The True Story Behind Tony

Before Anthony Bourdain was a famed chef with eight Emmys for his travel series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, he started out as a dishwasher in Cape Cod’s hippie enclave Provincetown in the mid-1970s. Tony, out in theaters Aug. 7, explores this period in Bourdain’s life, imagining how that kitchen job whet his palate for working in the restaurant industry.In the movie, Dominic Sessa portrays Anthony Bourdain, a student at Vassar College who follows his crush Nancy Putkoski to Provincetown, where she works in the summer at a pizza shop. She doesn’t exactly feel the same at first, and so one night, a heartbroken Bourdain drowns his sorrows at a casual seafood restaurant and gets into a fight there, ending up too drunk to go home. The restaurant’s chef (Antonio Banderas)—known simply as “Chef” in the film—brings him back to his house. The chef lets him stay for the summer because he has nowhere to go and puts him to work as a dishwasher in his restaurant. The staff is full of miscreants, who are snorting lines of cocaine left and right. But the chef becomes a mentor, showing Bourdain the particulars of running a Provincetown kitchen: how to shuck oysters and make homemade salt out ...