Anthony Bourdain: The Layover

This made him a cultural icon.

Bourdain went on to host several acclaimed TV shows, including A Cook's Tour, No Reservations, The Layover, and his most celebrated series, Parts Unknown, the last of which was pretty good, but I didn't care for his episode on Israel, where he was clearly biased and uninformed.

His work stood out because he didn't just show viewers what people ate.

He showed them why they ate it and what food revealed about history, politics, and identity Bourdain suffered from depression and died in 2018 by suicide.

Unfortunately, this one was not.

Anthony Bourdain visited the Marché d'Enfant Rouge during his Paris episode of The Layover in 2012, the episode in which he gave what became one of the most quoted pieces of travel advice ever, telling viewers that the worst thing you can do when you come to Paris is plan too much and to please make the most of it by doing as little as possible.

He included the market as one of his essential Paris market stops, describing it as the oldest covered market in Paris and listing it as part of what he loved about the city.

Not the Michelin star restaurants, not the landmark sites, the markets, the neighborhood bistros, the places that felt genuinely Parisian rather than performed for visitors.

This listing of it in the layover brought a significant wave of international attention to the market in the years after 2012, and is credited in multiple Paris flip cards as one of the reasons it became so internationally known.

So what we know now, the fire broke out at 39 Rue de Breton in the Ferdinand-es-Mont of Paris in the early hours of Monday the 12th of October, 2026.

The first reports came in at around 3.15 in the morning.