{"id":806988,"date":"2026-08-08T16:26:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T16:26:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/806988\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T16:26:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T16:26:12","slug":"sex-drugs-and-washing-dishes-inside-anthony-bourdains-unruly-younger-years-biopics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/806988\/","title":{"rendered":"Sex, drugs and washing dishes: inside Anthony Bourdain\u2019s unruly younger years | Biopics"},"content":{"rendered":"

The novelist Michael Cunningham has described Provincetown<\/a>, on the tip of Cape Cod, as \u201cthe only small town I know of where those who live unconventionally seem to outnumber those who live within the prescribed bounds of home and licensed marriage, respectable job, and biological children. It is one of the places in the world you can disappear into.\u201d<\/p>\n

This idiosyncratic bohemia has attracted the likes of Edward Hopper, Eugene O\u2019Neill, Mark Rothko and Tennessee Williams along with poets, dropouts, drag queens and drifters. In the summer of 1975 came a lanky, restless 19-year-old from New Jersey with no job and no money, sleeping on the floor of a shared cottage while his roommates worked to pay the rent. His name was Anthony Bourdain<\/a>, who would later become a celebrity chef, author and television globetrotter.<\/p>\n

Half a century later, that coming-of-age has been mythologised by Hollywood. Matt Johnson\u2019s new film, Tony, starring Dominic Sessa<\/a> as the adolescent dishwasher, imagines the origin story of the man before he rewrote the rules of food writing with his 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential.<\/p>\n

For those who knew Bourdain best, the film\u2019s release \u2013 eight years after his death by suicide \u2013 has been a difficult one to sit with. \u201cI have a very strong emotional relationship to Tony and yeah, it\u2019s hard,\u201d says Joel Rose<\/a>, 78, a novelist and editor who was arguably Bourdain\u2019s closest literary confidant for 35 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis has been a difficult period for me. There\u2019s a lot going on with Tony\u2019s memory and the memories that I have, and how in so many ways I feel cheated and confused. I had a very different relationship with Tony than his TV persona and all that. I wasn\u2019t in that world with him, and I\u2019m not sure that it was a favorite place for Tony to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bourdain described his time in Provincetown in Kitchen Confidential: \u201cWe all went to the beaches and ponds each morning, smoked pot, sniffed a little coke, dropped acid and sunbathed nude, as well as indulging in other healthy teenage activities.\u201d<\/p>\n

After getting a job as a dishwasher in the kitchen of local restaurant Flagship \u2013 later fictionalised as the Dreadnaught in Kitchen Confidential \u2013 he discovered a structure he\u2019d never known before: something with real stakes, real hierarchy and an odd, brutal kind of belonging. He worked his way up from the dish pit to the salad station, then to the fryer, and eventually earned a shift or two at the broiler.<\/p>\n

He put it this way to the Observer in 2017<\/a>: \u201cI only became happy \u2013 in fact, intensely satisfied \u2013 as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Provincetown in Cape Cod, my first job. I was a shy, goofy, awkward teenager. But in this blue-collar, factory-like environment, there was no blurred line, no grey area, no philosophical question to fret over.<\/p>\n

\u201cDishes had to go in the washer and come out taintless, and doing this swiftly and competently meant I was acknowledged as a human being by colleagues I wanted to be like. The day they promoted me to dunking fries I was overjoyed.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was also that first summer at the Flagship that Bourdain saw the moment he would later credit with making him want to become a chef. He and the rest of the kitchen crew crowded around a window overlooking the restaurant\u2019s trash-bin corral to watch their chef in the middle of a sexual encounter with a customer who, still in her wedding dress, was minutes from sitting down to dinner with her own wedding party.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Whether the marriage survived is not recorded anywhere. What is clear is the effect the scene had on a teenage Bourdain: the kitchen staff, he decided, were like pirates, answerable to nobody, living entirely by their own rules.<\/p>\n

Michael Ruhlman<\/a>, 63, a food writer who became one of Bourdain\u2019s closest friends in later years, said he once asked Bourdain directly whether the bridal-gown story was true. \u201cHe said: yeah, it happened, the guy was a total fucking pig,\u201d Ruhlman recalls. \u201cHe said he was the kind of chef who would make servers give him blowjobs while he was prepping his station. He was always hanging out with an interesting crowd.\u201d<\/p>\n

