I did not like Tony.
Not because I am precious about Anthony Bourdain. Not because I think a film about a real person has to behave like a Wikipedia page with cinematography. My problem is more fundamental than that.
I do not like the story the film chooses to tell about his life.
Tony treats the young Bourdain’s arrival in restaurant kitchens as the discovery of a calling. It gives us the familiar shape of a coming-of-age story: a young man is restless, slightly lost, uncertain of himself, and then he enters a kitchen. Suddenly there is heat, danger, camaraderie, discipline, vulgarity, competence and purpose. He has found his people. He has found the world in which he belongs.
We, knowing who Anthony Bourdain eventually becomes, are invited to watch all of this with the warm satisfaction of destiny revealing itself.
And that is exactly what bothers me.
Because Anthony Bourdain spent much of his adult life telling us not to romanticise this.
The restaurant kitchen certainly made him. It gave him a tribe, an identity, a vocabulary and eventually the material from which he would build his writing. He could describe a good service with such beauty that any cook reading him could remember why, despite all available evidence, we keep returning to these ridiculous rooms full of fire, knives, shouting and stainless steel.
He loved the competence of cooks. He loved the strange intimacy of a brigade. He loved the feeling of surviving something difficult together.
But loving something and recommending it are not the same thing.
That contradiction is apparently too complicated for a film industry addicted to origin myths.
Bourdain was unusually honest about the other side of that life: the exhaustion, the injuries, the drugs, the terrible hours, the mediocre restaurants, the low wages, the relationships sacrificed to service, and the years disappearing while everyone around you seemed to be building some more conventional version of adulthood.
He repeatedly warned aspiring cooks that the profession was brutal. He warned them that culinary school could be a spectacularly bad financial decision. He warned them that restaurant work could consume their bodies, their relationships and their futures while offering very little in return.
And yet Tony gets to turn the kitchen into a fucking baptismal font.
The film gets to stop at the seduction, cashing in on the manic-pixie-line-cook genre of entertainment that has become so popular: the damaged young man enters a chaotic kitchen, discovers discipline, finds a family and becomes himself.
What a convenient lie.
It can show the nineteen-year-old discovering the kitchen without carrying him through the decades required to understand what that discovery cost. The burns, swagger, cigarettes, screaming cooks and after-service drinks all photograph beautifully. Twenty-five years of working nights, weekends and holidays while wondering whether you are qualified to do anything else are considerably less cinematic.
The film wants the mythology without the invoice.
The fact sitting quietly underneath the entire story is that Anthony Bourdain did not become free because he became a chef.
He became free because he became a writer.
He worked in professional kitchens well into his forties. Kitchen Confidential arrived when he was forty-three. By then, the great restaurant adventure that culture would later turn into mythology had largely already happened.
Writing allowed him to step outside it, look back at it, interrogate it and eventually leave daily restaurant life behind.
Writing gave him another life, one in which he could eat in peace and take himself somewhere away from substance abuse.
That distinction matters. It is the difference between a life and a legend.
The kitchen was not a magical place that revealed his authentic self. It was a workplace. A brutal, intoxicating, occasionally beautiful workplace. It gave him material, friendships, scars, addictions, stories and a way of seeing. It also took years from him.
Bourdain understood that both things could be true.
The people who turn his kitchen years into a heroic calling usually understand only the first half because the second half ruins the merchandise.
The irony is that the better I came to understand Bourdain, the less interested I became in treating his kitchen years as the triumphant part of the story. They were formative, certainly. They were also messy, destructive, exhilarating, ridiculous and frequently miserable.
Bourdain himself seemed capable of holding all of those truths at once.
That is what made him an adult.
When I was younger and came across his television shows, I could not understand why this man was apparently hosting a food programme while spending so much time not showing me the food.
Guy Fieri would walk into a kitchen, get beside the cook, watch the meat hit the griddle, stick his face over the pot and tell you exactly what was happening. Adam Richman would make the dish the event. There would be anticipation, excess, a sauce, a ridiculous sandwich, somebody explaining how it was made, and eventually the bite we had all been waiting for.
Then there was Bourdain, wandering around somewhere, drinking with somebody, smoking, staring out of train windows, talking about politics or loneliness or history while the food I had supposedly arrived to watch remained somewhere in the background.
I remember thinking: who is this guy acting like he is hosting a food show while refusing to show me enough food?
