“If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.”
― Anthony Bourdain
As a new film evokes his coming-of-age in this bohemian Cape Cod town, Pete Wells goes looking for the people and restaurants that shaped him.
One summer day in the mid-1970s when Anthony Bourdain was a teenage dishwasher at the Flagship in Provincetown, Mass., he and the rest of the kitchen crew gathered around a window to watch their boss have a very intimate encounter with a female customer outside in the trash-bin corral. Dressed in a bridal gown, the customer had just been married and was about to have dinner with the rest of her wedding party. First, though, she was getting a little something from the chef.
History does not record whether the marriage prospered. We do know, though, what witnessing that primal scene did to
Mr. Bourdain’s adolescent brain, already buzzing from the swaggering misbehavior he’d seen inside the kitchen. In that moment, he said later without elaborating, he knew he wanted to become a chef.
Mr. Bourdain came to Cape Cod that summer with no job and few ambitions other than hanging out and getting high. By the end of the season he had found, possibly for the first time, something he wanted to aspire to.
This discovery is the theme of “Tony,” a feature film directed by Matt Johnson that opens in theaters on Aug. 7. The movie, set in Provincetown, takes liberties with what really happened, as biopics do. Its focus is squarely on the kitchen rather than the ways his three summers there shaped the sensibility he expressed in the 2000 memoir that made him a media star, “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,” and the televisionshows that followed.
This was even more true in the 1970s, when the town floated on cultural tides far from mainstream American currents. Except the Portuguese-speaking Azorean fishermen, who were there for the fish, almost everybody came for what the town didn’t have: rules, malls, two-car garages, stringent morality and a cost of living likely to interfere with personal desires.
Provincetown’s patchwork social fabric came together at places like Piggy’s, where Norman Mailer and Robert Motherwell shared the dance floor with local characters. Apartments and cottages all over town could be rented on the cheap.
Living a marginal existence was easy. In a sense, the town was nothing but margins. It was a safe harbor for poets, artists, drifters, clamdiggers, gay men, lesbians, drag queens, hippies and dropouts of all kinds. There was even room for students who wanted to try on a new personality before the fall semester, like Mr. Bourdain, who seemed to be making a concerted effort to flunk out of Vassar College.
The Tony of “Tony,” played by Dominic Sessa, stumbles onshore lovesick and alone, in pursuit of a girl named Nancy. In real life, Mr. Bourdain rolled into town with a pack of pals that included Nancy Putkoski, who had been his girlfriend on and off for some time. (They married in 1985 and divorced 20 years later.)
“They were high school sweethearts,” recalled John Yingling, the founder of Spiritus Pizza, as he sat on a bench looking at summer crowds parading down Commercial Street, the town’s main drag.
Spiritus was the hub of Mr. Bourdain’s social wheel. Mr. Yingling’s sister went to Vassar, too, and she began bringing her circle with her on summer trips to Provincetown. Nancy, who brought Mr. Bourdain along for three summers, worked at Spiritus.
She was a great favorite there. Mr. Bourdain was another story. With a troublemaker’s grin, curly long hair and the torso of a snake, he looked like the singer in a band that a college station in Boston might have played late at night.
“He was a pain-in-the-ass kid around here, to me, a lot of times,” Mr. Yingling said.
There must have been moments when Mr. Bourdain’s roommates shared the feeling. They had jobs. He did not. They paid the rent on a cottage. He slept there.
“We all went to the beaches and ponds each morning, smoked pot, sniffed a little coke, dropped acid and sunbathed nude, as well as indulging in other healthy teenage activities,” he wrote in “Kitchen Confidential.”
His idyllic freeloading ended one night when a roommate came home from her job at the Flagship in a bad mood. The dishwasher hadn’t turned up, and dinner service had resembled a typhoon out of “Moby-Dick.” As she later relayed it to Mr. Yingling, her conversation with Mr. Bourdain went like this:
“I hate the restaurant business. But you know who our new dishwasher is?”
“No, who?”
“You!”
The next day, Mr. Bourdain tied on an apron. “And he never turned back,” Mr. Yingling said.
Finding a Calling
Now a private home, the Flagship sat in a long, skinny, shingled building that juts out past the sea wall on pilings. The one detail said to survive is the bar, which was built out of an old, scarred wooden dory. I tried everything short of breaking and entering to get a look at it. I failed.
Inside the Flagship, which went by the alias the Dreadnaught in “Kitchen Confidential,” the cooks were busy frying seafood and broiling chops and steaks.
