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I met Tony three times, twice in Colorado. Our first conversation was in Boulder in 2013, after his inaugural Good vs Evil Tour with Eric Ripert. Eric warmly praised Colorado's food scene, but Bourdain unapologetically tore it apart in front of a room full of the state's best chefs, cooks and his rabid fans. I respected him for that. His loathing of Denver’s culinary scene led me to write my first book on the subject, dedicated to him. The last time we talked was at Ripert’s Cayman Cookout, the year before he died. His face was etched and weary. Like so many others, I became enamoured with Tony as the giddy and curious host of A Cook's Tour, and that is how I choose to remember him. I adopted the ethos ‘live like Tony,’ only with guardrails. A decade ago, on the heels of my master's thesis, I jetted off for a month-long, Bourdain-inspired solo sabbatical retracing his steps from Copenhagen to Brussels, Paris, Bordeaux, San Sebastián and Madrid, eating where he ate, walking through the same streets and trying to see the world the way he seemed to see it. Then, I did the same in Asia, toasting Tony’s birthday with an icy cold Tsingtao beer at the happening Houhai gastronomic quarter in Beijing. I still miss my wayfaring muse. The new film, Tony, returns to that pivotal, budding bon vivant, and it feels like the right moment to do the same: to go back to his early days and explore what turned him on, what excited him about food and travel, and where he would go if he could do it