There have been a few films about cuisine this year. So, with The Kitchen Brigade currently on release, Cinema Paradiso tucks in its napkin to sample some fine dining.
From Charlie Chaplin feasting on his boiled boots in The Gold Rush (1925) onwards, screen history is studded with iconic foodie moments. Off the top of Cinema Paradiso's head, there are the confections conjured up by Juliette Binoche in Lasse Hallström's Chocolat (2000), the dishes Julia Roberts savours during her Italian sojourn in Ryan Murphy's Eat Pray Love (2010), and the cupcake baked by Kirsten Wiig in Paul Feig's Bridesmaids (2011) - the less said about the Brazilian restaurant the better!
Then, there are the culinary experiments served up by Vivien Merchant to her trepidatious police inspector husband Alec MacCowan in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972); the sautéed mushrooms that bind Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps together in Paul Thomas Anderson's The Phantom Thread (2017); and the ram-don with steak that Chang Hyae-jin makes for the Park family in Bong Joon-ho's Oscar-winning Parasite (2019). And who can forget such kitchen set-pieces as Michael Caine rustling up an omelette by cracking eggs single-handedly in Sidney J. Furie's The Ipcress File (1966); Delphine Seyrig preparing meat loaf, cutlets, and boiled potatoes in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975); and Paulie (Paul Sorvino) using a razor blade to slice garlic as thin as possible in the prison kitchen in Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas (1990) ?
Hungry yet?
Currently in cinemas, Louis-Julien Petit's The Kitchen Brigade (2022) takes an unusual approach to haute cuisine by combining it with human rights. Having resigned her sous post at a chic Parisian restaurant after falling out with its celebrity owner over the presentation of her signature dish, Cathy Marie (Audrey Lamy) struggles to find a new job. So, she reluctantly agrees to work at the 'charming restaurant' that turns out to be the rundown canteen at a hostel for migrant teenage lads run by Lorenzo Cardi (François Cluzet). With the help of teaching assistant, Sabine (Chantal Neuwirth), Cathy Marie manages to improve the menu and interest some of the boys into helping out in the kitchen.
Despite the likes of GusGus (Yannick Kalombo), Fatou (Fatou Kaba), and Mamadou (Amadou Bah) showing promise, Cardi fails in a bid to establish a cookery course that would allow the hostel to present a diploma that could help in asylum applications. Undaunted, Cathy Marie enters a TV cookery competition that's sponsored by her former employer and she springs a surprise on the night of the grand final.
The combination of food and feel-good is irresistible, although it's only relatively recently that film-makers have latched on to the fact, as we shall see...
For Starters
How times have changed! Back in Hollywood's heyday, portraying a chef was deemed beneath the leading film stars. Consequently, the likes of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, and Cary Grant never donned a chef's whites. In the days before foodie culture and celebrity chefs, there was nothing heroic or romantic about preparing meals in a restaurant, diner, or café kitchen. The post held no social cachet, as cooks came from the lower orders and belonged to the service sector. As a result, they were essayed by character actors and/or bit-part players and appeared way down the cast list, if they featured at all.
There was certainly nothing glamorous about plating up during the Great Depression, even though the occasional aspiring showgirl might wait tables while seeking her big break. And, during the Second World War, the focus was firmly on frontline troops and not the Catering Corps. The odd cookie provided comic relief, in the tradition of slapstick clowns like Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle, who took the lead in The Cook (1918), a self-directed two-reeler set at a restaurant called 'The Bull Pup', where Arbuckle was more likely to be dancing with strings of sausages, some saucepans, and waiter Buster Keaton than he was slaving over a hot stove. This 20-minute gem can be rented from Cinema Paradiso as part of Buster Keaton: The Complete Short Films 1917-1923 (2006), but we can't currently bring you Charles Ruggles playing Adolf, the chef best friend of Maurice Chevalier's flirtatious doctor in Ernst Lubitsch and George Cukor's One Hour With You (1932).
Although the majority of the chefs in this survey graced pictures made since the turn of the century, there are a few exceptions. Such as Wilfred Haines (Lance Perceval), the chef aboard SS Happy Wanderer in Gerald Thomas's Carry On Cruising (1962), who concocts an international cake for Captain Wellington Crowther (Sidney James) that contains ingredients from his various ports of call, including Bombay duck, chop suey, spaghetti, and prunes.
Posing as a chef to lure gourmand critic Meredith Merridew (Robert Morley) on to This Is Your Dish, embittered actor Edward Lionheart (Vincent Price) serves up his lap dogs in a pie, in imitation of a scene in William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, in Douglas Hickox's Theatre of Blood (1973). Morley is also to the fore as Max Vandeveer, the publisher of Epicurious magazine in Ted Kotcheff's cult favourite, Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978).
Perfectionism is a key theme of this ghoulish whodunit and it recurs in the BBC sitcom, Chef! (1993-96), in which Gareth Blackstock (Lenny Henry) risks everything to obtain a third Michelin star for his rural restaurant, Le Château Anglais. Exploring the impact that cuisine can have on family life, this three-season show has much in common with Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), as widower Chu (Sihung Lung) devotes so much time to his duties at Taipei's Grand Hotel that he can only catch up with his three daughters at Sunday lunchtimes. But his world is turned upside down when he loses his sense of taste.
Martin Naranjo (Hector Elizondo) faces the same issues in Maria Ripoll's Tortilla Soup (2001), a Mexican American remake that co-starred Jacqueline Obradors, Elizabeth Peña, and Tamara Mello as the troublesome, but devoted offspring. Ang's Oscar-nominated drama was also reworked by Chinese director, Tsao Jui-Yuan, as Joyful Reunion (2012).
