In the movie, Dominic Sessa portrays Anthony Bourdain, a student at Vassar College who follows his crush Nancy Putkoski to Provincetown, where she works in the summer at a pizza shop. She doesn’t exactly feel the same at first, and so one night, a heartbroken Bourdain drowns his sorrows at a casual seafood restaurant and gets into a fight there, ending up too drunk to go home. The restaurant’s chef (Antonio Banderas)—known simply as “Chef” in the film—brings him back to his house. The chef lets him stay for the summer because he has nowhere to go and puts him to work as a dishwasher in his restaurant.
The real Bourdain died by suicide in 2018 at the age of 61. Tony, taking place over one summer, does not delve into questions about his death. “We wanted to remind people why they loved him in the first place, focus on the beginning of his life where he figured out how to share his superpower with the world of curiosity, empathy and connecting people through food,” says Lou Howe, one of the Tony screenwriters.
When Bourdain went to Provincetown for the first time, he wasn’t craving lobster rolls, but the company of one particular woman. As he wrote in his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential, he was 18 and “unhappily in love” when he went there to find his high school crush and future wife Nancy.
Nancy worked at Spiritus Pizza, and while Bourdain didn’t actually move in with a chef, as the movie depicts, he did sleep in the crawl space over a walk-in refrigerator at Spiritus Pizza at one point.
“He was forced to get this job. He didn't have any money in Provincetown,” says Todd Bartels, one of the Tony screenwriters.
Bourdain was attracted to a certain kind of swagger that the kitchen crew boasted. In one dramatic example in Kitchen Confidential, he wrote that when he watched a chef at the Flagship rear-end a bride celebrating her wedding at the restaurant, “I knew then, dear reader, for the first time: I wanted to be a chef.”
Bourdain dishing on Bourdain
In Tony, Sessa as Bourdain is obnoxious, talking himself up and lying to everyone he meets, even pretending that he’s writing a book about the restaurant to impress Nancy. The real Bourdain was definitely known as an arrogant kid in Provincetown. Per Kitchen Confidential, back then he was “angry” and “undisciplined,” writing, “I treated the world like my ashtray.”
As one of the Flagship’s chefs, Alex Getmanov, said in Laurie Woolever’s Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, Bourdain “didn’t know anything, and he had this attitude that he could do anything, which doesn’t get you far in a working kitchen.”
In an episode of his food travel series Parts Unknown, Bourdain described the Flagship as the place “where my cooking career started, where I started washing dishes, where I started to have pretensions of culinary grandeur.”
(L-R) Bourdain (Sessa) and the "Chef" (Antonio Banderas), who is a composite of the many chefs who inspired Bourdain. —Seacia Pavao
What Bourdain learned from the Cape Cod food scene
The chef and mentor in Tony (Antonio Banderas) is a composite of different chefs who inspired Bourdain.
More than that, he learned a passion for food. “Howard showed us how to cook for ourselves, for the pure pleasure of eating, not just for the tourist hordes,” he wrote in Kitchen Confidential, “that food could be a calling. That the stuff itself was something we could actually be proud of, a reason to live.”
He left Cape Cod with an appetite for food and vice. As he said in Parts Unknown, “I left Provincetown with restaurant experience, a suntan, and an ever deepening relationship with recreational drugs.”
Provincetown also gave Bourdain, an aspiring writer, something to finally write about, says Bartels. “He found a purpose. I don't know if there's anything more profound than that.”
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