Dominic Sessa as a young Anthony Bourdain in the film Tony. Photograph: Bob Gruen/A24 View image in fullscreen Dominic Sessa as a young Anthony Bourdain in the film Tony. Photograph: Bob Gruen/A24 Biopics Sex, drugs and washing dishes: inside Anthony Bourdain’s unruly younger years In the acclaimed new drama Tony, the early career of the late food writer and chef is brought to life, and those who knew him best are now also looking back
David Smith Washington bureau chief Sat 8 Aug 2026 11.00 CEST Last modified on Sat 8 Aug 2026 12.35 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google T he novelist Michael Cunningham has described Provincetown , on the tip of Cape Cod, as “the only small town I know of where those who live unconventionally seem to outnumber those who live within the prescribed bounds of home and licensed marriage, respectable job, and biological children. It is one of the places in the world you can disappear into.”
Read more This idiosyncratic bohemia has attracted the likes of Edward Hopper, Eugene O’Neill, Mark Rothko and Tennessee Williams along with poets, dropouts, drag queens and drifters. In the summer of 1975 came a lanky, restless 19-year-old from New Jersey with no job and no money, sleeping on the floor of a shared cottage while his roommates worked to pay the rent. His name was Anthony Bourdain , who would later become a celebrity chef, author and television globetrotter.
Half a century later, that coming-of-age has been mythologised by Hollywood. Matt Johnson’s new film, Tony, starring Dominic Sessa as the adolescent dishwasher, imagines the origin story of the man before he rewrote the rules of food writing with his 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential.
For those who knew Bourdain best, the film’s release – eight years after his death by suicide – has been a difficult one to sit with. “I have a very strong emotional relationship to Tony and yeah, it’s hard,” says Joel Rose , 78, a novelist and editor who was arguably Bourdain’s closest literary confidant for 35 years.
“This has been a difficult period for me. There’s a lot going on with Tony’s memory and the memories that I have, and how in so many ways I feel cheated and confused. I had a very different relationship with Tony than his TV persona and all that. I wasn’t in that world with him, and I’m not sure that it was a favorite place for Tony to be.”
Bourdain described his time in Provincetown in Kitchen Confidential: “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.”
After getting a job as a dishwasher in the kitchen of local restaurant Flagship – later fictionalised as the Dreadnaught in Kitchen Confidential – he discovered a structure he’d never known before: something with real stakes, real hierarchy and an odd, brutal kind of belonging. He worked his way up from the dish pit to the salad station, then to the fryer, and eventually earned a shift or two at the broiler.
He put it this way to the Observer in 2017 : “I only became happy – in fact, intensely satisfied – as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Provincetown in Cape Cod, my first job. 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…