Mr. Bourdain’s unruly soul seemed to find purpose and order in the channeled mania of the kitchen. He became, as he later told The Guardian, more than happy — “in fact, intensely satisfied.” When he moved from the dish sink to the salad station, the deep fryer and finally, for a few late-season shifts, the fearsome broiler, “I was overjoyed,” he said.
As part of the crew, Mr. Bourdain settled into one of Provincetown’s many margins. He also observed it, studying the mores of kitchen society with an anthropologist’s eye while his body rode its adrenaline highs. Years later, when he wrote about the life, he sounded like Margaret Mead with a sense of humor and a backpack full of amphetamines.
The effect was galvanic, said Adam Platt, the former restaurant critic for New York magazine, “similar to Martin Luther pounding his theses on the church door.” Our current obsession with what goes on backstage at restaurants — the whole teeming underworld of calloused hands, burn-scarred forearms and raging personality disorders — began then. It’s a straight line from “The Bear” back to “Kitchen Confidential.”
Before Mr. Bourdain died, when the lawless ways of restaurant kitchens came under fire for fostering serious physical and sexual abuse, he said he regretted valorizing that culture. He also came to a less celebratory perspective on drug use in Provincetown restaurants, which was notorious, even by the standards of the ’70s.
“Many of our friends from those days didn’t make it,” he said during a conversation with Mr. Yingling when he revisited Massachusetts in 2014 for his TV series “Parts Unknown.” He talked in that episode about his own heroin use and an epidemic of the drug elsewhere in the state.
In that first summer, though, he saw nothing but upside in the pirate’s life.
‘He Seemed Very Callow’
The next spring, he came back to the Flagship to apply again for his post at the broiler. Unfortunately for him, the place had a new owner: Ciriaco Cozzi, who also ran Ciro’s, an Italian restaurant on a nearby lane paved with clamshells and scented with garlic.
Mr. Cozzi set his standards high. Ciro’s bought whole veal legs that were broken down into scallopine and cutlets, the hand-chopped trimmings worked into meatballs. Garlic was sliced moments before it hit the pan. Using few shortcuts, a crackerjack team of cooks somehow pushed out around 500 dinners a night, seven nights a week.
“Ciro’s at that time was the busiest, most fantastic restaurant in Provincetown,” said Mr. Yingling, who let Mr. Bourdain sleep in a crawl space over his walk-in refrigerator at Spiritus during this audition.
Mr. Bourdain was awe-struck by the cooks at Ciro’s, called Mario’s in his memoir. “They moved in a pack, with their own dialect,” he wrote, “a high-pitched, ultra-femme, affected drawl, salted with terms from eighteenth-century English literature and Marine Corps drill instructor-speak — a lush, intimidating, sardonic secret language, which was much imitated.”
The admiration was not mutual. After he burned himself on a frying pan in a disastrous tryout, Mr. Bourdain was kicked back down to salads.
“We looked at him and sort of sneered, because he seemed very callow and, on the one hand, full of himself and, on the other hand, unsure,” said Alexej Getmanov, the Ciro’s cook known in the book as Dimitri. Mr. Bourdain told him that their disdain got under his skin and prompted him to attend the Culinary Institute of America, starting in February 1977. “He said, ‘Well, I’ll show them.’”
Ciro’s is now owned by the Luster family, two of whom, James and Larry, worked with Mr. Bourdain. Now under its original name, Ciro & Sal’s, the restaurant still breaks down whole legs of veal, even more rare today than it was then. The lane still smells like garlic.
Inspired by a Cookbook
Few other businesses from Mr. Bourdain’s era are still going. There’s the Provincetown Portuguese Bakery, where malasadas are fried in the window. The Lobster Pot, where his childhood friend Sam Goldman worked, is as busy as ever, but it wasn’t a hangout.
We never ate there; it was for tourists & day-trippers,” Nancy Bourdain, his ex-wife, wrote in an email. (She declined an interview request.) “I think we subsisted on food from local year-round spots like Tips for Tops’n, the Portuguese Bakery & Cookie’s Tap (kale soup with linguiça), lots of pizza, & cooking at home. We saved our money for going out to the local bars (Piggy’s & the Governor Bradford), other ‘stuff,’ & rent.”
Recipe: Portuguese Kale Soup
Versions of kale soup are still all over, even though the Portuguese community that brought it to the Cape is nearly gone. But looking for recipes that shaped Mr. Bourdain’s young palate is beside the point. We aren’t interested in him today because of the dishes he created as a chef so much as the way he wrote about the work, and the appreciation he showed, in his television career, for people who did their own particular thing in their own particular way.
In this regard, one book might be the Rosetta Stone for Bourdain scholars: Howard Mitcham’s “Provincetown Seafood Cookbook,” published in 1975.