That romantic image of the kitchen pirate cut both ways. As the restaurant industry later reckoned with its long history of physical and sexual abuse, Bourdain said he regretted<\/a> having glamorised a culture that was, underneath the swagger, often exploitative.<\/p>\n

He also grew more clear-eyed about the drug use that hollowed out so many of the Provincetown kitchens he had worked in. In a 2014 episode of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown<\/a> he said simply: \u201cMany of our friends from those days didn\u2019t make it.\u201d<\/p>\n

None of that was visible to him yet in 1975. Riding the confidence of his first Flagship summer, Bourdain came back to Provincetown the next spring hoping to land the broiler position outright. But the Flagship had new ownership, and he ended up trying out instead at Ciro\u2019s, an Italian restaurant run by Ciriaco Cozzi<\/a> that turned out hundreds of dinners a night on a kitchen that ran with near-military precision.<\/p>\n

The cooks at Ciro\u2019s unsettled him \u2013 they moved as a unit and talked in what he later called a \u201clush, intimidating, sardonic secret language\u201d, part 18th-century literary allusion, part marine drill sergeant. They were not impressed with him in return. During a tryout at the broiler, an overconfident Bourdain badly burned himself on a hot pan and was immediately bumped back down to salads.<\/p>\n

The humiliation stung Bourdain, prompting him to enroll at the Culinary Institute of America in February 1977 in an effort to prove himself. If Provincetown was where Bourdain discovered the kitchen, it was the grimy streets of New York\u2019s East Village in the early 1980s that forged him as a writer.<\/p>\n

Antonio Banderas and Dominic Sessa in Tony. Photograph: A24\/AP<\/p>\n

In 1983 Rose and his then wife, the French novelist Catherine Texier<\/a>, were running a radical, highly influential literary magazine called Between C & D. Produced on a dot matrix printer using fanfold paper, the magazine was sold in big, plastic Ziploc bags \u2013 a cheeky nod to the heavy heroin trade that dominated their neighborhood.<\/p>\n

One afternoon, Rose\u2019s fourth-floor apartment buzzer rang. \u201cI went downstairs and there was a very tall guy, never seen him before, in chef whites, and he introduced himself,\u201d Rose recalls by phone from the mountains in Kerhonkson, New York. \u201cHe said he had submitted a comic that he had drawn to the magazine and that I had rejected it, but I\u2019d written something very nice. And he wondered, could he talk to me?<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I invited him up to my apartment on the fourth floor. I\u2019d written back that his drawing sort of sucked, but that his writing was good. He said he didn\u2019t know any writers, that he wanted to be a writer and he just wanted to talk.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two men sat in the apartment for hours, talking about their lives. They discovered a shared suburban background, a love of literature and a mutual history with the restaurant business. Rose\u2019s father had been a career waiter at New York spots like the Stage Deli<\/a> and Carnegie Deli<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t influence his writing one iota,\u201d Rose says. \u201cHe was a good writer right from the start. He was a natural writer. If you\u2019re young and unsure and don\u2019t even have a voice yet, wow, it\u2019s terrifying. And he was terrified because he was already looking ahead. He was barely established and, as much as he loved what he was doing, he could see the wear and tear that it took on a person in the long term.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bourdain was still living on the margins, balancing intense double-shifts in Manhattan kitchens with a heavy drug habit.<\/p>\n

Rose continues: \u201cWhen Tony came up to the apartment that day, he was pinned. He had just gotten high and I called him on it right away because I knew. I\u2019ve been there myself. I wasn\u2019t doing drugs then. I had a hard time and almost gotten killed, and I didn\u2019t need to go back there. I know he was doing more coke than heroin but he was coming around my house quite a bit. I lived on 7th Street and he was getting drugs on 2nd and 3rd. I saw him quite a bit in those days.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bourdain pictured in 2000. Photograph: David Rentas\/Rex\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

