On April 20, 2007, he tied the knot with Ottavia Busia, who would become a mixed martial artist herself.

Ariane, the couple's daughter, was born in the year 2007. Bourdain claimed that being away from his family for 250 days a year while working on his television shows has strained the relationship between him and his wife. Busia appeared in several episodes of No Reservations, most notably those set in Sardinia, Tuscany, Rome, Rio de Janeiro, and Naples, all of which was filmed in her hometown. In 2016, the couple decided to separate. In 2016, while filming the Rome episode of Parts Unknown, Bourdain had the opportunity to meet Italian actress Asia Argento.

According to Argento, a New Yorker article published in October 2017 revealed that Argento had been sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein in the 1990s. When her account was criticized in Italian media and politics, Argento decided to leave the country and settle in Germany in order to escape what she described as an Italian culture of "victim-blaming." The actress Argento delivered a speech on May 20, 2018, following the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. She referred to the festival as "Weinstein's hunting ground" and claimed that she was raped by Weinstein in Cannes when she was 21 years old. "And even tonight, sitting among you, there are those who still need to be held accountable for their conduct against women," she continued. During that time, Bourdain was a strong supporter of her. On June 3, 2018, Bourdain shared a video of the cast and crew celebrating during the production of the show, which featured Asia Argento as director and him and Chris Doyle as executive producers.

A blue belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu was earned by Bourdain in August 2015, after years of training and practice.

In 2016, he won gold at the IBJJF New York Spring International Open Championship in the Middleweight Master 5 (age 51 and older) division of the Middleweight Master 5 division.

Bourdain had a reputation for being a heavy smoker. When Anthony Bourdain was in New York, Thomas Keller served him a 20-course tasting menu that included "coffee and cigarette," a coffee custard infused with tobacco, served with a foie gras mousse as a tribute to Bourdain's daily two-pack of cigarettes. Bourdain gave up smoking in 2007 for the sake of his daughter, but he returned to it near the end of his life.

Having previously experimented with cocaine, heroin, and LSD, Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential about his time working in a trendy SoHo restaurant in 1981. He and his friends were frequently high on drugs. Drugs, according to Bourdain, had an impact on his decisions, and he admitted to sending a busboy to Alphabet City in order to obtain cannabis, methaqualone, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, secobarbital, tuinal, amphetamine, codeine, and heroin.

Death

In early June 2018, Bourdain was in Strasbourg, working on an episode of Parts Unknown with his frequent collaborator and friend, Éric Ripert. When Bourdain failed to show up for dinner and breakfast on June 8, Ripert became concerned. He later discovered Bourdain dead in his room at the Le Chambard hotel in Kaysersberg, near Colmar, having committed suicide by hanging himself.

The public prosecutor for Colmar, Christian de Rocquigny du Fayel, stated that Bourdain's body showed no signs of violence and that the suicide appeared to have been an impulsive decision.

Rocquigny du Fayel revealed that Bourdain's toxicology results were negative for narcotics, with only a trace of a therapeutic non-narcotic medication detected in his system. After his death on June 13, 2018, Bourdain's body was cremated in France, and his ashes were returned to the United States two days later.