Happier, Stupider Times revisits Bourdain’s formative summers in Provincetown as A24’s new film TONY brings the same chapter of his life to the big screen.
Long before Anthony Bourdain was travelling the world, eating with strangers and changing the way an entire generation thought about food, he was washing dishes in Provincetown.
It’s a chapter of his life Bourdain fans may recognize from Kitchen Confidential, but A24’s new book, Happier, Stupider Times: Anthony Bourdain’s Provincetown Years, gives that period a world of its own.
The 216-page hardcover goes back to 1970s Provincetown, Massachusetts, when a young Bourdain arrived with ambitions of becoming a writer and virtually no kitchen experience. A dishwashing job introduced him to an entirely different education: restaurant kitchens, fishermen, artists, cooks, late nights and the group Bourdain would come to describe as the “pirate elite.”
Rather than attempting to summarize the Bourdain we eventually came to know, the book focuses on the place that helped create him.
That makes Happier, Stupider Times particularly interesting for anyone who has already read Bourdain’s work. It fills in the atmosphere around stories he told for years, bringing together maps, menus and rarely seen ephemera from iconic Provincetown establishments, along with artwork and photography from artists who lived there. There are also original recipes for local dishes including Portuguese kale soup and Cape Cod clam bakes, plus never-before-seen images of Bourdain and his crew.
It also happens to be a very chic book.
With its foil-stamped hardcover, vintage-inspired imagery and sun-washed look, Happier, Stupider Times is the kind of book that deserves to live on a coffee table rather than disappear onto a bookshelf. At 8 by 10 inches, it has enough presence to feel like a collectible without becoming an oversized design tome. For Bourdain fans, food obsessives or that person who is perpetually difficult to shop for, it also makes the perfect gift — part photography book, part culinary archive and part time capsule of a place and era that helped shape one of food culture’s most recognizable voices.
There’s something fitting about revisiting Bourdain this way. His legacy has never really been confined to food. What made him compelling was his curiosity about the people, places and cultures surrounding it. Provincetown gave him his first glimpse inside that world.
It’s also exactly where A24’s new film TONY begins.
Directed by Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson, best known for BlackBerry, TONY narrows its focus to Bourdain at 19, before the bestselling books, television career and celebrity. Dominic Sessa steps into the role of the young Bourdain, with Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, Antonio Banderas and Stavros Halkias among the ensemble cast.
Rather than attempting a traditional biopic, the film follows Bourdain as he travels to Provincetown and falls into the chaotic world of a restaurant kitchen — a summer that would ultimately alter the direction of his life. A24’s official synopsis keeps the premise appropriately simple: this is Bourdain before anyone knew there was a story worth telling.
Dominic Sessa is an especially interesting choice to take on the role. After breaking out in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, he is playing Bourdain at an age when the swagger, worldliness and confidence audiences would later associate with him were still being formed. Banderas, meanwhile, plays one of the restaurant figures within that world, while Jones and Woodall help populate a version of Provincetown filled with the relationships and personalities surrounding young Tony.
Johnson’s involvement makes the pairing of book and film even more direct. The filmmaker contributes the introduction to Happier, Stupider Times, writing about his own experience in Provincetown while making TONY and watching places and stories familiar from Kitchen Confidential come to life.
For longtime fans, it is also an opportunity to return to Bourdain without simply retracing the work everyone already knows. Happier, Stupider Times and TONY are both interested in the messy beginning: the kitchens, characters and summers that existed before Anthony Bourdain became Anthony Bourdain.
Considering how much of his later life was spent encouraging the rest of us to go somewhere unfamiliar, sit down, eat and pay attention, there’s something especially appropriate about going back to the place where he first learned to do the same.
Happier, Stupider Times: Anthony Bourdain’s Provincetown Years is available to order from A24, with copies currently listed to ship by September 10. TONY opens in theatres August 21.
