While playing a teenaged version of Anthony Bourdain in the new film Tony, Dominic Sessa is meant to appear out of his depth.
We first see him as a college freshman, swaggering around the Vassar campus with a sword tucked into his jeans, arrogantly declaiming the supposed stupidity of his professors; he fails out of their classes. Once installed in the humbling dish station of a Provincetown seafood restaurant, where he makes a series of humiliating mistakes, it becomes blisteringly obvious that young Tony has never wielded anything sharper than his own tongue.
Sessa, meanwhile, already knew his way around a dish station, a professional stand mixer, an industrial deep fryer and a large-scale oven.
“I worked summers at Cathy’s 14th Street Bakery in Ocean City [New Jersey],” Sessa says. “I started out at 13, washing dishes, and then [owner] Cathy [Greene] taught me how to mix the doughnut dough, how to cut the doughnuts, fry them and ice them, and eventually how to make croissants.”
“He was a very quick learner and hard worker,” says Greene, who trusted him with opening the bakery by himself at 4:30 a.m. to prep for the morning rush.
“One time I put the wrong dough mix in the bowl,” Sessa recalls with a self-conscious laugh. “There was too much yeast in it. I turned around and it had become this massive dough monster, spilling out of the machine. I had 20 minutes until Cathy got there, so I put it all into the outdoor trash cans. I thought I’d gotten away with it, but when she went outside to throw something out, the dough had expanded five times more, exploding out of the cans, and I had to admit what I’d done. She said, ‘I would have been much less disappointed if you’d just told me, and we could have fixed the problem. Now my trash cans are destroyed.’ Cathy taught me that it was okay to make mistakes, as long as I didn’t lie about it.”
It’s no spoiler to say that the through line of Tony, the film, a biopic nestled within a sweet summer coming-of-age story, is young Bourdain’s complicated relationship with honesty. He was, by his own description in his memoir-in-essays, Kitchen Confidential, “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” and his inability to tell the truth gets him literally and figuratively bashed around for much of the movie. He lies to his family, his boss, and his love interest about his skills and his motivations, realizing after a series of cinematic disasters that only the truth will help him become who he is meant to be.
In addition to their unmistakable physical resemblance to each other, there are similarities between Bourdain’s and Sessa’s circuitous lives.
