“So you worked as a cleaner in a kitchen one summer?” the admissions team at the Culinary Institute of America asks a young Anthony Bourdain.
“Yes,” he says, without hesitation.
It is an oddly ordinary answer for a man who would eventually become one of the world's most recognisable culinary figures. But 'Tony' understands that Bourdain's relationship with the kitchen did not begin with culinary genius. It began with a lost 19-year-old, a bruised ego and a summer job washing dishes. Directed by Matt Johnson and starring Dominic Sessa as Bourdain, with Antonio Banderas, Emilia Jones and Leo Woodall in supporting roles, the film chooses to stay there long before the books, television shows and fame.
Tony arrives in Provincetown chasing Nancy (Emilia Jones), an old crush, and carrying the conviction that he is destined to be a writer. Instead, he finds himself in a hammock at a beach house after a series of increasingly bad decisions, including refusing to pay for a meal and behaving badly towards a waitress at the Flagship. The restaurant's owner, played by Antonio Banderas, gives him another chance, eventually putting him to work in the kitchen. It is there, among dirty dishes, exhausted cooks and the relentless rhythm of service, that Tony begins to learn something more valuable than cooking: how to work.
That distinction is what makes 'Tony' work.
For anyone expecting something along the lines of 'The Bear', with kitchens reduced to a frenzy of flames, knives and close-ups of food being transformed into art, 'Tony' deliberately rejects that prototype. This isn't a film about watching a chef become a chef. It is about watching a young man become someone worth becoming.
The kitchen is almost incidental to the larger story. Johnson is more interested in the relationships that shape Tony than the dishes coming out of the pass. The film takes its time with the small, unglamorous details: oysters being opened, dishes that still need washing, kitchen towels that have seen better days, cooks eating stew from coffee mugs after their shifts. The camera doesn't fetishise the kitchen; it lets the atmosphere accumulate.
Even the oysters carry more weight than their place on the menu. They are sensual, almost sexual objects in Tony's hands—something he struggles to open while trying to impress a woman. But the film also returns to Bourdain's childhood memory of tasting his first oyster in France, when it tasted, to him, like “the future”. The oyster becomes a neat symbol of Tony himself: something he wants to master, but hasn't yet learned to handle with care.
Sessa plays him as a pathological liar with an enormous ego and an even larger insecurity underneath it. He is restless, arrogant and desperate to convince everyone—including himself—that he is destined for something greater. When a writing fellowship rejection knocks the wind out of him, the kitchen becomes less of a fallback and more of an education. The film's quiet achievement is in showing that Tony doesn't suddenly discover his calling. He slowly discovers that he is capable of showing up.
Leo Woodall's Sal is the kind of loose cannon who makes the kitchen feel dangerous and alive. He is reckless, charming and almost impossibly cool, a temptation towards the kind of life Tony thinks he wants. Their dynamic gives the film some of its kinetic energy, but it also provides a useful contrast to Banderas's unnamed chef.
Banderas is excellent as Tony's mentor. His chef is calm without being passive, authoritative without resorting to cruelty. He believes in God, believes in the kitchen and, more importantly, believes in standards. In a genre where the restaurant kitchen is often presented as a pressure cooker fuelled by humiliation and abuse, his leadership feels almost radical. He doesn't need to scream to establish who is in charge.
That may be Tony's most important lesson and what makes the film an excellent example of a coming of age film; a bildungsroman.
Before Tony learns to cook, he learns how to work. And before he becomes a chef, he gets his first lesson in what it means to lead. In the kitchen, he sees that authority doesn't have to come from agression and from a place of ego, and that discipline doesn't have to strip people of their dignity. He is learning the value of showing up, of doing the unglamorous work properly, and of understanding the people working beside him. And perhaps, without realising it, he is learning the very thing that would later make his travel shows so compelling: how to look at people.
'Tony' is, ultimately, a slow-coming-of-age film about one of the defining curves in the life of a future culinary icon. Gladly, it doesn't attempt to explain the whole of Anthony Bourdain. Nor does it need to. Instead, it catches him at the precise moment before the mythology begins: dirty kitchen clothes on his back, a dirty apron, rejection looming at back of his mind while being surrounded by people who have no idea who he will become.
The film's most interesting idea is that the kitchen didn't simply teach Bourdain how to cook like "everything black isn't burnt". It taught him how to work, how to follow, and eventually, how to take responsibility for himself. 'Tony' understands that becoming a man isn't simply about knowing who you are or wish to be but having the courage to find out. It's an act of faith(s).