Before He Was Bourdain

ByDanny ChauAug. 7, 11:38 am UTC
• 9 min

An advance screening of Matt Johnson’s A24 biopic, Tony,a coming-of-age story based on a few early chapters of the late, great Anthony Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential, was held in midtown Toronto on National Oyster Day. Walking into the theater, attendees were offered a freshly shucked oyster with all the fixings present: apple-shallot mignonette, grated horseradish, habanero hot sauce, a squeeze of lemon. A bit on the nose, but a free oyster is a free oyster, just like a tie-in is a tie-in. The bivalve played a formative role in Bourdain’s real-life Dionysian awakening. Bourdain had his first oyster when he was 9 or 10, vacationing in a coastal village of Gironde in the southwest of France, where his paternal grandfather emigrated from. “I remember it like I remember losing my virginity,” he wrote in Kitchen Confidential.“And in many ways, more fondly.”

The oyster is just as essential to the story in Tony,which comes out Friday.It becomes a manifestation of performance anxiety both in and out of the kitchen, and its shell becomes a mirror held up to a young Bourdain’s trail of deceit. Early in the film, a drunk Bourdain, played rather convincingly by Dominic Sessa, confides in Mary, the bartender of The Flagship, a casual lobster-roll dinette that would soon become a portal into a new life. He tells her about that first time eating an oyster in France, basking in his mother’s revulsion at the time. “It tasted like the future,” Tony says smugly, to little fanfare. Eating that oyster may have felt like his first foray into manhood, but he had many, many steps to go. 

The thing about Tony in Tonyis: He sucks. He’s a whole lot of nothing. He’s a serial pretender, a pathological liar. A loser who will bloviate to anyone and everyone, from girls at a bar to the panel of interviewers for a writing fellowship at Vassar College. He says what he thinks people want to hear and he will do so utterly convinced (or utterly desperate) that they will take him at his word. And though it doesn’t mean much, it’s all he has. It gets him into trouble. It gets him out of trouble. It gets him a black eye. It gets him burned, literally. Of course it does. He’s only 19. The movieopens with a quote from Kitchen Confidential rendered in stark black-and-white: “I was—to be frank—a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” It spends much of the ensuing 106 minutes mounting substantial evidence.

The Anthony Bourdain Special Episode

The Anthony Bourdain Special EpisodeThe Watch
The Watch• Aug. 6• 1 hr

The Anthony Bourdain Special Episode

The Anthony Bourdain Special EpisodeThe Watch
The Watch• Aug. 6• 1 hr
TV

The Anthony Bourdain Special Episode

The Anthony Bourdain Special EpisodeThe Watch
The Watch• Aug. 6• 1 hr

Alone and damn near penniless in Provincetown, Massachusetts, having ditched his home in New Jersey just to breathe in the same air as his massive high school crush, he is guided through a fateful summer in the mid-’70s by the better (and worse) angels of his environment. He finds mentors in the Flagship kitchen, where he works as a dishwasher in exchange for spending nights passed out on a hammock behind the head chef’s house. He enmeshes with the staff quickly, finding his place in the rhythm and caustic shit-talk of the kitchen, while also becoming privy to the layers of physical, emotional, and drug abuse just barely concealed beneath the surface. He helps catch an Atlantic bonito in the middle of the night. He gags after a sip of Swedish wormwood liquor. He tags along during a drug deal and catches his first glimpse of heroin, a drug that would consume the following decade of his life. But not yet.

This Tony still has everything to look forward to. This Tony is nearly three decades away from the unfathomable celebrity that blossomed, then metastasized, from a life spent perpetually on the brink. The patina of sin and redemption haven’t stained his chef’s whites yet. That’s not the Tony we see here. This Tony—the rebel without a cause skimming Kerouac on the ride over to New England on the off chance it might help him get laid—is stunned and a little sheepish just to be offered a uniform.    

The extremely narrow, decidedly unambitious scope of the movie is its biggest strength. And as a creative endeavor, it might have been the only viable way to explore Bourdain’s story without getting lost in the legend. Tony homes in on a moment in time that only a handful of people in Bourdain’s life can actually account for. The movie is just as a young Tony says at various points in the film, to increasing degrees of embarrassment: It’s a bildungsroman. It does nothing with the prevailing myths of Anthony Bourdain. It doesn’t have to. It’s the audience that colors outside the lines, that suffuses the narrative with subtext.    

It’s been more than eight years since Bourdain’s death by suicide, yet his voice has maintained permanent lodging in the collective consciousness. The carnal, lurid prose in Kitchen Confidentialwas given another dimension in the travel documentaries that soon followed in the new millennium. His resonant, Jersey-inflected register; the cadence; the ironic, comic-book punctuation in his joke delivery—it was the voice and candor that launched a million line-cook careers, inspiring a legion of bleeding-heart malcontents to jump into the profession. The kitchen establishes a literal line of fire that impels a sense of order under pressure and a sense of collaboration amongst many disparate stations just trying not to suffocate. The end result, should all go well, is something next to godliness. A valorous act of creation—of pleasuring—in spite of everything it costs to manage. A kinship of shared glories and traumas. A genuine connection. A plate of food worth savoring. “Admittedly, it’s a life that grinds you down. Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional,” Bourdain once wrote. “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.”

