The people who knew Anthony Bourdain best say the late chef was even more compelling off-camera than on it, and that A24's new film Tony captures the man they actually knew.
Eight years after Bourdain's death by suicide in France at age 61, three of his oldest friends and colleagues sat down with the New York Post to share stories from the years before fame found him, back when the 6-foot-4 cook in ripped jeans and cowboy boots was grinding through New York City kitchens, writing crime novels nobody read, and drinking until dawn at a dive bar called Siberia.
Their verdict on the biopic, directed by Matt Johnson and starring an actor known as Sessa in the title role: it works. And their memories of Bourdain himself, raw, profane, generous, self-destructive, paint a picture no film could fully contain.
Westmoreland owns Siberia, the fabled NYC drinking den where Bourdain landed after kitchen shifts in the 1990s. He remembers the first time Bourdain walked in, tall, wearing ripped jeans and cowboy boots, and the ribbing that followed.
"Yo, Tony. Not for nothing. You're not a gangster, you're a f***ing cook," Westmoreland recalled telling him. The two became close. During late-night, beer-soaked conversations, Westmoreland pushed Bourdain to stop writing crime fiction and start writing about what he actually knew: food, kitchens, the chaotic life behind restaurant doors.
"I'm gonna bar you if you don't write about anything about food," Westmoreland told him.
Bourdain listened. An essay in The New Yorker led to a book contract, and in 2000 Kitchen Confidential turned him from a working cook into a cultural force. But Westmoreland's bar remains a kind of unofficial shrine. Visitors still come in asking careful questions.
"People come in and usually start very softly, asking random questions. And then like five minutes later, it's obvious they're on a journey to learn more about him. I still get emotional talking about him, because I miss my friend."
Westmoreland said the question he hears most is whether Bourdain was really as cool as he seemed on television.
"Everybody asks, 'Was he really that cool?' But in reality, he was way f***ing cooler."
The two traveled together to St. Martin, where Bourdain tried to talk Westmoreland into opening an outpost of Siberia. The plan fell through. But the friendship held.
Westmoreland admitted he walked into the screening expecting the worst. "First of all, I thought the movie was gonna be a piece of s***," he said. He was wrong.
"But I gotta tell you, man, I thought it was good. I thought the guy (Sessa) nailed the way Tony was."
"He caught the essence of him," Westmoreland added, before offering one caveat: "While the actress who played Tony's eventual wife was very pretty and very nice, Tony's actual wife Nancy was prettier and hotter."
Chef John Tesar first met Bourdain in the 1980s. The two cooked together at The Supper Club, a well-known Midtown eatery. Tesar remembers the entrance.
"The first time I saw him, he walked in with that black leather jacket of his, tight blue jeans, cowboy boots and he was smoking a f***ing Lucky Strike."
"I was like, 'Who the f**k is this guy?'" Tesar said. "He had a very large physical presence."
Bourdain returned the admiration in print. In Kitchen Confidential, he gave Tesar the pseudonym "Jimmy Sears" and called him "a brilliant cook", while also noting that Tesar was "sleeping on floors around Manhattan, dodging creditors and ex-girlfriends, and in general going through a rough patch." That kind of unsparing honesty, applied to friends and to himself alike, was part of what made Bourdain's writing cut through.
Tesar described his late friend as "very charismatic, but also kind of naive in some way and sophisticated in others." He praised the biopic for focusing on the pre-fame years, before celebrity warped the picture.
"I think when you look at somebody who's famous, it's harder to know who they really are because then they're acting all the time. What I loved about the movie is that it shows you who he was before everybody and anything."
Sessa, Tesar said, "did a good job portraying the sensitive, vulnerable and sometimes full-of-s*** aspects of Tony."
Tesar also offered a blunt assessment of the food world Bourdain left behind. "It's been killed by ego, frosted tips and game shows," he said. "It's a shame he passed away, because he was really on a roll. Even if he was the most self-destructive, rude motherf***** in the world, he was a brilliant food writer."
And when Bourdain died in 2018, Tesar's reaction was immediate and unfiltered: "The first thought in my mind was, 'What the f**k, you idiot. Why did you kill yourself?'"
Food writer Michael Ruhlman, a frequent travel companion and close friend, first met Bourdain in 2001. The occasion: Bourdain had reviewed Ruhlman's book The Soul of a Chef for the New York Times Book Review. "It was a great review and sold a lot of books, so I wanted to meet him and thank him," Ruhlman said.
They hit it off fast. "We got along because we both rejoiced in fatty things and innards," Ruhlman recalled. What set Bourdain apart, in Ruhlman's telling, was not just the appetite but the voice behind it.
"He was just so forthright and outspoken, and said what was on his mind with a humor and intelligence nobody could imitate or duplicate."
Ruhlman also remembered Bourdain's ability to connect across lines that divide most public figures. "He crossed all kinds of religious and political divides, and was this kind of unifier, connecting us all and I think people really took to that," Ruhlman said. In a media landscape that rewards division, Bourdain's willingness to sit down with anyone, anywhere, and eat what they ate stood out.
Ruhlman shared one story that captures Bourdain's relationship with excess. Men's Health once assigned Bourdain to review Masa, a famous and controversial sushi bar. He got so drunk during the meal he couldn't remember anything about the food.
So Bourdain went back, this time bringing Ruhlman and fellow chef Eric Ripert along. Ripert then brought them to another bar. The evening deteriorated from there.
"I woke up to an email from him; he had gotten so drunk he threw up in the Hudson River," Ruhlman said.
Ruhlman recalled one of Bourdain's own lines that summed up the philosophy: "People talk about treating your body like a temple. I treat my body like a fun house."
The renewed interest in Bourdain is not limited to the biopic. A24 also released a companion book, Happier, Stupider Times: Anthony Bourdain's Provincetown Years. Laurie Woolever authored Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography. The Anthony Bourdain Reader came out earlier this year. The 2021 documentary Roadrunner covered his later years and death.
But for Ruhlman, the most striking evidence of Bourdain's reach is personal. Years after his friend's death, strangers still approach him to offer condolences, not for Bourdain, but for Ruhlman's own loss.
"Now he's Saint Tony. Strangers are still wishing me sympathies, and to have that level of empathy for not the person, but his friends, showed me the sheer reach of his popularity."
"There's never been anybody like him before and likely never will be again," Ruhlman said.
In a culture that manufactures celebrity by the hour and forgets it just as fast, Bourdain's grip on public memory eight years after his death says something worth noticing, people remember the ones who told the truth, even when the truth was messy.