My opinion flipped almost completely in 2019, when I started reading Kitchen Confidential after coming across a handful of Bourdain quotes that had lodged themselves somewhere inside me.
The book did something his television programmes had not yet done for me because I finally understood the voice before returning to the image.
I started relating to and understanding his arguments about how deeply political food is, his thoughts on how food can reflect an entire culture and history, and how analytical it can be.
Bourdain was not fundamentally a television presenter who happened to write.
He was a writer who had somehow been handed one of the greatest passports television had ever given anyone.
Food remained enormously important to him, but it was rarely the endpoint. A bowl of noodles led to migration. Breakfast led to class. A family meal led to war. A cook led to a conversation about labour, masculinity, colonialism, displacement, addiction, dignity or home.
Sometimes the veal’s foot really was magnificent and deserved several obscene noises of appreciation.
But eventually Bourdain would look up.
That was where the actual programme began.
And this is the part of Bourdain that popular culture seems increasingly determined to erase.
Not misunderstand.
Erase.
Somewhere between Kitchen Confidential, No Reservations, Parts Unknown, his death and his canonisation as the patron saint of people who insist they are travellers rather than tourists, Bourdain entered the cultural zeitgeist so completely that people began copying him without apparently understanding what he was doing.
No. That is too gentle.
They did not merely misunderstand him.
They gutted his work.
They stripped it of its politics, empathy, humility and intellectual curiosity, then turned the remains into a smug little costume for people who want to cosplay as worldly. They took everything difficult, everything uncomfortable and everything that demanded self-examination, threw it in the bin, and kept the plastic stool.
Food media took the most marketable pieces.
The plastic stool.
The steaming bowl of noodles.
The alleyway.
The sweating bottle of beer.
The old woman tending something over charcoal.
The untranslated sign.
The market where tourists supposedly never go.
The slightly dangerous-looking neighbourhood.
The proclamation that this is the place where “Anthony Bourdain ate.”
An entire generation of food influencers has absorbed this visual vocabulary while remaining astonishingly tone-deaf to what Bourdain was trying to accomplish with it.
Come with me to this hidden place Anthony Bourdain visited.
You HAVE to eat here when you come to Vietnam.
Look at this tiny plastic stool.
Look how authentic this is.
Look at me eating among the locals.
Look at this grandmother who has been making this dish for sixty years.
Look how adventurous I am.
Look how unlike the other tourists I am.
Look how much I respect this culture, as demonstrated by the fact that I have filmed myself consuming it.
It makes my blood boil.
Because this is not curiosity.
It is consumption wearing a linen shirt.
It is tourism with a superiority complex.
It is the same old colonial gaze with better lighting: the outsider arrives, declares a place authentic, turns its people into scenery, extracts an experience and leaves with proof of having been transformed.
Except the transformation is usually just a caption.
He unknowingly helped create performative monsters.
The fucking stool was never the point.
There is nothing inherently profound about sitting on cheap plastic furniture. Eating noodles in an alley does not grant a person anthropological insight. Travelling without a reservation does not make somebody intellectually curious. Being willing to swallow a food that an American audience considers strange does not constitute respect for the people who eat it.
And filming yourself doing it certainly does not make you brave.
Some of the same people who romanticise the Bourdain aesthetic would probably flinch if somebody genuinely treated them the way Bourdain was treated and simply placed calf liver in front of them for breakfast.
Bourdain said, “If you refuse to eat one thing, then you might miss the next best thing that is coming.”
That is not a command to perform adventurousness for an audience. It is an argument against the arrogance of assuming that your own habits are the centre of the world.
You enter somebody else’s world and, for a little while, they determine what happens next.
That is the part the influencers cannot tolerate.
Actual hospitality requires surrender.
The host chooses the meal. The grandmother decides whether you have eaten enough. The cook determines what is worth serving. You do not get to arrive with a content calendar and demand that somebody’s life arrange itself around your personal brand.
The contemporary content version is much safer. It offers curated discomfort. The creator wants exactly enough unfamiliarity to demonstrate adventurousness while retaining complete control over the encounter.
The local person becomes a character.
Their livelihood becomes scenery.
Their breakfast becomes content.
Their plastic stool becomes production design.
Then the creator gets the shot and leaves.
No history. No politics. No labour. No questions about who owns the restaurant, who is being paid, who is being displaced, who is allowed to call the neighbourhood authentic, or what happens when the tourists arrive because an influencer told them this was the “real” place.
