Eight years after the sudden death of Anthony Bourdain, the biopic Tony opens in theaters this weekend starring Dominic Sessa as the renegade chef.
Dominic Sessa plays the title role alongside Antonio Banderas, Emilia Jones, and Leo Woodall. The film depicts 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain during his first summer working in a chaotic seafood restaurant in Provincetown, Cape Cod. Bourdain previously recounted this period in his May 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.
In 1973, Bourdain graduated high school a year early at age 18 to follow a romantic interest to Vassar College. He described himself during that period as an undisciplined, spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless young lout in need of discipline.
Bourdain flunked out of college after skipping classes. He spent his waking hours drinking, smoking pot, scheming, and trying to amuse, outrage, or impress anyone entertained by him. He admitted that he treated the world as his ashtray.
Arrival in Provincetown
Unhappy and lacking direction, Bourdain joined friends in a summer share in Provincetown on Cape Cod. Provincetown was a small Portuguese fishing village at the tip of the Cape that transformed into a bustling tourist destination during summer months. In the 1970s, the port was filled with tourists, day-trippers, hippies, drifters, lobster poachers, dopers, Key West refugees, and thousands of cruising gay men.
Short on money, Bourdain took a job after his roommates grew tired of supporting him. His girlfriend worked making pizzas, while his roommates had returning summer jobs cooking, washing dishes, and waiting tables at night. In the mornings, the group visited beaches and ponds, smoked pot, sniffed cocaine, dropped acid, and sunbathed nude.
An annoyed roommate arranged a dishwashing job for Bourdain at the Dreadnaught, a restaurant where she worked as a waitress. Bourdain was hired after another dishwasher failed to show up for two days. His initial duties included scrubbing pots, scraping plates, peeling potatoes, removing mussel beards, picking scallops, and cleaning shrimp.
Life at the Dreadnaught
The Dreadnaught was a ramshackle driftwood building built over the water on wooden pylons. During bad weather, ocean waves struck the sea wall beneath the dining room floor. The restaurant featured grey wood shingles, bay windows, hanging fishnets, hurricane lamps, buoys, nautical decorations, and bars made from halved lifeboats.
Between the Fourth of July and Labor Day, the restaurant served fried clams, fried shrimp, fried flounder, fried scallops, French fries, steamed lobsters, grilled steaks, chops, and fish fillets to large tourist crowds. Management consisted of an elderly, boozy team that stayed out of the kitchen, while the waitresses were cheerful and friendly with the staff.
The kitchen was run by a distinct group of cooks who dominated the restaurant:
- Bobby, the chef, was an ex-hippie in his late-thirtyish years who lived in Provincetown year-round, doing roofing, carpentry, and house-sitting during the off-season.
- Lydia, a Portuguese divorcee with a teenage daughter, made the restaurant's clam chowder, dished out side dishes, and drank heavily during shifts.
- Tommy, the fry cook, was a surfer with electric blue eyes who rocked back and forth to keep up momentum.
- Mike, an ex-con and part-time methedrine dealer, managed the salad station.
Kitchen Culture and Antics
The cooks dressed in slashed chef coats, blue jeans, faded headbands, blood-covered aprons, gold hoop earrings, wrist cuffs, turquoise necklaces, scrimshaw rings, and tattoos. They carried sharp knives, threw dirty pans into the sink, and spoke a profane mix of counterculture jargon and local Portuguese slang, calling each other "Paaahd" for partner and "Daahlin" for darling.
The kitchen staff routinely looted the restaurant to stock up for winter. Bobby backed his Volkswagen van to the kitchen door twice a week to load sirloin strips, frozen shrimp, cases of beer, and sides of bacon. Speed racks above stations held highball glasses filled with drinks like Cape Codders, Sea Breezes, and Greyhounds, which Lydia called "summertime coolers."
Staff smoked joints in the walk-in cooler, used cocaine, and settled drug debts and bets on payday. Bourdain described the cooks as master criminals and buccaneers, viewing their lifestyle as an adventure of looting and rock-and-roll.
Promotion and the Wedding Party
After Mike went missing on a meth binge, Bourdain was promoted to the salad station. He plated shrimp cocktails, cracked oysters and cherrystone clams, mixed canned lobster meat with mayonnaise, and filled champagne glasses with strawberries and whipped cream.
The narrow kitchen line featured a cold station near the exit door, a double-decker lobster steamer, deep-fryers, a range, a Garland broiler, burners, and a brick hearth for charcoal grilling. A Dutch door near the hearth allowed entering tourists to look into the kitchen.
One weekday, an intoxicated wedding party arrived after a ceremony up-Cape. The bride, wearing a white wedding dress, leant into the kitchen and asked if anyone had hash. She later returned to the Dutch door to speak with Bobby, who smiled and told Bourdain, "Tony! Watch my station," before stepping outside.
The kitchen staff watched through a window near the dishwasher facing a garbage stockade where waste was kept for a pig farm. Outside, Bobby engaged in an intimate encounter with the bride against a 55-gallon drum while her groom and family ate fried seafood in the dining room. Bourdain stated that at that moment, he decided he wanted to become a chef.
