'Tony' teaches us that everyone should come of age in a kitchen

A burnt arm is a cook’s rite of passage. Between splashing oil, flames jetting upward from gas stoves, and unpredictable (often buzzed) coworkers swinging by with piping-hot frying pans, my arms were covered in burns by the time I was 15. I got my first kitchen injury at just 12 years old, working as a dishwasher at my dad’s bar. Two guys named Redd and Caesar helped wrap my burnt hand before sending me back to the dish pit. The kitchen manager later told me that while burns came with the work, your ability to dance around them spoke to growing expertise—a show of maturity. I wanted nothing more than to prove to my coworkers I could handle the heat.

Matt Johnson’s Tony, a roughly rendered Anthony Bourdain biopic released on August 7, drops us into the summer that the famed chef turned storyteller first faced the heat himself. One of the film’s early kitchen sequences shows a 19-year-old Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) cockily grab a hot pan during his first day as a dishwasher at the Flagstaff (based on the Lobster Pot in Provincetown, Massachusetts). He sears his hand, and his coworkers laugh at him, lobbing jokes and insults, before eventually offering some help. From then on, Bourdain lives on the line, magnetized by the back-of-house gauntlet, the motley crews that populate kitchens, and, perhaps most of all, the brutal heat and adrenaline that fill them.

Instead of cramming the colossal scope of Bourdain’s journeyman life into one movie, Tony narrows its focus to that summer. The decision has sparked debate about how Bourdain might have reacted. Would he hate it? Maybe. (His former assistant, Laurie Woolever, wrote in an essay that he would have at least hated the discourse around it.) But Johnson’s film works precisely because it limits the film to a slim part of the chef’s well-known life. It’s a rich snapshot illustrating not just what made Bourdain tick but the universal value of the kitchens he so loved.

Tony introduces us to young Bourdain in a bar near Vassar College (the chef’s unfinished alma mater). He wields nunchucks and a flowery vocabulary as he downs beers and tries to hit on Nancy (Emilia Jones), a fictionalized version of the chef’s real-life first wife, Nancy Putowski. Nancy shoots him down as he boasts about a writing fellowship he arrogantly believes he’s got in the bag. When he doesn’t get it, rather than tell his parents the truth, he bolts to Provincetown to pursue the girl, only to discover she’s already with a pizza-tossing hunk (at least, for the summer). Soon enough, after getting caught in a bar fight, Tony finds himself washing dishes at the Flagstaff alongside a band of misfits: hardworking father Tyrone (Michael Jibrin), professional shit talker Dimitri (Stavros Halkias), and virile party animal Sal (Leo Woodall). This ragtag group rallies around the unnamed chef (Antonio Banderas, with the movie’s star performance), who warmly cares for his staff but runs his kitchen with a firm hand.

Despite the familiar premise, Tony unexpectedly unfolds as a coming-of-age drama that’s less reliant on Bourdain’s real-life story than a run-of-the-mill biopic would be. The director plucked the premise from the first few chapters of Kitchen Confidential (2000), where Bourdain recounts his life-changing summer in Provincetown. Rather than presenting a comprehensive portrait of the man we’ve grown to love and know, Johnson offers a window into how that man came to be: a story about a haughty young man thrown into a crucible that teaches him about both the power of food and finding his place in the world.

My parents dropped me into a similar crucible in my early teens. After school, the kitchen felt like a slice of freedom—a world of regimented debauchery. I would spend hours prepping food for the line cooks, who cranked out orders while they pretended to knife fight, flirted with anyone who walked into the kitchen, and often indulged in another hit between rushes. As Bourdain wrote in his breakthrough 1999 New Yorker essay: “In America, the professional kitchen is the last refuge of the misfit. It’s a place for people with bad pasts to find a new family.” Since then, the makeshift restaurant family has wiggled its way into pop culture, eventually giving us gems like The Bear. I was lucky enough to witness that twisted family unit firsthand. What it taught me, more than anything, was to be open to the world.

But smooth seas do not make skillful sailors. The stressful dinner shifts forged how I organize my time (meticulously plotting out tasks so I don’t start a fire) and how I handle criticism. (Edits on an article are nothing compared to watching a chef dump your prep work into the trash.) Most importantly, they taught me to communicate with people, to endure the rough edges—whether that’s annoying customers in the dining room or rage-inclined line cooks with whom I shared the kitchen. Loss, too, was a critical part of kitchen life, where people came and went on a dime and addiction was ever-present. As Bourdain once revealed in Parts Unknown, “Many of our friends from those days didn’t make it.” My family bore witness to this more than once, as close friends slipped away into drug use. I once joined my father on a retrieval visit for a drug-addled cook (a person I looked up to like an uncle). I never saw him again.

Tony captures this in the character of Sal. At first, the oyster-shucking chef provides a lifeline for the amateur Tony: a companion in the kitchen who, at one point, offers him cocaine to battle a hangover. Woodall portrays his charm wonderfully. Increasingly, though, Sal slips further into drug use, storming away from the chef’s tutelage. It’s one of the film’s most poignant moments, as we (alongside Sessa’s Tony) come to realize that although the kitchen is, in many ways, a life raft, it can’t always save everyone.

Admittedly, Tony may have arrived too soon after Bourdain’s untimely death in 2018. The beloved chef already offered up his life to us several times over, gifting us with firsthand accounts of his world travels and culinary life. But that’s why Johnson’s story works: The filmmaker doesn’t dwell on biographical details, instead giving us a story that, in essence, conveys the value of Bourdain’s legacy, with the restaurant kitchen as a foundation. Johnson said it himself: “I’d like to think that he’d be watching through the crack of the door, saying, ‘While this is factually incorrect, it is metaphorically true.’”

Tony succeeds because it grasps the significance of Bourdain’s first summer in a restaurant—how it not only led him to a life appreciating food but gave him the values that would eventually define his career. What we take away is how Bourdain transmuted the strange, brutal camaraderie of the kitchen into his life and how it fueled his willingness to sit down with anyone, around the world, and share stories over a plate of food. Bourdain’s greatest gift to us was that he shared everything he learned. Rather than simply rehashing what we already knew from him, Tony is a worthwhile testament to how he learned those lessons in the first place.

This article officially appeared on harperbazaar.com

Image credits: Seacia Pavao

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