A24’s Tony follows a 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain through a summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It is 1975. He is a student at Vassar College who wants to be a writer, and he has told his family and his high school love interest, Nancy, that he won a fellowship to New York. He did not.
Trailer, via A24.
A Dishwasher at The Flagship
Nancy is already dating a pizza delivery man when Tony arrives. He drinks at The Flagship, a local seafood restaurant, is rude to Mary the waitress and bartender while inebriated, and is kicked out and robbed by Sal, one of the cooks. Short on money for the ferry home, he appeals to the head chef for a place to stay and lies that he has previous restaurant experience. He is given a job as the restaurant’s dishwasher.
The kitchen pulls him in — the drug-fueled lifestyle, the camaraderie among the cooks. Sal is brash, confident, volatile. His heroin habit wins. He arrives late for a shift, has a violent confrontation with Chef, and leaves. Tony takes his place as a cook, mentored by Chef, still lying to Nancy about the fellowship.
The Lobster Thermidor
To impress Nancy, Tony invites her to the restaurant and talks Chef into running lobster thermidor as a Friday special.
| Character | Actor | Role at The Flagship |
|---|---|---|
| Tony | Dominic Sessa | Dishwasher, then cook |
| Chef José Vatel | Antonio Banderas | Owner who hires Tony |
| Sal | Leo Woodall | Cook, exits after confrontation |
| Mary | Monica Raymund | Waitress and bartender |
| Stavros | Stavros Halkias | Restaurant worker |
| Tyrone | Michael Jibrin | Restaurant worker |
Matt Johnson directs from a script he wrote with Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe. The film runs 107 minutes. Dagmara Domińczyk plays Gladys, Tony’s mother; Rich Sommer plays his father, Pierre. Eric Ripert is listed as a cooking instructor.
What the Kitchen Costs
The tagline is Tony’s own confession: “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”
That is the whole architecture. Tony is a coming-of-age comedy drama about a kid who lies his way into a kitchen and finds the first thing he is actually good at. The source material is Bourdain’s 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential, and the film treats the summer as the hinge of a life.
The weakness is Sal. His heroin habit is the film’s one hard turn, and it arrives as a plot mechanism — the obstacle that clears Tony’s path to the line. Leo Woodall gets the swagger; he gets less of the man underneath. Banderas is steadier as Chef, a boss who mentors without sentiment.
What holds is Sessa. He plays the lying, the drinking and the neediness without asking for sympathy, which is the harder job.
Tony opened theatrically in the United States on August 7, 2026, and drew positive reviews. It earns them, mostly — a specific, unsentimental portrait of a young man who had not yet become the person anyone would write a book about. The kitchen does the work the fellowship could not.
7.5 of 10.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
