‘Tony’ depicts a pivotal summer in Anthony Bourdain’s life that led to his decades-long career in food

NEED TO KNOW

• Dominic Sessa portrays prolific chef and author Anthony Bourdain in the biopic Tony
• The film centers around the summer of 1975 when Bourdain discovered his love for cooking at a restaurant in Provincetown, Mass.
• Tony took inspiration from a chapter in Bourdain’s 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential, while also tweaking some details

Anthony Bourdain’s life and legacy are getting a new look in Tony.

The biopic, which hit limited theaters on Aug. 7 before the nationwide release on Aug. 21, stars Dominic Sessa as a 19-year-old version of the late prolific chef and food personality.

However, unlike other biopics, Tony only focuses on one era of Bourdain’s decades-long career. The movie centers around the summer of 1975 when Bourdain discovered his love of food and cooking while working at a restaurant in Provincetown, Mass. Bourdain, who died by suicide in 2018, wrote about the pivotal period of his life in his bestselling 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential.

“Tony is not interested in summarizing Bourdain’s life, nor in presenting a definitive explanation of the man,” the film’s description explains. “Instead, the film approaches the culinary icon as a young person still in the process of forming – insecure, ambitious, intelligent, wounded, hungry and deeply uncertain about his future.”

The film is directed by Matt Johnson and also stars Emilia Jones as Nancy, Antonio Banderas as Chef, Leo Woodall as Sal, Dagmara Domińczyk as Gladys, Rich Sommer as Pierre Bourdain and Stavros Halkias as Dimitri, among others. While Johnson and his fellow filmmakers based much of their movie around what Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential, they also took some creative liberties with pieces Bourdain didn’t elaborate on.

Here are some of the aspects of Tony that actually happened in Anthony Bourdain’s life and others that were dramatized.

Did Bourdain really spend a career-defining summer in Provincetown?

Similar to how the film portrays, Bourdain’s life forever changed after the summer of 1975 when he worked as a dishwasher at The Flagship restaurant — which he referred to as the Dreadnaught in his memoir — in Provincetown. At the time, Bourdain was a 19-year-old student at Vassar College with hopes of becoming a writer.

“I was a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential.

He ventured to the summer town with friends and no job, but that changed when one of his roommates and employee at The Flagship made him the new dishwasher.

“I only became happy – in fact, intensely satisfied – as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Provincetown in Cape Cod, my first job,” he recalled to The Guardian in 2017. “I was a shy, goofy, awkward teenager. But in this blue collar, factory-like environment, there was no blurred line, no grey area, no philosophical question to fret over. Dishes had to go in the washer and come out taintless and doing this swiftly and competently meant I was acknowledged as a human being by colleagues I wanted to be like. The day they promoted me to dunking fries I was overjoyed.”

After his first experience in Provincetown, Bourdain went to spend two more summers there in the mid-1970s.

Was Nancy a real crush?

In Tony, Bourdain embarks on his life-changing summer in Provincetown in part because his Vassar College crush, Nancy Putkoski, spends her summer there working at a pizza shop.

In real-life, Nancy was more than a crush and had been dating Bourdain on and off for years. Just like in the movie, she was a year older than Bourdain, and they began dating while attending high school together in New Jersey.

However, the movie didn’t depict how Bourdain graduated high school a year early to follow Nancy to Vassar.

Nancy and Bourdain continued to date and got married in 1985. They remained together for two decades before divorcing in 2005.

Did he really go to Provincetown for Nancy?

In real-life, Nancy and Bourdain planned the trip together and went with friends — unlike the film showing him desperately following Nancy on his own.

Bourdain left much of his love life out of his memoir, as he simply wrote that he went with his college girlfriend to Provincetown, writing, “the less said about that the better.”

“Don’t think I didn’t love that line,” Johnson told IndieWire of making the creative decision to slightly alter the autobiography’s events.

“The attraction here was that there was so little information about it, and 95 percent of it was Bourdain’s own self-report,” he explained to the outlet. “And so not only am I getting a list of facts, dates, details, and places from Anthony Bourdain, I’m also getting it through the psychology of him as a 40-year-old man mythologizing his own youth.”

