The trailer for Tony dropped this week, and seeing a 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain scrubbing dishes in Provincetown somehow hits harder than expected. Directed by Matt Johnson and starring Dominic Sessa, the film follows Bourdain before the fame, before the swagger, before he became the version of himself the world came to know. It captures the messy in-between stage when he was still figuring things out in a Cape Cod kitchen, which feels like exactly the right place to begin.
Here are 7 things to know about Anthony Bourdain
1. He only got his first kitchen job because his roommates were sick of him not paying rent.
The year was 1972. Bourdain was 17, sharing a summer house in Provincetown with high school friends, contributing nothing to the household finances. One night, a roommate who waited tables at a local seafood joint told him he was going to work there as a dishwasher whether he liked it or not.
That place, a sleepy waterfront restaurant he’d later call “The Dreadnaught” in Kitchen Confidential, is exactly where the A24 film picks up. Just a broke kid who needed to pull his weight.
2. It wasn’t the food that hooked him. It was the people.
What drew Bourdain to kitchen life wasn’t a love of cooking, that came later. It was the spectacle of the line cooks themselves – their swagger, their vices, their freedom. He wanted what they had. He would eventually discover that the real rock stars of any kitchen weren’t necessarily the best cooks. They were the ones who could tell the most compelling stories.
3. His whole career was an accident of maternal nepotism.
In the late 1990s, Bourdain had written an essay about the ugly secrets of Manhattan restaurant kitchens but was having difficulty getting it published. His mother Gladys, then a respected copy editor at the New York Times, passed it along to a friend who happened to be married to David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. Remnick ran it, kickstarting Bourdain’s career and legitimising the blunt, point-blank tone that would become his trademark. Within hours, TV crews were outside his restaurant. The essay became Kitchen Confidential. The book became everything else.
4. He wanted to be known as a writer, not a chef.
Bourdain had been obsessed with dark underground comics since the 1970s and even attempted to write and illustrate graphic novels, though publishers told him his drawing wasn’t good enough. He later collaborated with DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint on the graphic novel series Get Jiro!, and his editor there said she’d never seen him happier. He always bristled at the celebrity chef label. What he wanted, more than anything, was to be taken seriously as a writer.
5. A single trip to Japan rewired his brain.
Before Kitchen Confidential changed his life, Bourdain took a trip to Japan that he described as equivalent to his first acid trip in terms of how completely and violently it expanded his worldview. He said he arrived thinking there were a certain number of primary colours and came back knowing there were ten or twelve more. It made him want to see everything. That hunger, not just for food but for the shock of the genuinely new, is what Parts Unknown was really about.
6. He graduated early from high school just to follow a girl.
Bourdain met his future first wife Nancy Putkoski at high school. She was a year older, ran with what he called a “druggie crowd,” and he was so taken with her that he graduated a year early specifically to follow her to Vassar, which had only recently begun admitting men after more than a century as a women’s college. He dropped out after two years. The Provincetown summers happened in between, and the rest, painfully and beautifully, followed.
7. Provincetown described him better than any city he ever visited.
When Bourdain returned to Provincetown decades later to film a Parts Unknown episode, he called it a place with a long tradition of welcoming artists, writers, the badly behaved, and anyone who didn’t quite fit elsewhere. He called it paradise. It’s a telling self-portrait. He spent his whole career making the world feel slightly less frightening for people who felt like outsiders, because he’d been one himself – washing dishes on a Cape Cod dock at 17, not yet knowing what he was going to become.
Tony is coming at a moment when we’re still figuring out how to hold Anthony Bourdain, his brilliance and his darkness, the life he lived so loudly and the one he carried quietly. To think, he was once just a broke kid on a beach in Massachusetts, with no plan and no idea what was coming.
