If you love Anthony Bourdain’s books, then you’ll love TONY, the new biopic movie origin story
The new Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony (written and directed by Matt Johnson) kicks off with an epigraph, a quote from Bourdain’s most famous book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly:
“I was—to be frank—a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”
Trailer for Matt Johnson’s biopic about Anthony Bourdain, TONY.
What is Tony about? Synopsis / summary
If you’re a big fan of Anthony Bourdain’s writing, or if you’ve revisited Kitchen Confidential recently, you’ll recognize that quote from the “First Course” section entitled “Food Is Sex.” This whole film Tony is set between pages 17 and 35 of that 300+ page book, but I don’t mean that as a negative critique: I see Tony as an expansion of the most famous, begrudgingly celebrity chef’s origin story.
This film is the part of “Tony” (Dominic Sessa)’s life in which he flounders at his Ivy League school, wanders to Cape Cod lovestruck after a girl (Emilia Jones), and ends up grinding in a kitchen… which he ends up loving.
Who is Anthony Bourdain in Tony?
To be frank, I’m also a writer. Right after finishing my Masters of Fine Arts degree in creative writing, though, I was also “badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” Writers are famously babies, and even though I was/am a baby, I was tired of hanging out with them, so I went to work in a kitchen. A bake shop. The bake shop of one of the biggest hotels in downtown Atlanta. On DragonCon weekend. With only home-kitchen experience. My only asset was that I could pick things up pretty quick. Who the fuck did I think I was? (I’m a girl who likes to have pretty fingernails and a suntan.)
To say it kicked my ass is an understatement—the 4AM clock-ins and actual physical strength needed just to lift the bowl of the industrial stand mixer from floor to table wore me out in a matter of months. (ICYMI: you can’t use your body as a counterweight for an open-top liquid container, the way you would in a squat, because the contents will go all over you. It’s a dead lift by the tips of your fingers. Followed by a power-clean.) But it gave me a new respect for anyone who works in any kitchen.
Which, like, I knew in my head from reading Anthony Bourdain’s books (The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones and Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, too), but I now felt in my feet and hands and back and head. He was exactly correct.
All that to say, when I hear Anthony Bourdain’s name, my immediate thought and response is, “He is a really great writer. I mean, I know he’s a chef, but he’s a great writer.” Which is funny, because in this film, nineteen-year-old “Tony” tells anyone who will listen that he’s not a cook. He’s a writer.
Courtesy of A24
(L-R) Dominic Sessa
Credit: Seacia Pavao
The voice of Tony… and Anthony
The thing about postmortem biopics is that they typically romanticize the subject. This movie does not do that—which is smart, because anyone who’s read his work or seen his shows knows that Anthony Bourdain would have probably hated that revisionism. His perspective, reflected in his voice and demeanor, is so iconic because it’s paradoxical:
The Celebrity Chef who cringes at Celebrity Chef Culture
Anthony Bourdain admitted celebrity chef culture was good for business, but that it doesn’t make sense. It feels inauthentic, yet, he acknowledges, he is, now, somehow, gratefully and spitefully, a celebrity chef. In the preface, he says,
“What I set out to do was write a book that my fellow cooks and restaurant lifers would fine entertaining and true. I wanted it to sound like me talking, at say, … ten o’clock on a Saturday night, after a busy dinner rush, me and a few cooks hanging around the kitchen, knocking back a few beers and talking shit. You will notice that the tone of the book is blustery, that there is rather more than a little testosterone on the page and that I make the occasional sweeping generalization. This was entirely intentional.”
He's going for authenticity, and he gets there. It feels real, even if you haven’t lived it firsthand… but especially if you have lived it firsthand. And Tony adapts that tone beautifully.
