Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson didn’t care how the food looked when he was making Tony…sort of. The Torontonian loves food and, of course, knows how important it is to Anthony Bourdain’s story (even if the movie only covers a short period of the iconic figure’s life), but he was uninterested in the mechanics of making the art of cooking look like, well, art. Many others have succeeded in doing so on camera, and Johnson didn’t think he could add anything to that visual canon. Instead of what was happening in the kitchen, he was more concerned with who was making it happen.
“I’m not a chef; I have no talent, nor do I even have any vision in terms of what would make an aesthetically pleasing culinary experience,” says Johnson, who’s also known for acclaimed Canadian films BlackBerry and Nirvana the Band the Show. “What I found most interesting in Bourdain’s writing was the kitchen culture and this social relationship with the other people on the line. Apart from the chef, no one is really in charge, except through kind of how long you’ve been there or how well you could put up with the struggle of working in the kitchen. I wanted the social aspects [of the kitchen] to be the centrepiece because, one, that was something I understood, and, two, it actually seemed more important to Bourdain than the ‘how to cook.’ I believe that when people think of Anthony Bourdain, they think of him as a personality first—as someone who brings people together around food as opposed to somebody who cooks something undeniable that then brings people to the table.”
And when you watch Tony (in theatres in Canada on August 14), you can understand how being in the kitchen transformed Bourdain’s life. Part coming-of-age drama and part origin story inspired by the celebrity chef and documentarian’s 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential, the film follows a 19-year-old Anthony (played by Dominic Sessa) as he travels to Provincetown, Mass., dreaming of being a writer but instead ending up working at a local restaurant over a summer that shapes the rest of his life.
When does Tony come out in Canada?
Tony opens in Canadian theatres on August 14, 2026. [Ticket/Showtime information]
Matt Johnson’s Food Diary From the Making of Tony
Local Eats: What Matt Johnson ate in Provincetown
“I was living in Provincetown [while we were writing the screenplay]; it was off-season, so not all the restaurants were open. This is when I really discovered [Howard] Mitcham’s cookbook [Provincetown Seafood Cookbook]; it’s based on the exact type of seafood you can catch and get in that part of Massachusetts. In terms of where you can actually go and what you can eat, they have a stuffed cod at The Lobster Pot restaurant that is absolutely amazing—it’s stuffed with sausage and all kinds of delicious stuff. You can get lobster rolls from various places and basically any kind of whitefish almondine—a very Cape Cod-y thing that I’d eat often while I was writing the script there.”
On-Set Eats: Coffee and catering on Cape Cod
“It’s difficult to describe how little you’re thinking about what you can eat and how little agency you have over your own diet [when you’re on-set]. I was eating whatever our culinary team made. But I will say that we had a genius caterer from New Orleans who drove up with his truck and full Acadian crew, and they cooked incredible food. Every day, it was something new. What’s really important to me when I’m making a movie is that I find wherever the best local coffee is. For me, on the entire Cape, it was a place called the Three Fins—like the three fins on a surfboard—[they make] really good coffee. I like to drink either hot or iced lattes, but I’ll drink anything—I’ve got a problem.”
Wrapping Up: Matt Johnson’s favourite Toronto restaurant
“I famously kissed the ground when I got off the plane back in Toronto; I was so happy to be home [after wrapping the film]. There’s a restaurant called Café Polonez, where they basically serve Polish deli food, though it’s not a deli at all. I went right there and got the platter for two and ate the entire thing: That’s a chicken schnitzel, a pork schnitzel—very tender—four types of chopped salads, including one carrot, one beet and one coleslaw, a potato pancake with goulash inside it and a smoked sausage with grainy mustard on it. It’s one of my favourite restaurants; it’s completely unpretentious, and I’ve never had a bad meal there in my life.”