Skipping past opera-singing French chef Pierre Richard opening a restaurant in Georgia in Nana Dzhordzhadze's A Chef in Love (1996), we stick with a Latin flavour for Fina Torres's Woman on Top (2000), which sees Penélope Cruz walk out on her cheating Brazilian chef husband and overcome extreme motion sickness in order to become the presenter of the Passion Food TV show in San Francisco. Striking the right life/work balance also proves key to perfectionist Hamburg chef, Martina Gedeck, in Sandra Nettelbeck's Mostly Martha (2001), as she has to rely on Italian sous-chef Sergio Castellitto to support her in the kitchen and help raise her eight year-old niece following her sister's demise. In 2007, the story was relocated to the 22 Bleecker Street Restaurant in Manhattan's West Village for Scott Hicks's No Reservations, which lands martinet chef Catherine Zeta Jones with niece Abigail Breslin and rising culinary star Aaron Eckhart as her sous assistant.
Returning to Germany, Michael Hofmann's Eden sees maverick chef Josef Ostendorf befriend the owner of a small street café (Charlotte Roche) and her young daughter (Leonie Stepps), who is living with Down Syndrome. But the scene shifts to the Glasgow restaurant run by Nick Malone in the TV series, Kitchen (both 2006), where a probation officer makes life tough for ex-criminal Danny Swift (James Young), as he tries to make his way as a commis-chef.
An unlikely alliance confirms the motto, 'Anyone can cook', in Brad Bird's Pixar classic, Ratatouille (2007). Remy (Patton Oswalt) dreams of becoming a chef at the restaurant founded by Auguste Gusteau (Brad Garrett). But he's a rat and new owner, Skinner (Ian Holm), banishes him from the kitchen. So, Remy forms a friendship with garbage boy Alfredo Linguini (Lou Romano), who starts to cook up a storm before Skinner discovers his real identity and vows to clean up the kitchen. Filled with references to French cuisine and cinema, this is the perfect foodie film, with former chef Michael Warch advising the animators on cooking techniques and recipes when not working on the layout of the sets.
On the subject of animation, we should remember that the hero of SpongeBob SquarePants: Movie (2004) flips a mean burger at the Krusty Krab, while Bob Belcher slings the patties in Bob's Burgers (2011-18). In New Orleans in 1926, Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) holds down two waitressing jobs, as she dreams of opening her own restaurant in Disney's The Princess and the Frog (2009), We all know a certain spook-hunting canine is fond of his snacks, but he's less enamoured of the Red Ghost that menaces the Rocky Harbor Culinary Resort run by Fred's uncle, Bobby Flay, in Scooby-Doo!: Scooby-Doo and the Gourmet Ghost (2018).
It's always frustrating when a fine film eludes Cinema Paradiso's grasp, something like David Kaplan's Today's Special, in which Manhattan chef Aasif Mandvi puts off a trip to Paris to run his ailing father's curry house in Queens with the help of cab driver Naseeruddin Shah, who claims to have cooked for royalty in Mumbai. Also tantalisingly out of reach is Ken Yip's Kung Fu Chefs (both 2009), in which disgraced chef Louis Fan tries to bounce back from a feud with uncle Sammo Hung by training aspiring chefs and saving Ai Kago's Four Seas restaurant.
Chef Ewan McGregor and scientist Eva Green have just become a couple in David Mackenzie's Perfect Sense (2011). But their happiness is cut short by a pandemic that starts robbing people of their sensory perceptions one by one. A happier story is told in another 2011 release, James Hacking's Love's Kitchen, although it starts with a tragedy, as London chef Dougray Scott receives a damning review shortly after losing his wife. Old pal Gordon Ramsay (yes, him!) advises Scott to open a gastropub in the country and it's here he meets American food critic, Claire Forlani. When his boss seeks to turn his Paris restaurant into a laboratory for molecular gastronomy, famed chef Jean Reno teams with the starstruck and self-taught Michaël Youn to fight back in Daniel Cohen's Comme un chef (2012).
Having recognised the culinary talents of Monica Geller (Courteney Cox) as Pete Becker in Friends (1994-2003), Jon Favreau wrote, directed, and headlined Chef (2014), which begins with top Los Angeles chef, Carl Casper, blowing a gasket at a restaurant critic and follows him on a cross-country tour in a food truck named El Jefe, as he relearns to love his work by preparing Cubanos sandwiches for those with genuine appetites rather than the wealth to afford haute cuisine. Demonstrating that simple food can be delicious and photogenic, this sleeper hit should be watched in a Cinema Paradiso double bill with Stephen Frears's adaptation of Roddy Doyle's The Van (1996), in which unemployed Dublin buddies Bimbo (Donal O'Kelly) and Larry (Colm Meaney) seek to make a living from a renovated mobile chip shop. If you fancy a spicy variation on the theme, you can indulge in Raja Menon's Chef (2017), which joins Roshan (Saif Ali Khan) on the road after he gets tired of having his gifts contained in a high-class eaterie and uses his passion and innovation to start up a meals on wheels service.
This will remind Jackie Chan fans of the fast food van in Sammo Hung's Wheels on Meals (1986), which sees Chan and cousin Yuen Biao land in hot water in Barcelona after they're implicated in the disappearance of a young heiress. Also look out for the irrepressible Chan as a celebrity TV chef finding himself caught in a gangland turf war involving some Australian interlopers in Hung's Mr Nice Guy (1997). And, speaking of Down Under, it's a shame we can't slip in another food truck flick, as Tania Vincent and Ricard Cussó's A Sloth Story (2024) would be perfect for younger viewers, with its story about a sloth named Laura, who would rather play cricket with her new friends than protect the family cookbook that fast food magnate Dotti Pace (who happens to be a well-dressed cheetah) is keen to steal.
