Before he played Anthony Bourdain in the coming-of-age biopic Tony, Dominic Sessa’s first brush with fame was as an Ocean City, N.J., doughnut guy.
Tony, which opened in theaters nationwide last Friday, is an origin story. It depicts Bourdain decades before he would become the executive chef of French brasserie Les Halles and eventually a prolific travel journalist, best known for shows like A Cook’s Tour, No Reservations, and Parts Unknown.
In the film, Sessa portrays a 19-year-old Bourdain in the summer of 1973, when he found himself in Provincetown, Mass., desperate to get his would-be wife, Nancy Putkoski (Emilia Jones), to fall in love with him after losing out on a writing fellowship. A tough-yet-kind chef (Anthony Banderas) gives Bourdain a job as a dishwasher at the Flagship, a no-nonsense seafood shack where Bourdain grows from bumbling dishwasher into something resembling a cook.
The film draws heavily on chapters of Bourdain’s best-selling memoir Kitchen Confidential, in which Bourdain romanticized a crew of talented, if aimless, line cooks and their exploits.
“They drank everything in sight, stole whatever wasn’t nailed down, and screwed their way through floor staff, bar customers, and casual visitors like nothing I’d ever seen or imagined,” Bourdain wrote with palpable admiration.
It’s a feeling that Sessa, 23, knows well.
Born in Cherry Hill, Sessa grew up in Egg Harbor Township and Ocean City, where he spent four summers working in the kitchen at Cathy’s 14th Street Bakery, a pink-and-white storefront that serves thousands of doughnuts a week.
When Sessa started as a dishwasher there in 2016, he was 13. By the time he worked his last shift in 2019, he had worked his way up to full-fledged baker, responsible for opening the shop and preparing batches of Cathy’s famous powdered and cream-filled doughnuts from scratch.
“I’ve hired a lot of great kids, but there are some who don’t get it,” said Cathy Greene, the bakery’s owner. Sessa “was really a natural.”
Sessa doesn’t remember taking to it so easily. And yet, like Bourdain, he kept coming back.
“When I first started there, it was miserable — especially at that age, waking up super-early and making batches of dough. I was just lazy and didn’t feel like finding another job,” Sessa told The Inquirer. “But every summer I’d come back and Cathy would teach me something new … The experience was one of the things that taught me how to work hard.”
Doughnut summers
Admittedly, frying doughnuts at a family-run bakery did not entirely prep Sessa for the fictional kitchen he’d step into as a teenage Bourdain. In Tony, the Flagship is full of cocaine, dirty jokes, and smashed dishes. Cathy’s, by contrast, was basically Disney World.
Still, Sessa said the job helped him understand what motivates chefs to endure grueling hours and nonstop kitchen injuries. Like Bourdain, the actor was a self-styled troublemaker, nearly getting kicked out of his South Jersey high school before earning a hockey scholarship to Massachusetts’ prestigious Deerfield Academy, where he would eventually be discovered by director Alexander Payne and land his breakout role as a boarding school kid in 2023 Christmas comedy The Holdovers.
Cathy’s kept him disciplined.
Sessa used to clock in at the bakery at 4:30 a.m. to prep the day’s first doughnuts, rolling out and aerating one batch of dough while minding another batch as it proofed. In between, he’d fry up a third.
At its busiest, Greene said, Cathy’s sells between 1,200 and 1,400 doughnuts a day. Sessa drew on the rush — and the high stakes — while acting in Tony.
“I related to the integrity working in a kitchen demands,” he said. “If I didn’t show up on time, everything would be messed up, and everyone would know it was [because of] me.” Plus, there was “something so gratifying” about placing doughnuts in the display case and watching customers snap them up.
Greene said Sessa shined when it came to the rhythm of baking and could manage the flow of the station about as well as she could. When they’d roll out dough side by side, Greene would quiz him on three-digit by three-digit multiplication. Sessa, she said, always answered correctly “off the top of his head.”
“He was a real smart kid,” Greene said.
Things didn’t always run smoothly. Once, Sessa recalled, he nearly ruined the bakery’s trash cans by throwing out a batch of dough with too much yeast in it. He had gotten away with the mistake — until the dough proceeded to nearly quintuple in size. “It was billowing out of the cans, on the ground, seeping into the kitchen,” said Greene. “It was pretty funny.”
The stress of the job didn’t detract from Sessa’s favorite part: small-town notoriety.
Passersby love to peer into Cathy’s kitchen from the street. “Kids were always interested in watching the guy who rolls the doughnuts out,” Sessa said. “It made me feel like a celebrity.”
Drinking on the beach and baking hungover
As much as Tony spins a hero’s journey for a young Bourdain (who ends the movie — spoiler — by enrolling in culinary school), it also foreshadows his struggle with substance use.
Bourdain, who died from suicide in 2018 at 61, had spoken candidly about his addiction to heroin and cocaine before getting sober in the 1980s. In Tony, we see the fledging chef try cocaine for the first time at his dishwashing station at Flagship with Sal (Leo Woodhall), a hard-partying coworker who relishes in showing Bourdain his favorite vices.
Sessa’s Ocean City summers followed a similar pattern. Before The Holdovers, the actor was crossing the causeway to buy booze at Circle Liquors in Somers Point.
“All of my friends were doing the same thing” as Bourdain in Tony, Sessa said. “We would just work so we could get paid enough to buy alcohol, drink on the beach all night, go into work hungover, sleep it off after our shift, and do it all over again the next day.”
“We were all under 18 so we felt invincible,” Sessa said. ”It was paradise.”
Antics aside, Greene is proud of the role her bakery played in helping Sessa get into character (even if she hasn’t seen Tony yet). She just isn’t sure about cashing in on his star power. “I don’t want to be the one who is like, ‘Oh, I had Dominic Sessa here,’” Greene said. “But it’s pretty cool.”