In the late 1990s, Bourdain was in a Tokyo hotel room, looking out over the city after a visit to the fish market, when he sent a long, incredibly vivid email to Rose, who was living with Karen Rinaldi, an editor at Bloomsbury who had recently given birth to their son, Rocco.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was in the living room breastfeeding the baby, and I came in with this email and I said to Karen, \u2018I\u2019ve got to read you this.\u2019 She said, \u2018Joel, get the fuck away from me, do you see what I\u2019m doing?\u2019 I said, \u2018No, no, no, no, let me read it to you.\u2019 I read it to her and she knew Tony through me a little bit, and she said, \u2018Does Tony have any other stories?\u2019 I said, \u2018Are you kidding me? He has so many!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Rinaldi contacted Bourdain\u2019s agent, made an offer and bought the book. When it was published in 2000, Kitchen Confidential shattered the genteel, recipe-driven world of food publishing, ushering in an era that would lead to TV dramas such as The Bear<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dianne Jacob<\/a>, 71, a food writer and editor, comments: \u201cFirst of all, the writing is incredible. He has a very strong voice. He\u2019s an excellent storyteller. He understands pacing and candour, and he was almost like an investigative reporter. It made food writing sexy \u2026 More than anything else, it was real bad-boy persona and he was such a beautiful writer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet when Jacob met Bourdain in person during a book promotional tour in San Francisco, she encountered a man who seemed profoundly uncomfortable with the sudden glare of global fame.<\/p>\n

She recalls: \u201cThere was an older woman in the bathroom applying blush to her cleavage. There were all these men who were chefs who were full of tattoos and in love with him. When I got in line to have him sign my book, there were women passing him notes, maybe with their phone numbers. It was an incredible scene.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was charismatic, but he was also a little awkward and shy. I saw him afterwards, outside, smoking a cigarette, and I just thought I\u2019m not going to bother him, you know? He wasn\u2019t all in on the glamorous part of being a celebrity. He was kind of like a deer in the headlights with all these people admiring him. They all wanted to sleep with him, I think, everyone in the audience. Even straight men who are chefs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jos\u00e9 Andr\u00e9s, a Spanish American chef and restaurateur, and founder of the food aid charity World Central Kitchen, first met Bourdain 20 years ago and became a close friend.<\/p>\n

Andr\u00e9s and Bourdain watched each other\u2019s children grow up and for years would holiday together for a week in the Cayman Islands. They also travelled \u2013 and ate \u2013 far and wide in countries ranging from Spain to Haiti.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe gave joints a lot of value in ways other shows never did,\u201d Andr\u00e9s recalls. \u201cAs much as he loved high-end cooking and great wines and three-star Michelin, he loved the people doing the impossible hole-in-the-walls, and that was beautiful.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember we ate in the streets of Port-au-Prince [in Haiti] in places nobody would eat. That was Tony. He could be eating in the best restaurants in the world but he would go to the hole-in-the-walls, and many of them, because he made them famous, sometimes moved to better places.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet as the travel shows grew more successful, the TV crews bigger and the global adoration more intense, Bourdain\u2019s private world was fracturing. His 20-year marriage dissolved in 2005, unable to withstand the constant strain of his travel schedule.<\/p>\n

A still from Roadrunner. Photograph: Capital Pictures\/Alamy<\/p>\n

The final, tragic chapter of his life began when he met the Italian actor Asia Argento<\/a>. To those who had known him for decades, the change in his personality was abrupt and alarming.<\/p>\n

Ruhlman says: \u201cHe was a completely different person after Asia. After he met her, I got an email. I had invited him to my wedding reception in New York City and he says, \u2018Can\u2019t do it. I\u2019m in Italy shooting. I\u2019m in love too. Love abounds. Nothing but happiness.\u2019 And a year later he\u2019d killed himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Rose, who was in text and email contact with Bourdain just a day before his death, finishing work on their graphic novel Hungry Ghosts, the suicide in a French hotel room in June 2018 remains an open wound.<\/p>\n

He says: \u201cHe was not one who shied away from talking about suicide and killing himself and throwing himself in a meat grinder or a wood chipper or whatever he said. But from the day that I learned of his passing, I always felt that Tony probably put that noose around his neck and then at the last moment said, \u2018What the fuck am I doing now?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Up in the quiet mountains of New York, Rose watches the hummingbird at his bird feeder and looks out at the vast, green vista of the Catskills. He has just watched the first footage of Get Jiro!<\/a>, an upcoming TV adaptation of the graphic novel he wrote with Bourdain.<\/p>\n

\u201cTony would be in heaven,\u201d he says, with a bittersweet note in his voice. \u201cI know it\u2019s just what he envisioned, blood spatter and all the stuff that he loved. I have warm feelings about this as a long project and to see it through and then I also feel like, fuck, man, why aren\u2019t you here? This would be so much better if you were here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The novelist Michael Cunningham has described Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, as \u201cthe only small town…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":806989,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[88],"class_list":["post-806988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=806988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/806989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=806988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=806988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=806988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}