We've all seen reality shows in which celebrity chefs blow their stacks at kitchen minions. Well, John Wells's Burnt (2015) channels this fury into a redemption drama in which Adam Jones (Bradley Cooper) comes to London in a bid to rebuild his excess-trashed reputation by impressing critic Simone (Uma Thurmn) and earning his third Michelin star by reviving the fortunes of the Langham Hotel. With Omar Sy, Sienna Miller, Daniel Brühl, Matthew Rhys, and Emma Thompson in the stellar cast, this shares an anger management theme with Francesco Falaschi's As Needed (2018), which sees short-fused chef Vinicio Marchioni leave prison to teach a group of people with Asperger syndrome to cook, only for young Luigi Fedele to prove so good that he enters a prestigious culinary competition.
Acclaimed chef Sasha Tran (Ali Wong) feels she has to start again when her relationship with an influential New York restaurateur falls apart and she bumps into childhood friend, Marcus Kim (Randall Park) after returning to San Francisco to open a new venue in Nahnatchka Khan's Always Be My Maybe (2019). New York is the ultimate destination for aspiring chef Armando Espitia and teacher Christian Vázquez in Heidi Ewing's fact-based story, I Carry You With Me (2020), as they grow close while enduring the pressures and perils facing undocumented migrants in the USA's major cities.
Another hot-tempered genius has to fight for recognition in Chrisopher Boe's A Taste of Hunger (2021), as Katrine Greis-Rosenthal tries to help husband Nikolaj Coster-Waldau earn an elusive Michelin star for his Copenhagen restaurant, Malus. In Philip Barantini's Boiling Point (2021), straining to be the best catches up with Andy Jones (Stephen Graham), the head chef at the exclusive London restaurant, Jones & Sons. With service fully booked, he erupts during a perfect storm of an evening that had started with a failed hygiene inspection (try not to think of Fawlty Towers ). With Jason Flemyng playing a celebrity chef popping in to see how his prodigy is doing, this was so well received that sous-chef, Carly (Vinette Robinson), got her own spin-off BBC series, Boiling Point (2023), in which she and her former colleagues try to make a go of their own place, Point North.
Good though the show was, it was somewhat overshadowed by The Bear (2022-), which has racked up 21 Emmys and five Golden Globes for charting how feted chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) gets on in Chicago trying to transform his late brother's chaotic Italian beef sandwich shop, The Original Beef, into a top-end establishment. Retired chef Robin Feld (Nicolas Cage) would never dream of cooking the pig he uses to hunt for truffles in the Ohio backwoods. Indeed, when the creature is kidnapped in Michael Sarnoski's Pig (2021), Feld returns to Portland for the first time since going off grid following the death of his wife to rescue the creature. Taking him to a fight club for restaurant staff in the basement of a rundown hotel and the swanky Eurydice eaterie, the odyssey finds Cage on such fine form that he thoroughly deserved his Best Actor nomination at the Critics' Choice Movie Awards.
If You Can't Stand the Heat
This section centres on restaurants, although we shall pop into the odd diner along the way. The emphasis will be on kitchens, where the authority of the chef is often challenged by their underlings. But we'll also go front of house to see how waiting staff have been presented down the years since Ben Turpin's serial pest had what's taken to be cinema's first pie squished in his face at a bakery in Gilbert M. 'Broncho Billy' Anderson's Essanay slapstick short, Mr Flip (1909).
James Hill's adaptation of Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen (1961) certainly lives up to the poster shoutline in its depiction of a hot-house atmosphere 'where life simmers and sometimes boils over'. The owner is Mr Marango (Eric Pohlmann), who has trouble keeping the lid on with all the clashes between the British and continental staff members and with German cook Peter (Carl Möhner) being hopelessly in love with married waitress, Monica (Mary Yeomans). A crazed chef also featured in the dirty fork sketch in Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-74). Unlike the badly dated skit about a jungle restaurant for explorers, this was recycled in Ian McNaughton's And Now For Something Completely Different (1971), although the Spam sketch set at the Green Midget Café failed to make the cut. Perhaps the team's most memorable food-related item, however, features Terry Jones as the corpulent Mr Creosote being tempted into a 'wafer thin mint' by John Cleese's oleaginous French waiter in Monty Python: The Meaning of Life (1983).
The great Louis de Funès starred in two Gallic comedies about fine dining. He directed himself in The Big Restaurant (1966), which is set in wartime Paris, and was directed by Claude Zidi in The Wing or the Thigh (1976), which sees a food critic trying to change the nation's eating habits. Jacques Tati also satirised the French obsession with food in the Royal Garden restaurant sequence in his still-underrated epic, Playtime (1967). However, the humour was considerable darker and more explosive in Marco Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe (1973), a treatise on bourgeois consumerism that centres on The Biscuit Soup, the restaurant owned by chef, Ugo (Ugo Tognazzi), who has prepared the dishes with which he will eat himself to death with three friends: magistrate Philippe (Philippe Noiret), pilot Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), and TV producer, Michel (Michel Piccoli).
You'll need a strong stomach to cope with the excess on display in this denunciation of decadence. But those with a taste for Richard Fleischer's Soylent Green (1973) or Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) won't want to miss out on the Spanish dish at Paul and Mary's Country Kitchen in Paul Bartel's Eating Raoul (1982), where the menu offered at the new restaurant opened by the Blands (Bartel and Mary Woronov) hardly lives down to their name. The clue is also in the title in Peter Richardson's Eat the Rich (1987), as transgender waiter Alex (Lanah Pellay) exacts their revenge on the London restaurant that had fired them by taking over Bastards and giving its menu a radical makeover. Cannibal cuisine is also on offer in T.L.P. Swicegood's The Undertaker and His Pals (1966), Ivan Reitman's Cannibal Girls, and Philip Leacock's Dying Room Only (both 1973), as well as at the exclusive restaurant run by celebrity chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) in Mark Mylod's The Menu (2022), as foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and date Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) discover when they take their seats at Hawthorn, where the prices for the tasting menu on Slowik's own private island start at $1200 a head.
