Bourdain Wasn’t a Good Writer—Then Came the Kitchen

“I’m actually not a fucking cook, I’m a writer,” Dominic Sessa says in the trailer for Tony, the new A24 movie about Anthony Bourdain. It’s 1975 and the fictionalized Bourdain of the film is on the cusp of literary greatness, before being denied a huge writing fellowship and having to abruptly change his summer plans, going off to Provincetown to bum around and fry the clam strips that would set him on the path away to culinary greatness. This award—and Tony’s contention for it—is fiction. At Vassar, Bourdain walked around campus with nunchucks and a samurai sword. He wasn’t even attending class, much less being recognized for extracurricular merit.