A24’s Matt Johnson-directed biopic of Anthony Bourdain is finally here. This dazzling summer film is a love letter not just power of food, but to an exploration of youth, memories, and the stories that make us.
We Oyster enthusiasts all have different reasons for loving the aquatic delicacy. Some treasure the act of throwing the mollusc back; others enjoy cupping the shell with a delicate grip, the indulgent feel of the oyster moving down the mouth and throat. Many relish the aphrodisiac qualities. Personally, I return to this snack, somewhere between bohemian and monied, over and over for that immediate sensory experience of the ocean.
“It always feels nostalgic,” I say to the Wright Brothers’ resident Oyster Master, Luke. On a warm and sunny August day, a group of us have gathered at the salon’s Borough Market restaurant for a lesson in how to shuck oysters. We’re here courtesy of A24’s latest film Tony, the eagerly anticipated – and, to be honest, long-time coming – biopic of Anthony Bourdain. The film sprawls across one sun-dazed, lavender-skied summer of Bourdain’s university years, when the troubadour first found himself in a kitchen, the space that would come to define him, his celebrity, and what is now bona fide cult hero status.
But before Bourdain was a celebrated New York City chef, author of Kitchen Confidential (2000), and presenter of travel documentaries No Reservations and Parts Unknown, he was just Tony. Shucking oysters at a restaurant in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Not hugely different to what we are doing at Wright Brothers in London, over fifty years later.
For, of course: the oysters. That saltwater taste, so immediately evocative of the coastal rock pools and childish paddling of summer holidays gone by. Memories lap like the ocean upon the Cornish beaches of my childhood. “It’s amazing how many memories it brings to the surface,” I continue.
Luke nods. “You always know where you are,” he replies.
For Bourdain, the memories are family trips to France. “Seawater… Of brine, of flesh… And, somehow, of the future,” he writes in Kitchen Confidential. His character repeats this in the film, deftly delivered by 23-year-old rising star Dominic Sessa.
Fans of gastronomy’s greatest rock star may expect Sessa’s Tony to exhibit the same charm and generational charisma as the Anthony Bourdain we know – and hero worship – today. Instead, Tony gives audiences the sullen and insecure teenager he later self-described as a “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” The Kitchen Confidential quote is used not just as the opening quote of the film, but is the beating heart of it too.
The role of food within Tony is applied with the lightness of a sprinkling, and it’s as impactful as a good seasoning. Tony’s introduction to professional food in this environment is as All-American as his New England coastal summer; a runaway college student, he takes a job as a wash guy, befriending the charismatic line cook (in a standout performance by Leo Woodall) with a drug addiction. Well, it was Anthony Bourdain who famously wrote about kitchen staff doing lines in the walk-in fridge. Before he’s promoted to cook himself, Tony tries to impress a girl from his college with shucking oysters. And when he does get this promotion, he convinces his boss (the ever-excellent Antonio Banderas) to let him experiment with old recipes to further try to impress this girl.
Yet it’s the montages of Tony and the rest of the kitchen staff sitting together, after a long shift, once the restaurant has closed up for the day, that really remind us of the importance of food. Food is not just something to consume, but to bring people together; it is not just something to meticulously craft, but to make with love. “Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me,” Bourdain would go on to write. “The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.”
In these moments of the film, at a time of his life so intimately depicted by Blackberry director Matt Johnson, Sessa captures teenage Tony’s hardened exterior collapsing in his obvious joy to be included in these post-shift late-night meals.
At the Wright Brothers, Luke and the restaurant’s CEO Robin Hancock join us for lunch. Sunlight streams in from windows above the kitchen beside us; it’s a similar sultry beat of summer as that depicted in Tony. There is a shared merriment in our quick laughter over a seafood spread of taramasalata, croquettes, and the film’s very own lobster thermidor.
Lunch bleeds into the afternoon, and we move over to another Bourdain-related spot, Bar Italia. Stuffed from our meal, and sleepy under the sun, it was a well-timed relocation to the Soho establishment, which Bourdain once said was home to “the best cup of coffee, or damn close to it.” Here we sit outside, in the brilliant bustle of side street central London, drinking macchiatos and shots of Fernet-Branca, just like the big AB himself.
Bar Italia isn’t just notable for being beloved by Bourdain; it’s a slice of London’s beating cultural heart. Established right after the Second World War, it is where world-famous musicians sit shoulder to shoulder with art students; city celebs luncheoning beside scaffolders. If we were in New York or Los Angeles, this place would have a queue stretching miles down the road. But in London, Bar Italia is just part of the tapestry of the cobbled, winding city itself.
Positioned between his upbringing in New Jersey and his awakening in France, London is a city Bourdain considered a second home. It was in London that Bourdain – in all his iconic casualness – uttered words I mull over on this still, starry evening, as I stroll through an emptied Regent Street. “As I’ve become older,” he said, “I realise that the food I yearn for is the food that I react to in an entirely emotional way.”
In Tony, the most thrilling reaction to food isn’t to the dishes we know Bourdain to become capable of years later. It is this nineteen-year-old, watching his crush try his first foray into serious cooking. He’s made it out of love; she’s trying it out of excitable curiosity. It’s a tale as old as time. Between the oyster shucking and sunset ocean streaking, Tony is a film that celebrates a story we all already know.
Tony is released in UK and Irish cinemas on 14th August 2026
Images Courtesy Of
A24
