Bourdain’s World Was Not Enough

In his breakout 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Anthony Bourdain recounts his early years as a cook in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The memoir serves as the basis for director Matt Johnson’s Tony, but Bourdain fans will immediately recognize that Johnson and the film’s writers took many liberties, condensing multiple summers, people, and events from Bourdain’s life into a cinematic bildungsroman. In reality, the events that led to Bourdain’s time at the Culinary Institute of America were much more pedestrian. The amalgamation pays off, as the film serves as a portrait not only of Bourdain’s youth but of his entire life, complete with his darker struggles and unfulfilled expectations.