A New York City food creator who posts as @cjtravelstheworld is pushing back on the idea that the best meals in the city require an exclusive reservation or a velvet rope. “NYC is the greatest food city in the world, and exclusivity does not always mean great dining!” the creator wrote, framing the video around advice from the late chef and writer Anthony Bourdain.
The video leans on two of Bourdain’s most repeated rules for eating out, both of which trace back to his own writing rather than secondhand internet lore. In his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain advised diners to avoid ordering fish on Mondays, reasoning that seafood delivered at the end of the previous week was more likely to be what a kitchen was trying to use up rather than what had come in fresh. He was similarly skeptical of brunch, a meal he described as a dumping ground for a kitchen’s odds and ends, assembled by cooks who would rather be anywhere else on a weekend morning.
Commenters picked up on both rules immediately. “Fish on a Monday is because it’s probably from Wednesday of the previous week,” one wrote, echoing Bourdain’s own reasoning almost exactly. The same commenter added a theory about his brunch skepticism, writing that he never liked the shift because it was worked by cooks who “worked it all the time when he was down and out,” since brunch cooks could always find that kind of job even when better ones were scarce.
Other commenters pointed to Bourdain’s own later writing as evidence that even he complicated his rules over time. “His annotated version of Kitchen Confidential corrects some of these,” one wrote, a reference to the anniversary edition of the book in which Bourdain added footnotes revisiting and sometimes softening his younger self’s more absolute pronouncements. Not every reply took the advice seriously. One commenter joked that the rule explained plenty about their own eating habits, writing “sounds like anthony bourdain doesnt get invited to brunch.”
The broader point of the video, that exclusivity and quality are not the same thing, lines up with how Bourdain talked about food throughout his career. He built a reputation for seeking out small, unpretentious places over tasting-menu destinations, treating a well-run noodle stand or diner counter as being just as worthy of attention as any white tablecloth restaurant, provided the food itself held up.
Bourdain’s rules have outlasted him by years at this point, and that longevity is part of why they keep resurfacing in food content aimed at a much younger audience than the one that originally read his book. A piece of advice built around skepticism of hype and insider status travels easily into a format built entirely around hype and insider knowledge, since a creator citing Bourdain is implicitly arguing that their own recommendation, unlike a restaurant’s own marketing, can be trusted the way his blunt assessments were.
@cjtravelstheworld did not name specific restaurants in the caption, framing the post instead as general advice for navigating a city with no shortage of hyped, hard to book spots. The response in the comments, split between people testing Bourdain’s old rules against their own experience and people simply enjoying the callback to his writing, suggests his specific, decades old advice about fish and brunch has stayed more durable than most food trends from the same era.
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