A humble roadside noodle shop provides the setting for Juzo Itami's Tampopo (1985), 'a Ramen Western' that lampoons the conventions established in the 'Spaghetti Westerns' of the 1960s in showing how truckers Gun (Ken Watanabe) and Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki) help young widow, Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), to prepare the perfect ramen and shoyu broth. Exploring everything from human nature to cultural appropriation, this is a sensual, amusing classic that guarantees you will never view egg yolks in the same way again.
Disproving the old maxim that the best is left until the last, Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) takes over Le Hollandais, the London restaurant where gangster Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) calls the shots rather than chef Richard Boarst (Richard Bohringer). Wife Georgina (Helen Mirren) despises her spouse's boorish behaviour, however, and seeks solace in the arms of bookseller and regular diner, Michael (Alan Howard). But Spica smells treachery and plans a vengeful repast of pitiless cruelty.
Switching from the grotesque to the gourmandish, 1950s siblings, Primo (Tony Shalhoub) and Secondo (Stanley Tucci), hit upon a brilliant idea to save their struggling New Jersey restaurant, Paradise, in Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci's masterly Big Night (1996). Determined to show up bitter rival Pasqual (Ian Holm) for serving Americanised variations on traditional Italian dishes, Primo creates a mammoth timpano from layers of pasta, egg, meatballs, and salami to serve to singing sensation and special guest diner, Louis Prima. Might we suggest you twin this beautifully judged film with Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet (1990), which may focus on the troubled lives of North London twins Natalie (Claire Skinner) and Nicola (Jane Horrocks), but it also has dual foodie subplots. Chef Andy (Jim Broadbent) wants to quit the job he hates at a large catering company to hit the road in a fast-food van, while his friend, Aubrey (Timothy Spall), is preparing to open his new French restaurant, The Regret Rien.
Customer numbers are also a problem for Amanda Shelton (Sarah Michelle Gellar) in Mark Tarlov's Simply Irresistible (1999). She might have inherited The Southern Point restaurant from her mother, but Amanda can't cook - that is until she falls in love and starts channelling her emotions into her food. Chef Udo Cropa (Edoardo Ballerini) can't persuade father Louis (Danny Aiello) to stop serving traditional Italian fare at their Tribeca restaurant in Bob Giraldi's Dinner Rush (2000). But, with mob connections complicating the situation, Ugo decides to start cooking his own way, with a creamy lobster spaghetti as his signature dish.
So far, we've concentrated on the cooking side of the restaurant business. But we turn to those taking orders and delivering plates to tables with in Leo McCarey's Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), which sees English butler Marmaduke Ruggles (Charles Laughton) open a restaurant with cook Mrs Judson (Zasu Pitts) while the married George Hurstwood (Laurence Olivier) loses his reputation after Carrie Meeber (Jennifer Jones) wins his heart at Fitzgerald's, the Gilded Age Chicago restaurant he manages, in William Wyler's compelling adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's Carrie (1952).
In Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), widowed single mom and aspiring singer Alice Hyatt (Ellen Burstyn) takes a waitressing job at Mel and Ruby's Cafe in Tucson, Arizona. Burstyn won the Academy Award for Best Actress, but she's not the only woman to have prevailed for playing a waitress, as Helen Hunt essayed Carol Connelly, the sole server to put up with the eccentric demands of regular customer and obsessive-compulsive author, Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), in James L. Brooks's As Good As It Gets (1997).
Between life-changing twists, Portuguese-American sisters Kat and Daisy Araújo (Annabeth Gish and Julia Roberts) work shifts with friend Josephina Barboza (Lili Taylor) at a pizzeria in a small Connecticut fishing town that's about to be visited by a snooty food critic in Donald Petrie's Mystic Pizza (1988). A day in the life of a Shenaniganz franchise restaurant comes under scrutiny in Rob McKittrick's Waiting.. (2005), as Dean (Justin Long) comes to question after four years whether he wants to keep waiting tables alongside buddy Monty (Ryan Reynolds) and his ex-gilfriend, Serena (Anna Faris). This struck such a chord with US audiences that Long returned to cameo in the McKittrick-scripted sequel, Jeff Balls's Still Waiting... (2009), which sees new manager, Dennis (John Michael Higgins), try to motivate the Shenaniganz staff to earn him a promotion by out-performing the neighbouring Ta-Ta's bar, with its scantily-clad waitresses.
Not every diner has 'I Hate My Husband Pie' and 'Pregnant, Miserable, Self-Pitying Loser Pie' on the menu. But not everywhere is Joe's Pie Shop, as it's here that Jenna (Kerri Russell) serves the dishes inspired by her emotions in Adrienne Shelly's dramedy, Waitress (2007), in which the director and Cheryl Hines offer Russell support as she prepares to enter a competition with a $25,000 prize. The bounty is $10,000 in Kevin Heffernan's The Slammin' Salmon (2009), as former boxing champ Cleon (Michael Clarke Duncan) seeks to keep his Miami restaurant out of the clutches of the yakuza who owns his gambling debts by incentivising his workshy servers to compete for the most sales across an evening.
Michael Winterbottom gives us glimpses of the kitchens at work in The Trip (2010), while the serving staff get to describe the dishes at the table. But the restaurants across northern England are merely MacGuffins, as the focus falls on the badinage between Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, as they trade insults and impressions. The TV series linked to the four films are not available to rent (which feels like folly), but Cinema Paradiso users can follow the bickering buddies on their further adventures in The Trip to Italy (2014), The Trip to Spain (2017), and The Trip to Greece (2020). The pair are due to return in The Trip to the Northern Lights (2025), but one wonders how much more mileage they can cover (at 59 and 60) and whether this road movie version of Louis Malle's My Dinner With Andre (1981) will ever make destinations like France, Germany, Ireland, and, dare one say, Scotland and Wales?
