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Some biopics take the soup-to-nuts approach to their subject (although the chronology may be jumbled up for cinematic interest), hitting the notes of each well-known triumph and failure. Others opt to drill down on a short but pivotal period, usually one of soul-searching before a change of creative direction. Rock icons seem to lend themselves particularly well to this more focused approach, as seen in last year’s Bruce Springsteen’s wrestling-with-the-Nebraska-album film Deliver Me From Nowhere and 2024’s look at the run-up to Bob Dylan going electric, A Complete Unknown. Now, a crucial year in the life of the late Anthony Bourdain—who brought the same bad-boy rock-star energy to the food world—gets the same treatment in Tony.
Adapted from the opening chapters of Bourdain’s autobiography Kitchen Confidential, the film looks at one significant summer (in fact, said writer/director Matt Johnson, a compression of three summers) in the future chef’s life when he went from being, as a title card taken from his memoir Kitchen Confidential tells us, a “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless young lout … badly in need of a good ass-kicking” to something resembling a viable human being capable of considering other people’s needs and feelings.
The catalyst for this transformation was a stint in the kitchen of a Provincetown, Massachusetts, restaurant, starting at the bottom of the food chain as a dishwasher. When he arrived in the summer resort at the tip of Cape Cod in the early 1970s, Bourdain—then on the verge of flunking out of Vassar—was an unpleasant combination of arrogance and insecurity, bravado and neediness, given to informing all and sundry that he was a writer hard at work on a novel (not a word of which had actually been written, of course). It is as part of the kitchen crew that he discovered order, focus, a sense of purpose, and a tribe. As he said in 2017, “this was the first discipline, the first organization—because it is a very militaristic organization, the kitchen brigade—the first people whose respect I wanted and the first time in my life that I went home feeling respect for myself.”
Here, we look at what genuinely happened in Bourdain’s life and what is truer to the spirit than the letter.
Did Anthony originally go to Provincetown in pursuit of his dream girl?
On learning that he has failed to get a coveted writing fellowship to complete his Orwell-meets-Kerouac-inspired novel, 19-year-old Tony (Dominic Sessa) finds himself at loose ends as Vassar closes up for the summer. He hears that his fellow student Nancy (Emilia Jones), a girl he has had a crush on since high school, is spending the summer in Provincetown along with some friends, and, after stealing some cash from his father, decides to go there on his own in pursuit of her. But he soon discovers Nancy already has a boyfriend in the form of a co-worker at the pizzeria where she works.
Emilia Jones as Nancy in Tony.
A24
There is some truth in this, but Bourdain was not quite so lovelorn or isolated. Nancy Putkoski had been his on-and-off girlfriend since high school, which is why he followed her to Vassar. “I graduated high school a year early so I could chase the object of my desire to Vassar College,” Bourdain recalls in Kitchen Confidential. According to John Yingling, who employed Nancy at his Provincetown pizzeria Spiritus, “they were high school sweethearts.” Yingling’s sister went to Vassar and brought her college friends to work at her brother’s joint over the summer. Far from arriving as a lonely outsider, Bourdain traveled as part of this group for three summers. He and Putkoski eventually married in 1985.
Did Anthony work in the kitchen in return for being allowed to sleep on a porch?
Frustrated and angry after seeing Nancy with her new boyfriend, Tony drowns his sorrows at the bar of a local fried-seafood restaurant called the Flagship. He picks a fight with a line cook and is tossed out on to the street, with the cook pocketing what is left of his, or rather his father’s, money, leaving Tony penniless. The taciturn owner/head chef of the restaurant, known only as Chef (Antonio Banderas), allows the boy to sleep it off in a hammock on his back porch. When Tony asks if he can continue to sleep on the porch, Chef says only if he earns his keep by working as a dishwasher in the restaurant.
Bourdain did not take a job as a dishwasher in order to sleep in the restaurant owner’s hammock (although at one point he did spend a few nights sleeping in the crawl space over Spiritus’ walk-in refrigerator). In reality, he stayed with Nancy in a cottage she and her friends were renting. Far from being alone and miserable, he was having a wonderful time. “We all went to the beaches and ponds each morning, smoked pot, sniffed a little coke, dropped acid and sunbathed nude, as well as indulging in other healthy teenage activities,” he recalled in Kitchen Confidential. The difference was, in the evenings, all the others went off to work at restaurants while he did not. And the only reason he eventually got a job was because one of his roommates, fed up with Nancy’s freeloading boyfriend after a night shift made especially difficult because the restaurant’s dishwasher hadn’t shown up, told Bourdain that he would be taking over the truant dishwasher’s slot, and that was that.
Was the Flagship a real restaurant, and were the cooks there real people?
