Was celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern a drug addict?

Was Andrew Zimmern a drug addict? Zimmern is one of the most highly decorated celebrity chefs of his generation. He worked at a bevy of restaurants in his native New York City throughout his late teens and early twenties, and was a noted up-and-comer in the city’s restaurant scene well before his 30th birthday.

The ascent–and the breakneck pace of life as a celebrity chef–began taking its toll on Zimmern, though, and by the early 90s he had developed a debilitating drug addiction. When asked for details on that period of his life, Zimmern has actually refused to share too much: not because he’s ashamed of what he did, but because, according to him, the extent of his depravity would be difficult for everyone who hasn’t been there themselves to believe:

 

It was worse than [you think]. I’d rather not scare you too much but you’re living the life where you are constantly beat up, abused, abusing other people, doing something horrifically shameful and tawdry things that crater your soul–you give away pieces of yourself that you swear you would never do. You know, I swore I would never talk to you like this and then reach into your jacket and take your wallet and those are the things that you do when you are being driven by the insanity and the compulsion of alcohol and drug addiction.

 

As Zimmern explained in a Nightline profile a few years back, he supported his addiction the old-fashioned way: by robbing and mugging people with his fellow addicts. And, at the time, he didn’t see a problem with the way he was living. Zimmern was so far into addiction that behavior he now considers repulsive and shocking was, quite simply, normal:

 

Let me see if I can paint the picture for you: I lived in an abandoned building in lower Manhattan; one that we squatted–a bottle gang and I. I would steal purses off the backs of chairs in those swanky little cafes on Madison Avenue, run down the side street, leap the wall at Central Park and 5th Avenue, get on the subway, go down to the lower east side and sell the credit cards and passports that were in the purses for money to support my drug and alcohol habit. And then go to sleep at night on a pile of dirty clothes in this abandoned building and I sprinkled a bottle of Comet Cleanser around so the rats and roaches wouldn’t cross over at night so I could pass out in some peace and quiet and that’s what I thought was normal. That’s how I lived for a year–no showering, I was the guy you crossed the street to avoid if you walked by me in New York.

 

After a year of living like this, Zimmern, in his own words, lost “everything: my self-respect, my status, my parents, my friends, my status, my jobs…my self-esteem,” and hit bottom a number of times. Getting out of New York helped, and a staged intervention, followed by rehab at the Hazelden Foundation‘s clinic in Minnesota, gave Zimmern the perspective he needed to fight back against his disease. (Zimmern, who has lived in Minnesota for the last twenty years, is also a part-time volunteer at Hazelden.) To hear the chef himself tell it, what finally got him out of a downward spiral of drugs, alcohol, and self-loathing was a simple recipe:

 

I explained I didn’t know how to find God, and [this man I had never met] told me about the promises of the Twelve Steps. That by following Good Orderly Direction and the wisdom of the sober community I would come to believe. I didn’t need to believe at that moment, I just needed to believe in a future where I would.

I didn’t know if I should feel insulted or enlightened. There was a recipe. I could understand that. A phrase I’d heard over and over, “Keep it simple,” finally made sense. Read the instructions and follow the recipe. Stop fighting it. It all came together in an instant.

 

Zimmern has been less specific when talking about which drugs he was addicted to; the general impression seems to be that he didn’t favor one over another. But he’s now been clean for over twenty years, and willing to help other people with their addictions for just as long.

 

(Photo credits: Was Andrew Zimmern a drug addict via Facebook)

 

(Photo credits: Andrew Zimmern drug addiction via FB)