The scenes he packs into those seventeen pages of Kitchen Confidential are all represented. For those who recall the “burn cream” request after he grabs a cast iron skillet barehanded, or the cool oyster-shucker Bobby / Sal (Leo Woodall) who hooks up with the bride during her wedding reception, or even how little-boy Anthony ate oysters in France… you’ll get all of that in the film. But! If you haven’t read the book, the anecdotes don’t feel like inside joke Easter Eggs—is there anything worse than the forced laughter of an audience performing that they get the joke?—they play out like normal scenes in a film. Which is a testament to the screenwriting of Matt Johnson.
Courtesty of A24
(L-R) Dominic Sessa, Leo Woodall
Credit:SeaciaPavao
Kind of a jerk
If you’ve never worked in a kitchen, Anthony Bourdain can come across as kind of a jerk. I said it. But he also says it. He knows he’s “narcissistic” and arrogant, or was. But honestly? By the time he’s writing a NYT best-seller, worked as a cook for decades, completed Culinary Institute of America education, and much more, he has earned the right to his elitism.
Working in that bakery for just a couple months gave me a big head in any home kitchen. At the time, cooking a three-course dinner—everything hot at the right time—was my bitch. (If it served 12 or fewer.) I still judge the shit out of anyone who holds a chef’s knife with their index finger extended.
But at the start of Tony, no.
Tony at the beginning of Tony? He’s the Guy in Your MFA (figuratively). He pitches his manuscript’s “basic vision” for a fellowship at Vassar as Jack Kerouac and J.D. Salinger just having a conversation, and he will write it on a single piece of paper. Barf. I mean, I know it was 1974 at the time, but that idea is just barf, on any timeline. That is the point of its inclusion.
There’s no denying Tony’s character is intelligent—but that idea is completely uninspired, and so is he. So he lies to everyone and wanders off to Cape Cod after a girl he had a crush on in high school. He has what Toni Morrison called in Sula “an artist with no art form.” Dangerous.
In case you’re wondering, Anthony Bourdain did go on to write novels. And, I just now learned, he wrote a true crime book about my girl Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical!
But also… GREAT humility
Being able to talk about yourself as the little shit that you once were, like Anthony Bourdain does, is humble. It requires reflection, which he has obviously done, and the honesty to tell yourself how you were, which was kind of shitty there for a while.
If you’ve seen Anthony Bourdain’s travel and cooking shows like Parts Unknownor No Reservations, you’ll recognize this self-aware humility. (You may also, as I did in retrospect, notice too much gallows humor, and that his jokes are disturbingly self-harm-forward.)
Because he speaks so candidly, though, so authentically, his work is wildly successful. “So-called restaurant insiders and foodies were said to be outraged,” he says of Kitchen Confidential. “The truth? I have never had so many free meals and free drinks come my way in my life.”
His friend and well-renowned chef, Eric Ripart, even has a small cameo in the closing scene of Tony. Of Anthony Bourdain, he has said, Bourdain was “very humble about his cooking skills.” And, that the film Tony shows “an Obviously Very Different’ Person at 19.”
It’s a supreme bummer that anyone had to say he was different at 19. (Who among us was not a drastically, embarrassingly different person at 19 than we are now?) Still, we had to start somewhere, and this origin story of Anthony Bourdain as we know him publicly, is a damn delight to watch unfold.
Courtesy of A24
(L-R) Dominic Sessa, Eric Ripert
Credit: Bob Gruen
Also… Tony is hilarious
Look, Anthony Bourdain has masterful syntax. He’s hilarious and quippy, and the film’s repartee reflects that tone without being reductive.
Girl: What’s that in your pants?
(Points to nun-chucks inexplicably in his waistband.)
Tony: Oh, that’s my dick.
I don’t know how Matt Johnson did it, but the situational comedy and the back-and-forth elicited huge laughs in my theater every time. The timing and delivery was impeccable every time. I mean, the crab-shack Escoffier chef, Ciro (Antonio Banderas), firing a shotgun at a giant tuna from a fishing boat? Come on!
Compression and Artistic License
It goes without saying that to write about anyone is to apply artistic license. The same with goes with film, especially dramatization.
Tony opens in select theaters on August 7, 2026, before expanding nationwide on August 21, 2026.
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