The excursion is of a more limited nature in Lasse Hallström's The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014), an adaptation of the Richard C. Morais novel about Le Saule Pleureur, the restaurant owned in the small town of St Antonin by Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), who takes exception to the fact that newcomer Abbu Kadam (Om Puri) has opened Maison Mumbai directly opposite her own premises. However, she soon realises that her rival's son, Hassan Haji (Manish Dayal), has the talent to earn her a second Michelin star. The exile in the kitchen in Aki Kaurismäki's The Other Side of Hope (2017) is Syrian refugee, Khaled Ali (Sherwan Haji), who winds up making herring sushi alongside cook Nyrhinen (Janne Hyytiäinen), waitress Mirja (Nuppu Koivu), and doorman Calamnius (Ilkka Koivula) at the Helsinki restaurant owned by former shirt salesman, Waldemar Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen).
A Veronese aroma can be detected in Donald Petrie's Little Italy (2018), as rival pizzeria owners, Sal (Adam Ferrara) and Vince (Gary Basaraba), conspire against each other, even though the former's daughter, Nikki (Emma Roberts). and the latter's son, Leo (Hayden Christensen), break their fathers' hearts by falling for each other. But there's little love lost in Alonso Ruizpalacios's La cocina (2024), a revisitation of the Wesker play from the start of this section, which centres on The Grill, a tourist spot on Times Square where a mix on undocumented Latin American and Arab workers toil in the kitchens. However, the tensions boil over when Mexican chef Pedro (Raul Briones) falls out with pregnant waitress Julia (Rooney Mara) at the exact moment that an accusation is made over some missing money. Blending seething long takes and combustible close-ups, this is tough and disconcertingly authentic enough to give you food for thought before your next night out or takeaway.
Toque Blanche
This isn't the place for a short history of celebrity chefs, but one or two historical figures have been the subject of culinary biopics. Cooking at the 16th-century papal court of Pius V, Bartolomeo Scappi was played by Gerardo Maffei in Maurizio Azzali's teleplay, The Pope's Cook (2008). No one has yet got round to profiling Robert May, the English author of The Accomplisht Cook (1660), but his contemporary, François Vatel, was the subject of Roland Joffé's Vatel (2000), with Gérard Depardieu playing the chef hired in 1671 by the Prince du Conde (Julian Glover) to produce a banquet for Louis XIV (Julian Sands) that will restore his tarnished reputation at court. Historical fact gets blurred in Éric Besnard's Delicious (2021), which is set in 1789 and follows chef Pierre Manceron (Grégory Gadebois) as he is coaxed out of retirement after being humiliated by the Duc de Chamfort (Benjamin Lavernhe) and his cronies by Louise (Isabelle Carré), who has plans to open the first restaurant in Paris.
Owned respectively by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, enslaved chefs Hercules Posey and James Hemings did much to upgrade the status of food in the newly independent United States, as is revealed in the award-winning documentary series, High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America (2021-). A similar series on French television, Carême (2025), has recently examined the life of Marie-Antoine Carême (Benjamin Voisin), who was the toast of Napoleonic Paris. Charles Elmé Francatelli (Ferdinand Kingsley) would be equally feted in London, as he became a favourite of the queen (Jenna Coleman) in the ITV series, Victoria (2016-19). Heading back across the Channel, the first celebrity chef of modern times was commemorated in Auguste Escoffier - The Birth of Haute Cuisine (2020), a docu-series that reflected on his association with César Ritz and the creation of such signature dishes as Tournedos Rossini, Lobster Thermidor, and Pêche Melba.
A fictional celebrity chef has to fight for his legacy in Stephen Chow and Lee Lik-chi's comedy, The God of Cookery (1996), as Stephen Chow (Chow) has to outwit his usurpative assistant, Bull Tong (Vincent Kok), in order to regain his fame. There's no teacher/student rivalry in Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia (2009), however, as home cook and blogger Julie Powell (Amy Adams) works her way through the 524 recipes contained in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the influential tome by her culinary idol, Julia Child (Meryl Streep), who became a TV personality after the launch of The French Chef in 1963. So, where is the film about Fanny Craddock, who was the UK's first tele-cook and did much to introduce the British palate to the recipes of Escoffier? She is owed a huge debt by the likes of Delia Smith, Nigella Lawson, Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver, and Heston Blumenthal, who all have discs available to rent from Cinema Paradiso. Use our invaluable Searchline to find out more.
There has been a boom in docu-profiles of famous chefs since the turn of the millennium, among them D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus's Kings of Pastry (2009), Sally Rowe's A Matter of Taste: Serving Up Paul Liebrandt (2011), and Joseph Levy's Spinning Plates (2012). But we'd like to bring your attention to Gereon Wetzel's El Bulli: Cooking in Progress (2010) and David Gelb's Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011). The former centres on Ferran Adrià, who used to spend half the year researching and inventing in his Barcelona laboratory before presenting his experimental dishes at El Bulli, the restaurant in Roses, Catalonia that was only open for half a year. By contrast, there are only 10 seats at Sukiyabashi Jiro, the sushi restaurant owned in the Gizo part of Tokyo by Jiro Ono, a devoted practitioner of the Shokunin way and the oldest ever recipient of a third Michelin star. He will celebrate his 100th birthday on 27 October 2025 and his dedication, discipline, and delicacy should be an example to anyone who fancies themselves in the kitchen.
