Tony Filming Locations: Where the Anthony Bourdain Movie Was Shot

Anthony Bourdain eventually became a chef, writer and traveler who seemed incapable of staying in one place for long, but Tony is interested in the period before all of that. Matt Johnson’s A24 film follows a 19-year-old Bourdain during a formative summer in Provincetown, when he arrives on Cape Cod without much direction and stumbles into the anarchic culture of restaurant kitchens. Dominic Sessa plays Bourdain, with Emilia Jones as Nancy, Leo Woodall and Stavros Halkias among his co-workers, and Antonio Banderas as the chef who becomes an important mentor.

It would have been easy to recreate 1970s Provincetown somewhere cheaper and more controllable. Instead, Johnson insisted on putting a meaningful portion of the movie in the town where Bourdain’s culinary story actually began. Tony was filmed entirely in Massachusetts, primarily across Provincetown, Dennis, Plymouth, Kingston and Brockton, with additional work around Cape Cod and the South Shore. The production shot for roughly 25 days in 2025, only about five and a half of which were spent in Provincetown itself.

Provincetown, Massachusetts

The most important filming location is naturally Provincetown. Bourdain spent part of his youth there and later described the town as the place where he discovered restaurant life. For Tony, cameras returned to those same narrow streets, beaches and waterfront areas rather than merely borrowing Provincetown’s name for the screenplay.

Production arrived at the end of May 2025 and established a base camp at Riley’s parking lot at 132 Bradford Street. Filming then ran through the first week of June, requiring intermittent traffic holds along Commercial Street. Town records specifically identified MacMillan Pier, beaches and several Commercial Street businesses among the planned locations.

That relatively short Provincetown schedule produced a surprising amount of recognizable geography in the finished movie.

MacMillan Pier

The first major Provincetown filming day took place at MacMillan Pier on June 2, with production scheduled there from morning until late evening. The pier extends directly from the center of town into Provincetown Harbor and remains one of the clearest visual signatures of the community.

For a film about somebody arriving at the edge of Cape Cod and discovering an entirely new way of life, the waterfront does more than establish location. Boats, fishing activity and the close relationship between Commercial Street and the harbor help recreate the working seaside town Bourdain encountered before Provincetown became quite as polished a tourist destination.

Commercial Street

On June 3, production shifted onto Commercial Street, including the alley and beach behind 229 Commercial Street, Masonic Place and the Provincetown Portuguese Bakery area. The following nights moved farther east along the same street.

Commercial Street is particularly useful because the physical proportions of Provincetown have survived despite decades of change. Narrow storefronts sit almost directly against the road, houses are packed close together, and passages frequently run between the street and harbor. Careful period dressing could therefore take the location back to the 1970s without rebuilding an entire Cape Cod town.

The production also captured additional B-roll around Provincetown on June 6, meaning some familiar street corners seen briefly in the finished film may not correspond to individually announced filming sites.

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Lobster Pot and Old Colony Tap

Two genuine Provincetown institutions became part of the movie on June 4 and 5. Crews filmed around The Lobster Pot at 321 Commercial Street and neighboring Old Colony Tap, with nighttime production continuing into the early morning.

The Lobster Pot has particular resonance in a Bourdain story. Bourdain later revisited the restaurant while filming Parts Unknown, and it belongs to the seafood-kitchen culture that shaped his earliest impressions of professional cooking. The movie does not simply use a generic Cape Cod restaurant exterior when the real landscape of his youth is still available.

Spiritus Pizza

Perhaps no surviving business has a stronger personal connection to young Bourdain than Spiritus Pizza at 190 Commercial Street. Production filmed there overnight from June 5 into June 6.

Spiritus opened in 1971 and became closely tied to Provincetown’s late-night social culture. Bourdain’s future wife, Nancy Putkoski, worked there, and Bourdain later recalled spending considerable time around the restaurant during his Cape years. The real Spiritus therefore appears in Tony as something much more valuable than a nostalgic Easter egg. It is one of the few places where the film’s recreated history and Bourdain’s actual history occupy almost the same ground.

Gina’s by the Sea Becomes the Flagship

The movie’s most important restaurant interior was not filmed in Provincetown.

Production moved to Gina’s by the Sea at 134 Taunton Avenue in Dennis, a longtime Cape Cod restaurant that had closed before filming. Crews spent several weeks using the property, transforming it into a stand-in for the now-closed Flagship Restaurant, where Bourdain’s early professional kitchen experience began.

This is one of the more interesting location tricks in Tony. The filmmakers could show the genuine Provincetown streets surrounding Bourdain’s story, then cut to a restaurant elsewhere on Cape Cod that could be controlled and redesigned to resemble an establishment that no longer exists.

The choice also explains why IMDb’s simple listing of Provincetown does not tell the whole production story.

Brockton and George’s Cafe

Before the Provincetown unit began, cameras were working in Brockton. Production filmed in and around George’s Cafe from May 28 through May 30, with parking restrictions established near Brook Street and 94 Woodard Avenue to accommodate the shoot.

Exactly which fictional location George’s represents has not been officially identified, so it would be risky to assign it to one particular restaurant or bar in the story. What is confirmed is that Brockton formed part of the South Shore production footprint that allowed Johnson to recreate 1970s interiors and streets away from the much busier Outer Cape.

Plymouth, Kingston and Hyannis

A large portion of Tony was filmed outside Provincetown in the Plymouth and Kingston area. Provincetown officials were told before filming that much of the production would move to Plymouth because working there was considerably less expensive than maintaining a crew on the Outer Cape for six weeks. CBS Boston subsequently confirmed filming in both the Plymouth and Kingston region.

The production also reached Hyannis, where Sessa was photographed filming aboard a ferry on June 19, 2025. The ferry material fits naturally into a movie whose protagonist is constantly moving into and out of Cape Cod’s coastal communities.

Boston.com additionally reports filming in Dennis, Brockton and other Cape and South Shore locations between May and July 2025.

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Massachusetts Keeps Tony Close to the Real Story

The cleverness of Tony’s location work is not that every building is historically exact. Many are not. Gina’s substitutes for a vanished restaurant, and South Shore properties fill in spaces that would have been expensive or impossible to control in modern Provincetown.

What matters is that Johnson did not remove the movie from the environment that formed Bourdain. MacMillan Pier, Commercial Street, Spiritus, the Lobster Pot and the beaches remain physically connected to his real youth. That gives Tony something a meticulously constructed backlot could never quite provide. The young man in the film does not yet know where his life is heading, but he is walking through the same town where the real Anthony Bourdain first discovered the world he would eventually spend his career writing about.