Johnson continued, “And so it’s doing this double duty for me, where not only do I get to compose a story around the details that he gives me, I also get to understand, almost through inversion, his feelings about it.”

Did Bourdain really run away from his mother?

In Tony, Bourdain not only flees to Provincetown to follow Nancy, but also to escape his challenging relationship with his parents, Gladys and Pierre Bourdain.

While Bourdain’s estate has previously shared that he had a complicated dynamic with his parents, it’s not clear whether or not it played a role in his journey to Provincetown.

Johnson explained to IndieWire that he used parts of his own childhood to fill in the gaps of Bourdain’s relationship with his parents.

“The uncomfortable truth is I struggle in my other films to be honest about what my life was actually like, what my childhood was like,” Johnson said. “[The story of Bourdain and his mother] really is the story of what it was like to be me when I was this exact age. And so I found it useful, it helped me understand the movie I was making by making it about myself and my own childhood as much as I possibly could.”

Screenwriter Todd Bartels also explained to Vanity Fair that they were trying to capture both the “tension between them” and possibly “something that he might want to run away from.”

Was Chef a real person?

Besides Bourdain himself, one of the main stars of Tony is Banderas as Bourdain’s mentor and head chef of The Flagship, who simply goes by “Chef.”

While Bourdain was inspired by several chefs throughout his career, he specifically referenced a man he called Bigfoot as his mentor in Kitchen Confidential.

However, Bigfoot, who Bourdain never named, was not the chef at the Provincetown restaurant and was instead his first boss at a restaurant he was working at in New York City while attending the Culinary Institute of America.

“I also took some stuff from the later New York [chapters in Kitchen Confidential] pages as well, and Antonio Banderas’ character is really informed by Bigfoot, Bourdain’s first big boss in New York,” Johnson told IndieWire.

Did Bourdain really live with Chef?

In the film, Bourdain is fooling around Provincetown when he runs into Chef, who lets him sleep at his home in exchange for him working as a dishwasher at his restaurant, The Flagship.

The movie slightly departs from Bourdain’s story, as he actually stayed in a summer cottage with his friends.

“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 wrote in Kitchen Confidential.

Was The Flagship real and did it really burn down?

The Flagship restaurant, which Bourdain called the Dreadnaught in his memoir, was a real seafood restaurant in Provincetown.

“The Dreadnaught was — well, you’ve eaten there, or someplace like it: a big, old, ramshackle driftwood pile, built out over the water on ancient wooden pylons,” he described in Kitchen Confidential. “In bad weather, the waves would roll under the dining-room floor and thud loudly against the sea wall. Grey wood shingles, bay windows, and inside, the classic Olde New Englande/Rusty Scupper/Aye Matey/Cap’n Whats’s decor: hanging fishnets, hurricane lamps, buoys, nautical bric-a-brac, the bars fashioned from halved lifeboats. Call it Early Driftwood.”

Bourdain wrote that he started out as a dishwasher but was promoted to the salad station by the end of the summer. When Bourdain returned to the summer destination the following year, he moved on and worked at another restaurant called Ciro & Sal’s.

Toward the end of the film, an accident causes a fire to burn parts of The Flagship. Bourdain and his controversial friend and coworker Sal come up with a plan to organize a beach cookout under the guise that the money would be donated to Chef, but they actually planned on stealing it and fleeing. However, Bourdain goes against the plan and gives the proceeds to Chef, after all.

However, there’s no record of a fire affecting The Flagship or Bourdain throwing a clambake as a scam (although there were annual clambakes hosted by various chefs). Instead, filmmakers explained they wanted to include the scene to symbolize how Bourdain’s “superpower was bringing people together and listening to them and connecting people through food.”

The Flagship has since shut down and is now a private residence.

Did Bourdain really drop out of Vassar to pursue cooking after the summer?

Bourdain spent a total of three summers working in restaurants in Provincetown before he dropped out of Vassar College to enroll at the Culinary Institute of America.

“I left Provincetown with restaurant experience, a suntan, and an ever-deepening relationship with recreational drugs,” Bourdain said in an episode of Parts Unknown in 2014. “I went to culinary school, then to New York City, and never returned.”

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