If there was one thing that Anthony Bourdain personified, it was a roguish love of life. And for Bourdain, the one-time chef and popular television presenter, much of what he most enjoyed about life involved food and travel.
On the various shows he served as host – most notably “No Reservations,” which ran on the Travel Channel for nine season beginning in 2005 – Bourdain flew around the world, introducing viewers to the food of foreign cultures while focusing on what made those cultures significant.
For Bourdain, it wasn’t enough just to down a signature dish of, say, Paris. He would prowl through the one of the city’s meat markets, swill a taste of absinthe and even spend the night in the room where Oscar Wilde supposedly breathed his last. Fitting his rebel-boy attitude, he titled his Parisian “No Reservations” episode, “Paris: Why the French Don’t Suck.”
That Bourdain attitude became his trademark. It was on display in 1999 when, then in his early 40s, he first gained public attention after The New Yorker magazine printed his essay “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” It was confirmed a year later when his tell-all book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly became a New York Times best-seller.
Curiously enough, much of that attitude is missing from Tony, director Matt Johnson’s exploration of Bourdain’s introduction, at age 18, to the world of food preparation. Johnson, working from a screenplay co-written by him and three others, does capture a callow version of Bourdain – the version that, in the future chef’s own words, was “to be frank – a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”
That much Johnson gets right in what is being called an “interpretation” of Bourdain. As played by Dominic Sessa, the 23-year-old actor whose previous big film was 2023’s The Holdovers, Johnson’s version of young Tony indeed is “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, thoughtless” and more. What he is not, though, is charismatic.
To be fair, that seems to be Johnson’s intention – to show how a young Bourdain, a student at Vassar College filled with ambition to be a writer and lusting after a fellow student (the character Nancy as played by Emilia Jones), ends up in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, and, ultimately, is guided toward a career in the culinary arts.
Getting there, though, involves Johnson’s adopting a plotline that might as well be a season of some youth-trendy cable TV miniseries such as “Heartstoppers” or “The Summer I Turned Pretty.”
We watch as Tony shows up in Provincetown, unaccountably gets taken under the wing by a local seafood restaurant owner (played well enough by Antonio Banderas), suffers the obligatory hazing dished up by veteran kitchen workers and suffers more than a few hard lessons before ultimately finding the path to his eventual fame.
Where oh where, though, is the real-life Bourdain, the guy who roamed the Vassar campus wearing a samurai sword, who used said blade to cut flowers for his girlfriend? A kid who, as portrayed in Kitchen Confidential, owned an ego so outsized it tended to fill up any room he entered?
Instead, we get the character as played by Sessa, a simpering, insufferably insecure adolescent whom Johnson tries to manipulate us into liking. Even if Johnson’s version had been fictional – which to be honest it mostly is – it would have been only of marginal interest – especially filled as it is with sequences, such as a kitchen fire, that feel as phony as a weekly fish special.
Tony, then, pretends to be the origin story of a man who, despite the inner conflicts that would lead to his suicide in 2018 at the age of 61, left a legacy of some of the best food-and-culture-based TV programming ever made.
A legacy, by the way, that was both intelligent and insightful but was ever conscious that other such shows tend to be simple recipe generators or, worse, mere marketing ploys.