In June 2021, as fans marked the third anniversary of the death of chef, author, and travel documentarian Anthony Bourdain, a message supposedly posted by the "Kitchen Confidential" author to Twitter in which he praised the bat soup in Wuhan, China, was circulated on social media:
This is not a genuine tweet from Bourdain. This is just a morbid joke that plays on the celebrity chef in a sense "predicting" the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This message reads: "This might be the best bat soup I ever had in my life. Someday everyone's gonna be talking about Wuhan."
This fake tweet had been circulating for about a year by the time Snopes was alerted to it. It was first posted to the "Coronavirus Memes" section of Reddit in March 2020 where it was accompanied by an "original meme" tag, indicating that this Reddit user (u/loozerne) created this fake tweet.
We double-checked Bourdain's Twitter account just to be certain that it was never posted by the celebrity chef. And, lo and behold, we found no indications that this message was ever posted to Bourdain's account.
Bourdain ate some interesting foods as he traveled the world for his show "Parts Unknown," but we weren't able to find any articles or videos of the celebrity chef trying bat soup. The closet thing we could find was this video of Bourdain and "the soup of death," a bug-filled dish he had in South Korea: