Walk down Coin Street in Waterloo and the eyes of Anthony Bourdain will find you before you find him. A vast mural of the cult chef-turned-food writer covers the wall of pan-Asian restaurant Sticky Mango, commissioned by chef-owner Peter Lloyd, who encountered Bourdain across various corners of the world at the World Street Food Congress. Hundreds of people still make the pilgrimage here, pausing beneath those huge painted eyes for a photograph. Anthony Bourdain London oysters, nostalgia, and the question of where a passion for food actually begins: a new biopic arrives in cinemas this month to unpick all three.
Tony: the summer that lit the fire
Tony, directed by Matt Johnson, is set during one formative summer in 1975. A 19-year-old Bourdain, having failed to win a writing fellowship, flees his family home in New Jersey and follows a high-school crush to Cape Cod. After a drunken night, he falls into the orbit of a local seafood restaurant, The Lobster Pot, where a chef known only as ‘Chef’ (Antonio Banderas) offers him a bed in exchange for pot-washing duties. What follows is loosely drawn from a few pages of Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential and an episode of his television series Parts Unknown in which he returns to Cape Cod.
The film drifts like a remembered summer, warm and slightly out of focus, but the teenager at its centre is anything but romanticised. A quote from Bourdain himself appears on screen early: ‘I was, to be frank, a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, thoughtless young lout who needed a good ass-kicking.’ Slowly, beneath the tutelage of Chef and his shelves of old French cookbooks, something changes. Lobster Thermidor and the precise colour of a seemingly burnt fish skin become, in the film’s telling, almost spiritual lessons.
Oysters run through the story like a recurring motif. Bourdain already loves eating them, recalling the first he ever tasted on a childhood holiday to France: ‘It tasted of seawater, of brine and flesh, and somehow… of the future.’ But shucking them, that particular discipline of knife and wrist and patience, defeats him where his workmate Sal (Leo Woodall) makes it look effortless. As Bourdain struggles with the shells, the film is quietly watching him learn humility alongside technique.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the summer depicted in the film preceded Bourdain’s enrolment at the Culinary Institute of America, with the film’s closing passages following his application there. In a detail that carries its own weight for anyone who knows what came after, the Hollywood Reporter notes that Eric Ripert appears briefly in the film on an admissions panel: a cameo that places two futures in the same room before either of them has quite arrived.
Anthony Bourdain London oysters and the Borough Market connection
The adult Bourdain called London his ‘second home’, returning repeatedly to film episodes of A Cook’s Tour, No Reservations, The Layover and Parts Unknown in the capital. He declared Fergus Henderson’s nose-to-tail restaurant St. John his ‘favourite restaurant in the universe’, ate at the fish restaurant Sweetings, drank espresso chased by shots of Fernet-Branca at Bar Italia in Soho, and kept a table warm at Trisha’s.
For the particular thread that runs through Tony, though, the place to go in London is Wright Brothers Seafood Restaurant and Bar in Borough Market. Opened in 2002 by Ben and Robin Wright, it became the first oyster merchant to open in London since 1970. Robin, like Bourdain, discovered his love of oysters on a childhood holiday to France, and eventually left his previous career to follow that passion for seafood.
At the flagship Borough Market branch, a small, bustling spot with an open-plan kitchen, Oyster Master Luke Rees-Oliviere demonstrates the art of shucking: clasping the shell in your palm, finding the point where the two halves meet, working the blade in. Then he explains the concept of merroir, the oyster’s equivalent of terroir, shaped by water salinity, temperature, tides, algae and mineral content. Jersey Rock Oysters arrive flinty and mineral; Achill Island oysters from County Mayo carry brine and earth; Louët-Feisser oysters from County Lough land with a deep umami finish.
Oysters and London have a longer shared history than most visitors realise. Robin notes that humanity’s reliance on the mollusc stretches back millennia. Two hundred years ago, oyster sellers cried their wares on every street corner. In 1865, records state that 500 million native oysters passed through Billingsgate market in a single year. They were eaten by rich and poor alike, deliberately left untaxed to keep them affordable, and given out freely by pubs looking to draw in customers.
That history is, in miniature, what Bourdain spent a career pursuing: the point where a humble ingredient and a community’s appetite meet, and what that meeting reveals. In Tony, we watch the moment he first understood it, standing at a counter in Cape Cod with a shucking knife and a shell he couldn’t quite open.
Tony is in UK and Ireland cinemas now.