Bourdain dishing on Bourdain
In Tony, Sessa as Bourdain is obnoxious, talking himself up and lying to everyone he meets, even pretending that he’s writing a book about the restaurant to impress Nancy. The real Bourdain was definitely known as an arrogant kid in Provincetown. Per Kitchen Confidential, back then he was “angry” and “undisciplined,” writing, “I treated the world like my ashtray.”
“He was very brutally honest in critiquing his younger self, so that gave us some free rein to paint this wayward young man in all his warts,” says Howe.
As one of the Flagship’s chefs, Alex Getmanov, said in Laurie Woolever’s Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, Bourdain “didn’t know anything, and he had this attitude that he could do anything, which doesn’t get you far in a working kitchen.”
Working in the Flagship’s kitchen, Bourdain wrote, “essentially pushed me down the path I still walk to this day.”
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