As Tony settles in to working in the kitchen of the Flagship, he gets to know his fellow workers, particularly Sal (Leo Woodall), a swaggering, effortlessly cool babe-magnet whose technical ability seems unaffected by his heroic consumption of drink and drugs and who shows Tony how a bump of cocaine can help a line cook keep up with the pace of the kitchen after a heavy night. He is even more impressed after he glimpses Sal having a quickie by the restaurant garbage bins with a bride who has sneaked away from her wedding dinner. But after Tony sees the dark side of Sal’s approach to life, which encompasses petty crime, random violence (it was Sal who tossed him out and stole his cash), and shooting up, he becomes increasingly inspired by the self-contained Chef, with his disciplined approach to running a kitchen and perfectionism when it comes to food. Coming in from the porch—rather like a puppy being allowed into the house if it remains on good behavior—Tony starts hanging out with Chef and discovers that, as well as having sophisticated tastes like Miles Davis and modern art, the Flagship owner has trained at top institutions and restaurants, although his heart remains with the Portuguese-influenced food of his youth. Chef shares with Tony a much-notated seafood cookbook that ends up becoming a big influence on the young cook.
The Flagship was a real restaurant in Provincetown (it closed in 2004) and the young Bourdain did work there, first as a dishwasher, then on the salad station. In Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain describes its chef, Bobby, as “a well-toasted, late-thirtyish ex-hippie who, like a lot of people in P-town, had come for vacation years back and stayed.” It was Bobby who was involved in the tryst with the bride, a true event that made a big impression on Bourdain, who later recalled, “it was watching chef Bobby screwing a bride over a barrel in the garbage area, while her wedding party dined inside, that made me want to be a chef.” Bobby is only one of the inspirations for Sal, who is an amalgamation of several kitchen workers Bourdain hailed as “sexual athletes” living a life of “adventure, looting, pillaging, and rock-and-rolling through life with a carefree disregard for all conventional morality.”
The Chef character, who inspired Bourdain’s more serious side, is also a composite of several chefs he encountered. After working at the Flagship, Bourdain did a stint at what was considered Provincetown’s best restaurant, a northern Italian place called Ciro & Sal’s (Sal nothing like the Sal in the movie), dubbed Mario’s in Kitchen Confidential.
According to the film’s co-writer Lou Howe, an unnamed chef known in Kitchen Confidential as Bigfoot was the primary inspiration for Chef. (Opinions differ on who Bigfoot actually is, but many Bourdain devotees vote for Andy Menschel, a chef Bourdain didn’t encounter until many years later in New York who became a mentor.) Chef is also thought to be partially inspired by one of Bourdain’s Ciro’s colleagues, the restaurant’s pasta chef Alexej Getmanov, known in Confidental as Dimitri, who became a close friend and, for a while, business partner. He was not Portuguese/Brazilian, as Chef appears to be, but Russian/German. However, he was similarly, according to Bourdain, a “loner, intellectual, voracious reader, and gourmand.”
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Another inspiration for Chef is a cook Bourdain didn’t actually work with but who was nevertheless a big influence: Howard Mitcham, author of the Provincetown Seafood Cookbook, a book given to him in real life when he started work at the Flagship and the model for the book Tony finds at Chef’s house. Mitcham’s book meant enough to Bourdain that he wrote the introduction to a 2018 reissue, noting that Mitcham “understood always that the best place to enjoy seafood was on the beach, among friends, in a pretense-free zone, preferably accompanied by many drinks,” and that the book taught him “there is no difference between the joys of a great meal at a three-star Michelin restaurant and at a humble fisherman’s bar—as long as it’s made with love and with pride.”
In the movie, Tony (now calling himself Anthony) revives the tradition of cooking a New England clambake on the beach for the whole community as a way of raising funds for Chef after a setback. It is not known whether Bourdain did organize such an event, but the sequence is a nod to the annual clambake Mitcham used to host for his artist friends as well as to the clambake recipe in his book.
Is the depiction of Provincetown accurate?
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Tony attends a Portuguese-language mass with Chef and later a nighttime tuna run where virtually all the town’s fishermen spontaneously launch their boats to take advantage of the large numbers of fish, which gives him a sense of the town’s blue-collar roots as a working fishing town.
The film does capture ’70s Provincetown’s combination of bustling summer resort filled with tourists overlaying the much quieter year-round New England town largely settled by fishermen from Portugal’s Azores (a “Catholic, Portuguese conservative mission community,” as Bourdain observed in a 2014 episode of his television series Parts Unknown). But what is missing is any hint that it was (and is) a leading beach destination for the gay community. This is where a youthful Tennessee Williams, who spent a summer here writing The Glass Menagerie, once strolled naked into what is thought to be America’s oldest gay bar. “My feeling was that this was a gay town and I was here at the pleasure of somebody else,” Bourdain recalled on Parts Unknown; but the P-town shown in the film is as thoroughly straight as the Jersey Shore.
Dining and Cooking