Jiro would certainly be an inspiration to Juana (Diana Elizabeth Torres), a single mom who gives up her fruit cart to become a kitchen assistant at an Oakland restaurant specialising in Japanese cuisine and sets out to shatter some traditional taboos in Anthony Lucero's East Side Sushi (2014). Doing things differently is also the way forward for Sam Vincent (Emilia Fox) and Gina Benelli (Dawn French) in Delicious (2016-19), when they discover that the celebrity chef they had both married, Leo Vincent (Iain Glen), has found a devious way from beyond the grave of keeping his Cornish hotel running.
Too Many Cooks
With her penchant for peppering the soup, the most peculiar cook in screen history is also the most portrayed. In Norman Z. McLeod's Alice in Wonderland (1933), the Duchess's cook was played by Lillian Harmer, but she was omitted fro Disney's Alice in Wonderland (1951). Avril Elgar was cast as the Peppercook in Jonathan Miller's acclaimed 1966 BBC variation, while Patsy Rowlands took the role in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972). Sheila Hancock got to hurl plates at Alice (Tina Majorino), the Duchess (Elizabeth Spriggs), and the pig baby (Ken Sansom) in Hallmark's 1999 incarnation, but the crockery smashing was entrusted to March Hare Thackery Earwicket (Paul Whitehouse), as the cook was airbrushed out of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010).
Such behaviour would never have been tolerated by Mrs Kate Bridges (Angela Baddeley) in Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75) or by Clarice Thackeray (Anne Reid), who made the kitchen at 165 Eaton Place her domain in the BBC revival, Upstairs Downstairs (2010-12), which sought to take on ITV's Downton Abbey (2010-15). Lesley Nicol was an ever-present as Mrs Beryl Patmore, also jousting with Daisy (Sophie McShera) in the film spin-offs, Downton Abbey (2018), Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022), and Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (2025).
While the drama tended to take precedence over the dishes in series set in grand households, the emphasis is very much placed on the menu and its meticulous preparation in Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (1987). Based on a 1958 short story by Isak Dinesen (aka Karen Blixen), this Oscar winner is the most exquisite and deeply moving food film ever made, as Babette (Stéphane Audran) seeks to repay piously abstemious Danish sisters Martine (Birgitte Federspiel) and Philippa (Bodil Kjer) - who had taken her in after she had been forced to flee post-revolutionary Paris - by cooking for them and their guests a seven-course French dinner that includes turtle soup, caviar, quail in puff pastry with foie gras and truffles, and a rum sponge cake.
The reverential silence in which the banquet is consumed contrasts with the carnage that ensues when ship's cook and former US Navy Seal, Casey Ryback (Steven Segal), attempts to wrestle back control of The Missouri after the battleship is hijacked by terrorists intent on seizing its nuclear payload in Andrew Davis's Under Siege (1992). Good and bad also clash head on in Mahesh Bhatt's Duplicate (1998), as humble cook Babloo (Shahrukh Khan) has his dreams of creating exotic dishes for hotel manager Sonia (Juhi Chawla) knocked for a loop when he discovers that he is a dead ringer for ruthless crook, Manu Dada, who is besotted with cabaret dancer Lilly (Sonali Bendre).
We couldn't do a survey of screen cuisine without including some home cooking and two of the finest examples of making food as a declaration of love can be found in Alfonso Arau's Like Water For Chocolate (1992) and George Tillman, Jr.'s Soul Food (1997). In the former take on Laura Esquivel's novel, Tita (Lumi Cavazos) is taught to cook by Nacha (Ada Carrasco) in 1900s Mexico so that she can care for her mother because a family tradition prevents the youngest daughter from marrying. Also a story of three sisters, the latter shows how the Sunday dinner tradition started by Big Mama Josephine (Irma P. Hall) is threatened by the tensions between Chicago siblings, Teri (Vanessa L. Williams), Maxine (Vivica A. Fox), and Bird (Nia Long), after their mother's death.
The family is divided for political reasons in Tassos Boulmetis's A Touch of Spice (2003), which follows Fanis Iakovides (George Corraface) as the astrophysicist who returns from Greek exile to reunite with the Turkish grandfather, Vassilis (Tassos Bandis), who had taught him about food in his enchanting spice shop. Another prodigal returns in Pratibha Parmar's Nina's Heavenly Delights (2006), as cook Nina Shah (Shelley Conn) comes back to Glasgow to help Lisa (Laura Fraser) run her estranged father's restaurant, The New Taj, and take a tilt at the Best in the West Curry Competition.
Georgia Byrd (Queen Latifah) gives in-store cookery demonstrations by day and follows TV chef Emeril Lagasse's gourmet recipes by night. But a shock Lampington's disease diagnosis prompts the New Orleansian to embark upon an adventure in the Czech spa town of Karlovy Vary in Wayne Wang's Last Holiday (2006). The best-laid plans of a São Paulo greasy spoon cook who longs to open a high-class restaurant go awry when he's sent to prison in Marcos Jorge's Estômago, while 60 year-old Sète shipyard worker, Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares), has many obstacles to overcome if he is to fulfil his ambition of opening a Tunisian restaurant aboard a dilapidated boat in Abdellatif Kechiche's Couscous (both 2007).
A lucky Maneki Neko waving cat persuades Brittany Murphy to remain in Tokyo and learn the art of noodle-making with a couple who speak only Japanese in Robert Allan Ackerman's The Ramen Girl (2008) and cookery lessons are also on the cards when Canadian diplomat Lisa Ray is posted to New Delhi and chef husband Don McKellar gets a taste of the meals served up by residency cook, Seema Biswas, in Dilip Mehta's Cooking With Stella (2009).
