10 Anthony Bourdain Books to Grab Before the Biopic ‘Tony’ Hits Theaters
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- A24's biopic "Tony" premieres in select U.S. theaters on Aug. 7 and goes wide Aug. 21, starring Dominic Sessa as a 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain working summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1975.
- Director Matt Johnson based "Tony" on just two chapters of Bourdain's 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential, which sold over a million copies and topped the New York Times bestseller list after his 2018 death.
- The film also stars Emilia Jones as Nancy (Bourdain's love interest and future wife) and Leo Woodall as a colleague-turned-buddy named Sal, with the story confined to Bourdain's earliest kitchen days.
- Bloomsbury Publishing released a 608-page "Three Crime Novels" collection — bundling Bone in the Throat, Gone Bamboo, and The Bobby Gold Stories — on July 28, days before the biopic lands.
- Bourdain's wider bibliography spans travel writing (A Cook's Tour, World Travel with co-author Laurie Woolever), true crime (Typhoid Mary on Mary Mallon), and cookbooks including a 20th-anniversary Les Halles edition and his circa-2016 Appetites.
Why it matters: Director Matt Johnson built the Bourdain biopic from a narrow two-chapter slice of Kitchen Confidential, leaving most of the chef's crime fiction, travel writing, and cookbooks off-screen — so fans wanting the unfiltered Bourdain have to do the reading themselves, and Bloomsbury's July 28 crime-novel omnibus gives them exactly ten days before opening night.
