourdain did that was without passion. So after one bad experience at an empty Johnny Rockets airport location, it was enough for him to dredge up some big feelings about the chain. In a 2016 appearance on Conan, Bourdain called his experience "soul-destroying."

It's not simply that Johnny Rockets is fast food; Bourdain had a well-known love for spots like Popeyes. The offense committed by the burger chain was pretty basic: It served him a cold burger with precooked fries and a limp pickle. The staff silently staring at him as they handed him his sad meal was a bow on what he called a "moment of perfect misery." He ended his rant on Johnny Rockets with a succinct "not a fan, no."

Although Bourdain admitted he often criticized KFC, in his interview with Conan, he confessed to an occasional "slide into the Colonel." He found the KFC Double Down to be representative of America's worst food tendencies, but ever full of contradictions, he loved the occasional "glowing orange" mac and cheese from the fried chicken chain. So it's not fast food that set him off, it was simply bad food.

In a 2011 interview with National Geographic, Bourdain told the magazine that he was OK with eating fast food as long as it was delicious. What seemed to bother Bourdain the most in his Johnny Rockets experience was the lack of care to make the food good. He described multiple opportunities for the staff to make the food palatable. The burger could have been heated up and the fries dunked back in the hot oil. No one else was there, and the chefs were standing around with little else to do.

But, ultimately, as he described it to Conan, "None of us were where we wanted to be." Perhaps there's no better evidence, though, that Bourdain didn't just hate chain fast food restaurants in general than his favorite place to eat in LA being In-N-Out.