Earlier this week, A24 worked with the hospitality professionals in major cities across the U.S. to create an “Industry Night” promotion for the movie, allowing a local chef in each participating location to host a free screening of Tonyfor front- and back-of-house restaurant workers. There, they got an early look at a portrait of their patron saint as a young man. For many, they also caught a glimpse of the broad strokes of their own journey through Johnson’s lens, the romance in fucking up and figuring it out. A week before that, A24 held a premiere party at the opulent Golden Steer steakhouse in Greenwich Village’s One Fifth Avenue building, a restaurant venue where, once upon a time, Bourdain served as chef back when it was known as Vince and Linda’s. Celebrities, celebrity chefs, and media mainstays commingled in a strange gathering, sipping martinis and digging into small bowls of mapo tofu, ostensibly celebrating the film and Bourdain himself while trying to override the pervading sense that Tony probably would have hated this.Whether that’s true—of the celebration, of the movie itself—is best left to those who actually knew him.    

But in many ways, the rollout of Tonymirrors that of Bourdain’s enduring legacy itself, as the more jagged aspects of his myth are gradually smoothed out over time with anodyne patches of memory. How do we choose to remember Anthony Bourdain? As a hero? As a tragic figure?  

There is an episode of Parts Unknownthat features Bourdain next to the celebrated Southern chef Sean Brock, both drunkenly seated in a Waffle House in Charleston. Bourdain’s narration, cribbing a line from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, bestowed upon the iconic chain a utopian sensibility: An irony-free zone where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. It was a reflection on a specific moment in time; he wasn’t espousing an ideal worth chasing. The same could be said about Johnson’s vision with Tony.There is plenty that hurts at 19.Rejection hurts. Disappointing others hurts. Coming down from a high hurts. Time crawls slowly at that age; pain is more acute, but the lessons on the other side of it tend to linger in the mind.  

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.An absurd premise, and yet, it certainly feels as though popular food culture has moved in that direction. Broadly speaking, what was Bourdain if not one of the pioneering food influencers? What was he if not a prophet with a large swath of disciples who ventured to do exactly as he did, and not as he said? Whatever inner peace Bourdain found in Vietnam over the years, in indiscriminately tossing a punishing amount of pickled chilies into his morning bowl of pho, fans found an itinerary to be replicated verbatim. He’d expressed concern about that phenomenon in the years just before his death; the speed with which this checklist mentality has taken hold of culture has seen near-exponential acceleration in the ensuing decade. A high-profile influencer can mobilize a following within hours of posting a standout dish at a restaurant, creating demand for a menu item that can’t possibly be sustained—all to recreate a moment that wasn’t theirs to begin with. “I much prefer people who just showed up in Paris and found their own way without any particular itinerary, who left themselves open to things happening,” Bourdain once said. “To mistakes, because that’s the most important part of travel. The shit you didn’t plan for, and being able to adapt and receive that information in a useful way.” 

The memories are already starting to warp, in ways that once again echo Vonnegut. There’s a viral quote that surfaced after Bourdain’s death. You probably know the one: Eat an oyster. Have a Negroni. Have two.Bourdain never said it, but it’s convincing enough to make someone want to believe he did. In the late ’90s, an iconic MIT commencement speech from Vonnegut made the rounds on the internet. Ladies and gentlemen of the Class of 1997:Wear sunscreen. He never said it, but it was convincing enough that even Vonnegut’s wife shared it with friends and family. If Vonnegut was the smartass poet laureate of post-war disillusionment, Bourdain would carry the mantle into the following generations as the reluctant champion of break-bread diplomacy. According to Bourdain’s longtime executive assistant, Laurie Woolever, Anthony’s younger brother Chris recently had a conversation with a few neighbors that left him puzzled, disappointed. One had only just realized that Chris was related to Anthony; another asked who Anthony was. The former claimed that Anthony was one of the best chefs in the world—a flagrantly incorrect flattening of what made him one of the most beloved celebrities of our time. He was a good cook, a good writer, but what made him extraordinary was his presence. He was one of the most inquisitive people to ever appear on television—a Yankee David Attenborough in a ratty Ramones tee.    

Tonywardens off all of that, creating a geodesic dome around 1975 and all that it represented for Bourdain. “To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are,” Bourdain once said. “It’s a story you can’t tell. It’s a story you, almost by definition, can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.” 

The biggest compliment that can be given to Tonyis that it captures that feeling often. 

The movie is not particularly sentimental about the man that Anthony Bourdain was. It is, however, sentimental about the preciousness of that particular moment in every young adult’s life where they have the freedom and ignorance and agency to ride the edge and—to also crib a line from Vonnegut—experience becoming. In its lack of reverence paid toward the myth and monolith, Tony manages to stumble into one of Bourdain’s most enduring wisdoms.

Danny Chau
Danny ChauChau writes about the NBA and gustatory pleasures, among other things. He is the host of ‘Shift Meal.’ He is based in Toronto.