Before the Fame, Bourdain Finds His First Kitchen and His Voice
A24 is taking Anthony Bourdain back to the summer before the books, television cameras and worldwide icon status. The studio has unveiled a new look at Tony, with The Holdovers breakout Dominic Sessa playing a 19-year-old Bourdain as he stumbles into the chaotic world of a Provincetown restaurant kitchen.
Rather than squeezing an entire extraordinary life into one tidy cradle-to-grave biopic, director Matt Johnson focuses on a formative summer when the future chef, author and traveler was still searching for direction. Bourdain arrives wanting to become a writer, takes a kitchen job and discovers the strange, bruising camaraderie that will eventually shape both his career and his voice.
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Enter Bourdain’s Kitchen
Tony returns to the summer that started Anthony Bourdain’s lifelong relationship with restaurant kitchens. Visit A24’s official film page, then revisit the writing that made his voice impossible to imitate.
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Sessa does not appear to be chasing a broad impersonation of the Bourdain audiences already know. The footage instead catches the restlessness underneath him: the sharp mouth, literary ambition, self-destructive energy and fascination with people who lived outside polite expectations. It is less “here comes the famous chef” and more here is the difficult young man still figuring out what he is actually built to do.
Antonio Banderas plays Ciro, the restaurant owner and chef who brings Tony into the kitchen and begins teaching him its rhythms, rules and controlled disorder. Their mentor-student dynamic gives the first footage its emotional backbone, with Banderas bringing warmth and authority while Sessa ricochets between arrogance, uncertainty and genuine hunger to belong somewhere.
The cast also includes Emilia Jones as Nancy, alongside Leo Woodall, Stavros Halkias, Dagmara Domińczyk and Rich Sommer. The ensemble surrounds Tony with the cooks, friends, lovers and grown-ups who make that Provincetown summer feel less like a biographical checkpoint and more like a lived-in coming-of-age story.
That narrower approach may be exactly what a Bourdain film needs. His appeal was never just that he knew food; it was the way he wrote about work, appetite, failure, class, travel and human contradiction without sanding away the ugly parts. Tony has a chance to show where that sensibility began without pretending one movie can explain the whole man.
Tony opens in select theaters on August 7, 2026, before expanding nationwide on August 21. Between Johnson’s direction, Sessa’s naturally lanky intensity and Banderas holding court in the kitchen, A24 may have found a way into Bourdain’s story that feels personal rather than packaged.
Watch A24’s First Look and Official Tony Trailer
The first-look clip introduces young Tony’s arrival in Provincetown and his uneasy entry into Ciro’s restaurant kitchen.
A24’s full official trailer expands the story with Tony’s writing ambitions, kitchen education and volatile search for purpose.
Source: A24 and A24’s official Tony first-look and trailer videos.
