The Community of the Kitchen: A Review of Tony

I spent a good amount of my high school years in restaurant kitchens. I spent countless hours digging in giant tubs of whipped butter, or pouring little to-go soy sauce cups, to the point where my skin was stained with the smell of grease. I argued with head chefs about order tickets and getting the calamari out to table ten. And even when I walked home with far too little money in tips, I loved it.

The whole experience. The odd friendships I formed with unexpected characters. The families I built inside smelly, sweaty kitchens. The dirty work, the easy work, the silverware rolling, the calming down of customers.

I watched the intricacies of people’s lives unfold right in front of me every day over a plate of Tortiglioni Rossa and freshly baked bread. As well, I learned the intricacies of the individuals I wiped tables down with every day. These people, who had lives vastly different from mine, taught me lessons that reached much further than the proper way to set out silverware. Sometimes I forgot that putting on a smile and walking fast with hot plates was not all these people were destined to do.

Matt Johnson’s biopic, Tony, captures this feeling of community and the impact of the characters who work together beautifully, despite their vastly different backgrounds. The coming-of-age story, based on a chapter of Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain, shows exactly what it is about a kitchen that can give people such a sense of home.

Although I love the kitchen, I’ve never been anything near a chef, and neither had Bourdain. The story follows the 19-year-old, arrogant, overconfident boy (played by Dominic Cessa) who runs away from his family to Provincetown, MA, to chase a girl who couldn’t care less about him. He does so under the pretense that he is on a fellowship from Vassar College, writing a book. This is merely a lie he tells to come off cooler to others (and a little to himself). He ends up essentially homeless, trading his work as a dishwasher for a hammock bed in the backyard of the restaurant owner’s beach home.

In this experience, he gains the friendship of the classic archetypes of people you could find in every restaurant. Firstly, his boss and roommate (simply referred to as Chef), played by Antonio Banderas, emulates the mentor role. He brutally wakes Bourdain up every day by dumping a bucket of water on him and forces him to come along to far-away seafood distributors. He teaches him to shuck oysters, how to make homemade ketchup, and how to operate a kitchen. Without realizing it, Bourdain is pretty much trained to own a restaurant just by following around Chef. In the time he didn’t spend being mentored, he spent with Sal, played by Leo Woodall, a rebellious, drug-using cook who is clearly just looking for a good time. They go to parties, get in fights, and try to get Bourdain the girl he’s been chasing, all while Sal mentors Bourdain in a completely different aspect of life. Along with these characters, we get to know Mary, the sassy hostess, waitress, and bartender, who keeps the cooks in check, and Stavros, the humorous punching bag of the restaurant family.

At the end of each grueling shift, the small staff comes together and eats their family-style meal, often a squid stew. They embody a real family, making fun of each other and sloppily sharing a meal while yelling across the table. We realize before Bourdain does that although he’s run from his real family, he has built a new one merely by shucking oysters with weird strangers.

Besides this aspect of the self-built family, something else that struck me about this film was its angle. Rather than focusing on the height of Bourdain’s career, as a normal biopic might have, we as viewers only see one summer. A summer where Anthony Bourdain is not yet a known name, and he is just Tony. In fact, repeatedly throughout the movie, Bourdain shuts people down as they tell him Anthony is a stronger name for a writer, the title he claims to hold while wearing a dirty apron.

It’s easy to get roped into the glitz and glam of stars’ lives when you watch a movie about their experiences. There’s always that one scene. The one where the star finally gets noticed for their talents, or they unexpectedly win the award, and all falls into place. There is no scene like this in Tony, because the focus was not the outcome of his stardom, but the building of it. Viewers don't watch Bourdain suddenly fall into success and live in fame; they see him get dirty with dishwater, get rejected by pretty girls, and learn what it’s like to be on his own in the world.

There is also no attempt to make Bourdain’s character necessarily likeable in this story. There is no praise for him as a chef or anything he did in his time of fame. Honestly, if the story wasn’t named Tony, some may assume this is just a classic coming-of-age story about an angst-filled boy who has found himself working in a Provincetown seafood restaurant. A boy who is arrogant, selfish, and often frustrating to watch. But the movie never asks us to like him. Rather, it suggests why someone like Bourdain would find a love for working in a kitchen.

The kitchen is loud, messy, and dysfunctional. It’s also a place where Bourdain’s not-so-positive traits are not necessarily flaws that need to be fixed. His restlessness and eagerness to prove himself actually fit into the fast nature of the kitchen, and he finds routine. More importantly, the kitchen gives Bourdain a sense of identity while he struggles to find one on his own.

There truly is this strange but beautiful kind of community created by doing difficult and often thankless work alongside the same people every day. Tony captures that community without attempting to make it polished or perfect. Instead, the movie reveals that sometimes belonging comes from the messiest of places.

Did you see Tony? What were your thoughts?