Just a bowl, a reaction shot and a caption about hidden gems.
There is something particularly absurd about this because Bourdain himself encountered an almost perfect parody of the same instinct while filming in Sicily. What was supposed to be an authentic fishing sequence descended into theatre, with dead sea creatures being thrown into the water so that they could then be “caught” for the camera.
It is difficult to imagine a better metaphor for what eventually happened to his legacy.
Throw the dead octopus into the water.
Film somebody discovering it.
Call the experience authentic.
Add a voice-over about getting off the beaten path.
What made Bourdain interesting was the degree to which he seemed willing to interrogate the machinery he was standing inside. He was not some untouched observer floating above television. He was an outlier, quietly chucking stones from the fringes of society at exactly the kind of people who now seem to revere him.
He knew the encounter was mediated.
He knew the camera changed the room.
He knew that “authenticity” could be staged, purchased and packaged.
The older he became, the more interested he appeared to be in asking what happened when the person with the camera stopped assuming that he was the most important person in the frame.
That is the Bourdain I came to love.
The man who listened.
The man who let other people’s histories interrupt his own performance.
One of the lines that helped me understand him was his furious writing about Cambodia and Henry Kissinger, where seeing the consequences of American foreign policy transformed history from abstraction into something visceral and human.
That matters because Bourdain’s travel was never simply about collecting restaurants.
It was about discovering how differently history looks once you meet the people who inherited its consequences.
Foreign policy is wonderfully clean when encountered through textbooks, speeches and television panels. Then you sit down with someone and realise that a bombing campaign is also somebody’s childhood, that a border is somebody’s displacement, that a dictatorship is somebody’s missing father, that colonialism still lives inside class, language and memory, and that war continues inside ordinary lives long after the men who ordered it have retired to comfortable dinners.
Food gave Bourdain access to those conversations.
More importantly, he allowed those conversations to interfere with the food show.
That difference is enormous.
There is a type of television presenter who listens to a tragic story because the tragic story is part of the segment. The smile disappears. The presenter nods slowly. The music changes. The person speaking becomes temporarily useful as a container for suffering, and once the required emotional footage has been captured, everyone can return to yelling about crispy pork.
Bourdain could certainly participate in television contrivance, but at his best something else seemed to be happening. He appeared genuinely troubled, curious or changed by what people told him.
He did not always turn suffering into a lesson.
Sometimes he simply looked horrified.
Sometimes he looked ashamed.
Sometimes he looked like he understood that the country he came from had done things that could not be repaired by a good meal and a thoughtful voice-over.
That is a much more serious form of travel than collecting evidence that you are not boring.
He seemed to find comfort and recognition in other people’s sorrow because he carried enough darkness of his own to recognise that people are rarely one thing.
Sometimes the story simply hurt.
And wonderfully, gloriously, sometimes five minutes later he was making obscene noises over a piece of meat.
That contradiction matters.
Bourdain’s seriousness never required him to become bloodless.
He could listen to somebody talk about war and still be completely fucking thrilled by lunch. He could discuss colonialism and then become distracted by the texture of a pig’s foot. He could hear about someone’s dead relatives and later drink too much and laugh at something filthy.
Because that is what people actually do.
People living under terrible governments still care about dinner. People who survived wars still argue about whose mother makes the better stew. Refugees still insist that their guest take another piece. Families dealing with poverty still save the good portion for somebody they love.
Someone can explain a century of political humiliation while becoming irritated that you have not eaten enough rice.
Sorrow does not eliminate appetite.
Appetite does not trivialise sorrow.
Bourdain understood that both could occupy the same table.
The influencers do not understand this because they are not interested in people. They are interested in the image of themselves as people who are interested in people.
That is the difference.
Perhaps that is the part of his work that food culture has found hardest to reproduce because it cannot be reduced to a visual formula.
You can buy the leather jacket.
You can find the plastic stool.
You can colour-grade the alley.
You can order the offal.
You can develop the slightly world-weary narration.
You can lower your voice and say “This is the real Vietnam.”
You can call a poor neighbourhood “undiscovered” while standing in front of a family business that has been feeding people for generations.
You can put “authentic” in the caption.
You can even develop the facial expression: half wonder, half mild danger, as if eating lunch in another country is an act of personal heroism.
You cannot fake curiosity for very long.
