The myth of Anthony Bourdain: how the bad boy chef became a hero to boozehounds and bullies
The author of Kitchen Confidential has inspired a new movie, Tony, about his days as a dishwasher. But do today’s chefs still admire his self-sabotaging
The author of Kitchen Confidential has inspired a new movie, Tony, about his days as a dishwasher. But do today’s chefs still admire his self-sabotaging rock’n’roll spirit – or have they outgrown it? The trope of the Angry Young Man was not born in a kitchen, but Anthony Bourdain’s particular myth-making created what might be the prototype for fin de (20th) siècle masculinity.
As the director of Tony, the new biopic of Bourdain focusing on his first job, has said, the film is about “a magical world where nothing can go wrong and a young man who’s angry about it”. Bourdain arrived in that job, as a dishwasher in a restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, aged 19.
He was hellbent on a life of formless, self-sabotaging rebellion, and found his tribe. But when he published his book Kitchen Confidential in 2000, a quarter of a century later, he set the ethos of that kitchen tribe in stone, and attracted an ever-replenishing pool of chefs who, if they weren’t already just like him, were prepared to die trying.
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