As the tireless Anthony Bourdain launches yet another project (the second episode of his Travel Channel show The Layover aired two nights ago), we wonder how the gregarious chef, author, and television personality developed his signature voice. Given his stories’ fearless, extreme, and always original point of view -- conveyed in memoirs like “Kitchen Confidential” and “Medium Raw” and in off-the-cuff narration of eating adventures around the world for his nine seasons of No Reservations -- we weren't surprised to learn of his greatest literary inspiration: “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” “I vividly remember my introduction to Hunter Thompson's masterpiece in its original serial form in the pages of Rolling Stone. I was absurdly young (maybe 15?) and in no way prepared for the angry, hallucinatory, and searingly funny prose that seemed to leap off the page and burn its way into my skull,” Bourdain told GQ last year. “Thompson's savagely descriptive sentences deeply affected my own, leading to a lifelong love for hyperbole…I became determined not just to write like Thompson but to live like Thompson, too. Probably not the ideal role model for a 15-year-old. But there it is.”

Bourdain and Thompson are bound by an insatiable curiosity, a politically incorrect hunger for and relating of adventure, and a gift for gritty dialogue. All the best writers and chefs are essentially storytellers -- via the medium of the page or the plate. Strong writing, like strong dishes, can communicate nuances about family, culture, and feeling while creating a vivid and evocative experience that alights the senses. With Bourdain’s literary hero worship in mind, we found this Chicago Tribune roundup of favorite books cited by other chefs and culinary influencers. Select personalities are featured below, along with their favorite titles, each with a morsel about the link between the two.

David Chang: "The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine" by Rudolph Chelminski

Following in Bourdain’s footsteps, the multi-talented and multi-tasking Chang just launched the TV series The Mind of a Chef, which premiered on PBS November 9; Bourdain is executive producer and narrator. As the inventive chef and founder of several restaurants worldwide, starting with Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York City’s East Village (and one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in 2010), David Chang is a self-professed perfectionist: "There are things we say in the kitchen, a codified lexicon, that explain some of the kitchen mentality at Ko. 'Make it soigné' means make it right and make it perfect. It's something you hear a lot in traditional French kitchens. No mistakes, no misunderstandings. Make it the best. Do not fuck it up,” he says in the “Momofuku” cookbook, co-written with New York Times writer Peter Meehan, who also collaborates with Chang on the Lucky Peach food journal, published by McSweeney’s. We hope that “The Perfectionist,” a biography of Bernard Loiseau, the acclaimed French chef who killed himself in 2003 amid rumors that his restaurant might lose its three-star Michelin status, serves as a cautionary tale for the ambitious and exacting Chang.

Chef Thomas Keller: "Blue Trout and Black Truffles: The Peregrinations of an Epicure," by Joseph Wechsberg

The influence of this book upon Thomas Keller, the visionary chef behind the landmark restaurants Per Se in New York City and The French Laundry in Napa Valley, is written on his menu; in a recent update to his three Michelin-star offerings, the black truffle dish is a $75 supplement to The French Laundry's $270 chef's menu (replacing the foie gras course, now banned under California law). This 1953 book by Wechsberg, a Czech writer, musician, and gourmand, is devoted to the eateries and vineyards of France. In “The French Laundry Cookbook,” Keller may not have cited his literary forefather directly, but he did include a chapter titled “The Importance of France,” which is likely to resonate with all epicures.

Restaurateur Lidia Bastianich: "The Horse of Pride: Life in a Breton Village" by Pierre-Jakez Helias

A New Yorker review of the autobiographical “The Horse of Pride,” written by a Breton stage actor, journalist, poet, and radio script author, describes the book as “…solid, detailed, and satisfying, like Breton crochet lace…It speaks to the heart. That is the language beyond language.” The image-rich book lends itself to translation on film, and in 1980, Claude Chabrol adapted the book for the screen. Maybe as a result of its influence, the Italian-American chef, author, and television personality Lidia Bastianich captures a similarly cinematic tone in her writing. Judith Jones, her legendary editor at Knopf (who also worked with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child), once described a passage by Lidia as “a whole meditation on what you’re doing while stirring risotto…what you listen for, see, and smell. Writing like this comes from something within.”

Food writer Jeffrey Steingarten: "Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris" by A.J. Liebling

These two highbrow funny guys gained their literary chops as undergraduate humor writers: Steingarten for the Harvard Lampoon and Liebling as a contributor to Dartmouth’s Jack-O-Lantern. Steingarten went on to become a lawyer, and in 1989, he started as a Vogue’s James Beard award-winning food critic; Liebling went from Dartmouth to Columbia University’s School of Journalism before spending the influential years of 1926 and 1927 in Paris, where he studied literature at The Sorbonne and ate and drank well. “The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite,” Liebling is known for saying. Steingarten, whose first-person adventures are peppered with wit and buoyed by obsessive research, builds upon his hero’s legacy.