It's a shame this quaint comedy has slipped through the cracks, but Cinema Paradiso can bring you S.J. Clarkson's Toast (2010), which reveals how future cookery writer Nigel Slater (Freddie Highmore) coped with the loss of a mother who could barely heat canned goods (Victoria Hamilton) and the arrival of a stepmother (Helena Bonham Carter) who knew her way around a kitchen and was willing to pass on her skills. The reluctance to eat is born out of politeness in Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox (2013), as Mumbai office worker Saajan Fernandes (Irrfan Khan) realises that the dabbawala delivery system must have made a mistake when he's presented with tiffin tins containing a delicious meal intended by housewife Ila Singh (Nimrat Kaur) for her husband.
In Naomi Kawase's Sweet Bean (2015), snack vendor Sentaro (Masatoshi Nagase) finds that people can't get enough of his dorayakis after he hires 76 year-old Tokue (Kirin Kiki) to make the filling, a sweet red bean paste called 'an', using her own secret recipe. This utter delight is highly recommended and we suggest you watch it along with Domee Shi's Bao (2018), the Oscar-winning tale of a lonely Chinese Canadian cook who turns a steamed bun into her son, which can be found on Pixar Short Films Collection: Vol.3.
We're not currently able to serve up Christian Vincent's Haute Cuisine (2012), even though it stars the wonderful Catherine Frot as the cook from a Périgord truffle farm who winds up in the kitchens at the Élysée Palace in a story based on Daniele Mazet-Delpeuch, who became the private chef of President François Mitterand. Moving back a few years further, we arrive in New York in 1976 in Renaud Gauthier and Marie-Claire Lalonde's Discopath (2013), as hamburger cook Duane Lewis (Jérémie Earp-Lavergne) turns into a crazed killer whenever he heads to Seventh Heaven for a night on the dance floor. Five years earlier in Los Angeles, Henry Joseph Church (Eddie Murphy) moves in with 10 year-old Charlotte (Natalie Coughlin) and her ailing mother, Marie (Natascha McElhone), to cook and keep house in Bruce Beresford's Mr Church (2016), which screenwriter Susan McMartin based on her own life.
There's a culinary element to one of the stories related in Wes Anderson's quirky anthology, The French Dispatch (2021), as 'The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner' centres on the meal prepared by cop Nascaffier (Stephen Park) for the chief of the Ennui force (Mathieu Amalric) that is interrupted by news that the latter's son has been kidnapped by chauffeur Joe Lefèvre (Edward Norton). We're willing to bet, however, that the vittels served up weren't a patch on the fare provided by Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), the cook for fin-de-siècle epicure, Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) in Tr?n Anh Hùng's sublime drama, The Taste of Things (2023). With its first 40 minutes being dedicated to the preparation of a meal that was filmed in long takes with the Vietnam-born film-maker calling out instructions off camera, this is often mesmerising. No wonder Tr?n won the Best Director prize at Cannes, although the culinary skills of the co-stars are admirable in their own right.
Set in an even more impressive French country residence, Gilles Legardinier's Mr Blake At Your Service! (2023) sees a London financier (John Malkovich) being mistaken for a butler by cook Odile (Émilie Dequenne). However, he quickly realises that she has an exceptional talent that he feels is being wasted on the reclusive Natalie (Fanny Ardant) and her staff. Sadly, this would be the ever-excellent Dequenne's final film before she died tragically young at the age of 43. We can but hope this offbeat comedy will eventually become available on disc, along with Stéphane Ly-Cuong's In the Nguyen Kitchen (2024), in which wannabe musical theatre performer Yvonne Nguyen (Clotilde Chevalier) is forced to move back into her room above the Parisian suburban restaurant run by her ageing Vietnamese mother (the superb Anh Tran-Nghia), whose speciality is the rice noodle roll known as bánh cu?n. Home-style cooking is also the selling point of the restaurant owned by Vince Vaughn in Stephen Chbosky's Nonnas (2025), a feel-good charmer based on the story of Joe Scaravella and his Staten Island eaterie, Enoteca Maria, which employed Italian American grandmothers in its kitchen - and they are played here with mischievous charm by Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire, Brenda Vaccaro, and Susan Sarandon.
And For Afters...
There are few things more frustrating than finishing a painstakingly researched article only to find lots more examples in a last-minute search. Fortunately, when this happens with a piece about chefs and restaurants, we can bung them all into a smorgasbord coda and make it look as though this is what was intended all along. Let's start by dropping in on a few of the diners, cafés, and greasy spoons that have featured in movies down the decades (and we know there will be dozens we've driven past, but Joe E. Brown had it right with the final words of Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, 1959).
Our whistlestop tour of smaller premises begins with the Arizona diner in which fugitive Duke Mantee (Humphrey Bogart) takes his hostages in Archie Mayo's The Petrified Forest (1936). Next up, following a diversion to the roadside tavern in the Po Valley that hosted Luchino Visconti's pioneerng neo-realist drama, Ossessione (1942), we fetch up at Twin Oaks, where owner Cecil Kellaway is surplus to requirements for wife Lana Turner after she meets drifter John Garfield in Tay Garnett's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).
This noir classic was written by James M. Cain, who also provided the story for Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945), which saw Joan Crawford win the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance as the waitress who goes on to found her own chain of restaurants (and who was also played by Kate Winslet in Todd Haynes's mini-series, Mildred Pierce, 2011). How different life was for Susan Bradley (Judy Garland), as she takes a waitressing job in the Fred Harvey diner in the south-western town of Sandrock in George Sidney's The Harvey Girls (1946), which earned Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer the Best Song Oscar for 'On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe'. The girls face some hostility from unwelcoming locals, but no one is as rude as Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson), who gives a waitress (Lorna Thayer) hell while ordering a plain omelette and a chicken salad sandwich in Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970).
