Andrew Zimmern reveals he tried to drink himself to death and was homeless while battling addictions

While battling addiction, celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern tried to drink himself to death and spent a year without taking a shower while squatting in an abandoned building.

Zimmern, who is best known as the iron-stomached host of “Bizarre Foods” on the Travel Channel, spoke openly about his battles with drugs and alcohol in an interview with Artful Living. Among the revelations was that he spent a year homeless after being evicted from his apartment in late 1990 or early 1991.

At a friend’s recommendation, Zimmern holed up in a vermin-infested building in Lower Manhattan.

“It was a townhouse that was in the midst of being renovated,” he said. “Work had stopped. Actually, demolition is more like it; renovation is a little too fancy a term. There were concrete casements in the windows. There was electricity that had been pirated from a nearby building across the roof with extension cords. And there was a sink with running water, so you could drink water. Thus began my year of homelessness.”

Zimmern, now 57, said he didn’t shower for a year. A pile of dirty clothes on the floor served as his bed.

“I didn’t really sleep; it was more like passing out,” he said. “Every couple days, I would steal a bottle of Comet cleanser that I would pour in a circle around my sleeping area so rats and roaches wouldn’t crawl over me in the middle of the night.”

“And I thought that was OK and normal. That’s how bad it was,” he added. “And I just kept falling further and further down. I would steal purses off the backs of chairs in bistros on the Upper East Side and bring them downtown to drug dealers to sell the credit cards and passports for money. That was my life.”

Zimmern said he would hit bottom about a year later with a drinking binge meant to end his life.

He said he stole jewelry from his godmother, hocked it for cash and checked into a hotel that was “a grade above a flophouse.” He then purchased three cases of vodka and started drinking until he blacked out.

“I couldn’t tell you whether it was three or five days later, but I woke up one morning and the tension, the Ace bandage that had been tied so tightly around my entire life just wasn’t there,” he said. “I felt a desperate need to reach out to someone. I called my friend Clark, who was shocked to hear from me. He came down and got me out of there. Unbeknownst to me, he was already planning my intervention.”

The intervention led to five weeks in rehab, followed by a stay at a halfway house that required its residence to hold jobs. Zimmern, who had already began his culinary career, found work as a dishwasher.

He said he tries to draw from his past mistakes to help others in need.

“Today I’m on the boards of some important organizations that help a lot of people in this country. And I try to make a difference in the lives of people with whom I can share my experience,” he said.

Zimmern said he began drinking and smoking pot at the age of 13 to cope with the traumatic experience of seeing his mother in a coma for months following a botched surgery. He then moved on to harder drugs.

“I very quickly started doing pills, cocaine, hallucinogens,” he said. “By the time I went to college, I had already experimented with heroin. So when I got to college, the gloves came off, and I became a typical New York garbage head.

“Whatever was around was my drug of choice. I liked to mix things that brought me up with things that brought me down so that I could use all day long, whether that was narcotics, sedatives, opioids mixed with cocaine. I was functional, which gave me the false illusion that it was manageable. But things just continued to get worse and worse.”