Food Network and later with the Travel Channel, before he joined CNN in 2013.

"It can't be overemphasised. He has a level of authenticity you don't commonly get with people on TV," astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson said on CNN. "Outside they're whatever else. He was authentic. You knew that."

Bourdain's celebrity was such that when Obama went to Hanoi, Vietnam in May 2016, he met him at a casual restaurant for a US$6 (RM24) meal of noodles and grilled pork.

President Donald Trump told reporters as he left the White House that Bourdain's death was "very shocking." "I enjoyed his show, he was quite a character," Trump said.

On the network, anchors struggled to hold back tears as they reminisced about their late colleague and urged people faced with despairor who know people struggling with depression to call a suicide hotline.

CNN anchor John Berman remembered his late colleague as a "human contradiction".

"He loved food. He wrote about food. He lived food. He thought we obsessed about food too much," Bermand said.

"He once said to me, 'I wish people would stop taking pictures of food and have more sex.' You know, because what he really wanted to do was to show people life."

Bourdain's death comes three days after American designer Kate Spade, who built a fashion empire on her signature handbags, was found dead in her New York apartment of suicide on Tuesday (June 5).

"Success does not protect you from depression. It doesn't protect you from suicide," Jodi Gold, director of the Gold Centre for Mind Health and