You cannot fake being willing to have your assumptions overturned.
You cannot manufacture the moment when another person’s story becomes more important than whatever you intended to say when you arrived.
You cannot pretend to respect a culture while treating its people as props.
You cannot claim to be following Bourdain while refusing the humility that made his work worth following.
This is why the endless “Come with me to the restaurant Anthony Bourdain ate at” content feels so empty to me.
Imagine watching the man’s entire body of work, seeing him travel through places shaped by colonialism, war, immigration, American foreign policy, labour exploitation and enormous inequality, watching him talk to cooks and refugees and writers and ordinary families, and somehow concluding that his great contribution to civilisation was knowing a particularly good place for noodles.
That is not a tribute.
It is intellectual vandalism.
The restaurant was not sacred because Anthony Bourdain ate there.
The meal mattered because somebody lived there.
Food gave him a reason to knock on the door.
Hospitality let him inside.
What happened afterwards was the work.
Which brings me back to Tony.
The film bothers me because it participates, however unintentionally, in the same process of simplification.
Bourdain becomes easier to understand when reduced to symbols.
The young man finds the kitchen.
The kitchen becomes his calling.
The chef becomes the writer.
The writer becomes the traveller.
The traveller becomes the icon.
It is tidy.
Bourdain was not.
His life makes more sense to me when the contradictions remain intact.
He was a cook who loved kitchens and warned people about kitchens.
He was an eater capable of almost pornographic pleasure who understood that the person serving the meal mattered more than his reaction to it.
He was a television celebrity who became increasingly interested in workers, immigrants, misfits and people whose histories powerful countries preferred not to discuss.
He could be vain and self-aware, cynical and sentimental, crude and extraordinarily tender.
He could listen to a story of sorrow with genuine fucking concern and then, when the veal’s foot arrived, give the veal’s foot every bit of the oomphing and drooling it deserved.
And perhaps the reason I now resist the idea that the kitchen was simply Bourdain’s calling is because I finally understand what came after it.
As a younger person obsessed with food, I wanted him to show me more cooking. I wanted the grill, the technique, the sauce, the close-up and the bite. I wanted Bourdain to behave more like Guy Fieri or Adam Richman because I assumed that food television existed primarily to show me food.
Years later, after becoming a cook myself and reading Kitchen Confidential, I understood that Bourdain had already spent most of his adult life inside kitchens.
He knew what was there.
He had escaped.
The extraordinary thing was what he did once he got outside.
He took the vocabulary the kitchen had given him, the bullshit detector, the affection for working people, the attraction to misfits, the appetite, the profanity, the understanding that people reveal themselves when they eat, and carried all of it into the rest of the world.
That is the Bourdain story I care about.
Not simply the story of a boy who discovered he belonged in a kitchen.
The story of a man who spent decades there, understood both what it gave him and what it took from him, and eventually found another way to live.
The story of someone who became famous for describing a brutal profession so vividly that thousands of people somehow mistook the warning for an invitation.
The story of someone whose television work tried to push food media beyond consumption and toward curiosity, only to watch culture eventually reduce that work back into consumption.
Eat where Tony ate.
Sit where Tony sat.
Order what Tony ordered.
Take the photograph.
Get the shot.
Move on.
That is the entire fucking problem.
People stop listening to what he said and start arranging themselves to resemble the photographs.
They imitate the jacket, the cigarette, the stool, the noodles and the weary expression. They imitate the surface because the substance would require them to examine their own country, their own privilege, their own assumptions and their own appetite for turning other people’s lives into content.
They want the glamour of humility without the humiliation of actually being humbled.
They want to be seen as curious without risking being wrong.
They want to be called travellers while behaving like advertisers.
They want the moral credit of proximity to poverty without any responsibility toward the people whose poverty they are photographing.
They want Bourdain’s credibility without Bourdain’s discomfort.
The version of Anthony Bourdain worth preserving is harder than that.
It is not a man who knew the hidden restaurant.
It is a man who understood that there was no such thing as a hidden restaurant once a camera arrived.
It is not a man willing to eat the scary organ.
It is a man willing to admit that the organ was not the most important thing in the room.
It is not the cool guy smoking outside after dinner.
It is the person who sat down, listened and allowed the world to become more complicated than the story he had brought with him.
The contradictions are not obstacles to understanding him.
They are the point.
The plastic stool never was.