Tony Movie Review: Anthony Bourdain, Before He Was Anthony Bourdain

A new Bourdain film skips the fame entirely, catching him instead as a broke, arrogant 19-year-old washing dishes in a Cape Cod kitchen in the summer of 1975.

My favourite scene in Tony is when a 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain, drenched in sweat and steam, realises he has absolutely no idea what he’s doing—and the line cooks around him know it too. But nobody calls it out, the kitchen simply keeps moving, and he either keeps up or he doesn’t. That single moment tells you more about Bourdain than any highlight reel of his later globe-trotting ever could, and it’s the precise point of time director Matt Johnson has chosen to build an entire film around.

It’s a strange thing, reviewing a film about Bourdain in 2026. We’re a decade into a culinary culture he’d have loathed on sight—travel reduced to a bulleted itinerary, meals staged for a nine-second clip before anyone’s actually tasted them. Bourdain’s whole ethos ran the other way: respect earned on plastic stools at 2am, not under chandeliers; curiosity over clout, always. Watching Tony, I kept waiting for the film to soften that ethos into something more marketable. It never does.

Rather than racing through the television years everyone already knows, Johnson zeroes in on a single summer—1975, Provincetown, Massachusetts—adapted from the opening chapters of Kitchen Confidential. This isn’t the Bourdain of the passport stamps. This is a broke, arrogant kid who’s followed a high school crush to Cape Cod convinced he’s destined to be a great novelist, and who instead ends up washing dishes at a seafood joint called The Flagship because he’s run out of better options.

Dominic Sessa, so good in The Holdovers, plays him without a trace of foreshadowing—no knowing wink to the icon this kid will become. His Tony is all posture and no substance, the kind of insecure swagger you recognise instantly if you’ve ever worked a summer job surrounded by people who actually know what they’re doing. And they do know: Leo Woodall’s Sal leads the line cooks with a speed and quiet authority that makes Tony’s literary pretensions look exactly as thin as they are.

The film’s real anchor, though, is Antonio Banderas as Ciro, the head chef. It would have been easy—and cheap—to make Ciro a shouting cliché, the kind of kitchen tyrant every food film reaches for by default. Banderas refuses that entirely. His Ciro is weathered, exacting, and almost entirely wordless about it; he doesn’t need to raise his voice to make a 19-year-old understand that talent means nothing without discipline, and that you don’t get to tell anyone’s story—least of all your own—until you’ve earned the right to keep up with the tickets.

Cinematographer Michael Bauman gives all of this a texture you can practically smell: damp Cape Cod air, grease clinging to the walls, the particular chaos of a kitchen at peak service. Johnson resists the nostalgia this era usually invites—no soft-focus sunsets, no needle-drops doing the emotional work for him. Instead there’s a rhythm to the film that mimics the rhythm of the line itself: relentless, unglamorous, oddly hypnotic.

What makes Tony worth your time isn’t nostalgia for Bourdain, though there’s plenty of that on offer if you want it. It is certainly why I watched it. But I loved most of all how the movie outlines that moment when an arrogant, pretentious kid started becoming the journalist who’d later sit on curbs in Hanoi and kitchen floors in Marseille, treating a bowl of noodles from a street vendor with deep respect and reverence.

That instinct—the egalitarian, unglamorous respect for the people actually doing the work—wasn’t something Bourdain arrived with. Tony argues it was built, plate by plate, ticket by ticket, in a dish pit in 1975. Watching it felt like the best possible antidote to a food culture that’s forgotten the difference.

All images: A24