NEW YORK – Celebrity chef and world-traveling CNN host Anthony Bourdain is dead at 61, the network said June 8.

CNN said the cause of death was suicide.

His friend, New York chef Eric Ripert, found Bourdain unresponsive in a hotel room near Strasbourg, France, where he was filming his show “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,” according to CNN. French police confirmed to NBC News that Bourdain was found dead in a hotel room in Kaysersberg by apparent suicide.

He was remembered as a great storyteller who used food to get at the deeper bonds between people across borders.

“It is with extraordinary sadness we can confirm the death of our friend and colleague, Anthony Bourdain,” CNN said in a statement Friday morning. “His love of great adventure, new friends, fine food and drink and the remarkable stories of the world made him a unique storyteller. His talents never ceased to amaze us and we will miss him very much. Our thoughts and prayers are with his daughter and family at this incredibly difficult time.”

CNN will air a tribute to Bourdain Friday at 10 p.m. ET, with a marathon of his favorite episodes of “Parts Unknown” airing Saturday night and the regularly scheduled new episode of the show airing Sunday at 9 p.m. ET with a special introduction from Anderson Cooper.

Bourdain’s 2000 book “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,” an unvarnished look behind the scenes of the New York restaurant world, brought him international fame, which turned into a long TV career.

Within hours of his death, “Kitchen Confidential” was in the top 20 on Amazon.com.

He brought viewers around the world to sample all kinds of cuisines on a series of shows, including the Food Network’s “A Cook’s Tour,” Travel Channel’s “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown,” which won four consecutive Primetime Emmys for outstanding informational series or special. That show also won a Peabody Award in 2013.

“We ask very simple questions — what makes you happy, what do you eat, what do you like to cook — and everywhere in the world we go and ask these very simple questions, we tend to get some really astonishing answers,” Bourdain said when accepting the Peabody.

In 2016, he and then-President Barack Obama sat down for a dinner of “cheap but delicious noodles” in a Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall restaurant.

“He taught us about food — but more importantly, about its ability to bring us together. To make us a little less afraid of the unknown,” Obama wrote on Twitter after Bourdain’s death. “We’ll miss him.

Bourdain had written extensively about his life and detailed his early years of drug use, which he said had led to his dropping out of Vassar College after two years. He wrote about having depression in both his 2010 memoir, “Medium Raw,” and “Kitchen Confidential.”

In the latter, he detailed a time of unemployment that left him “utterly depressed” and “immobilised by guilt, fear, shame and regret.”