Following another Italian detour so that Bruce Lee can see off the mafiosi threatening the family restaurant in Rome in The Way of the Dragon, we stop off at Mel's Drive-In in Modesto, California for George Lucas's American Graffiti (both 1973) and the Fell's Point establishment in Barry Levinson's Diner (1982), which launched the Baltimore tetralogy that concluded with Tin Men (1987), Avalon (1990), and Liberty Heights (1999). Meanwhile, in Wabasha, Minnesota, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau set out to prevent Sophia Loren from converting their favourite bait shop into an Italian restaurant in Howard Deutch's Grumpier Old Men (1995).
Having owned a Los Angeles restaurant while coming between cop Kurt Russell and reformed drug dealer Mel Gibson in Robert Towne's Tequila Sunrise (1988), Michelle Pfeiffer found work as a waitress in the Apollo Cafe in New York, where she falls for short-order cook Al Pacino, in Garry Marshall's Frankie & Johnny (1991). In Minneapolis, diner waitress Marisa Tomei seeks to get over another broken romance with busboy Christian Slater in Tony Bill's Untamed Heart (1993), while Hollywood's famous Brown Derby restaurant makes a guest appearance in Doug Liman's Swingers (1996).
We all know why a woman in a diner (Estelle Reiner - the director's mother) wants what Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) is having in Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally... (1989). But the menu has nothing quite so arousing on offer in either Percy Adlon's Bagdad Café (1988) or Jon Avnet's Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), even though each picture has become a cult classic. However, Mookie (Spike Lee) gets sufficiently angered by the Wall of Fame décor in the Bedford-Stuyvesant pizzeria owned by Sal Frangione (Danny Aiello) in Do the Right Thing (1989) that he sparks a riot by hurling a trash can through the front window. Further iconic restaurant encounters can be found in Luc Besson's Nikita (1990), John Woo's Hard-Boiled (1992), and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994).
Rosanna Arquette decides to rob the restaurant in which she waitresses to further her ambition of becoming an escapologist in Richard Shepard's The Linguini Incident (1991). Moreover, after Marilyn Chambers found saucy ways to help a friend save her vegetarian restaurant in Ernest G. Sauer's long-forgotten Bikini Bistro (1995), ex-jailbird Alison Elliott has a more mixed impact on the diner run by Ellen Burstyn in Lee David Zlotoff's The Spitfire Grill (1996). The same year saw various margin dwellers assemble at Red's Desert Oasis Diner in Michael Covert's American Strays, while Liv Tyler and Deborah Harry are part of the waiting staff at Pete and Dolly's roadhouse in James Mangold's Heavy (1995), which sees the former try to persuade overweight cook Pruitt Taylor Vince to attend the Culinary Institute of America in upstate New York.
Stanley Moon (Dudley Moore), a short short-order Wimpy cook is so besotted with waitress Margaret Spencer (Eleanor Bron) that he sells his soul to George Spiggot (Peter Cook) in return for seven wishes in Stanley Donen's Bedazzled (1967). A migrant waiter at a Sichuan restaurant in Queens is desperate to secure his green card in Tony Chan's Combination Platter (1993), while flipper Kenan Thompson needs to keep his job to pay off a debt and devises a moreish sauce to outsell the rival Mondo Burger in Brian Robbins's Good Burger (1997). Coming more up to date, Michael Wilshire (Frank Dillane) lands a job as a commis-chef at the City View Lodge hotel in Harris Dickinson's Urchin (2025). But his habit of undercooking or burning dishes, along with a confrontation with a customer over a steak, result in him getting fired and he has to seek alternative work litter picking.
Seeing how happy French chef Tcheky Karyo and Kelly Preston are, Matthew Broderick and Meg Ryan debate whether to become an item in Griffin Dunne's Addicted to Love (1997). Learning she has a brain tumour, Valerie Edmond returns from New York to Berwick to be with the only man she ever loved. However, chef Gerard Butler has married someone else in Vadim Jean's One More Kiss (1999).
Mexican migrant Flor Moreno (Paz Vega) comes to Los Angeles in James L. Brooks's Spanglish (2004) and becomes housekeeper o the Claskys, chef husband John (Adam Sandler), and his argumentative wife, Deborah (Téa Leoni). Veteran chef Amitabh Bachchan is appalled when the thirtysomething Tabu criticises one of the dishes at his Spice 6 restaurant in Lonon, but he soon comes to trust her taste in R. Balki's Cheeni Kum (aka Less Sugar, 2007)
Gourmet chef Adam Bousdoukos comes to regret changing the menu at his Hamburg restaurant and entrusting it to gambler brother Moritz Bleibtreu in Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen, while Emma (Tilda Swinton), the Russian-born and neglected wife of a Milanese textile tycoon, has an affair with younger chef, Antonio Biscaglia (Edoardo Gabbriellini), in Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love (both 2009). Returning to Tribeca with a pointless film studies degree, Lena Dunham (who also directs) takes a job at a local restaurant and flirts with sous-chef David Call in Tiny Furniture (2010).
Matthew Goode plays a British chef spiralling out of control in Bondi in Australian Jonathan Teplitzky's Burning Man (2011), while ex-cons Sam Worthington and David Wenham struggle to go straight and seek help from gangster-turned-restaurateur Timothy Spall in the same director's Gettin' Square (2003). Hyderabad shoe seller Parineeti Chopra and Lucknow kebab chef Aditya Roy Kapoor find a unique way around India's dowry system in Habib Faisal's Daawat-e-Ishq (aka Invitation of Love, 2014).
Las Vegas chef Michael Shannon and Parisian restaurateur Michael Nyqvist discover they have would-be fashion designer Imogen Poots in common in Matthew Ross's dark thriller, Frank & Lola (2016). And, finally, Chinese chef Chu Pak-Hong transforms the menu of the café that Anna-Maija Tuokko runs in an insular Finnish village in Mika Kaurismäki's delightful Master Cheng (2019), while Mamoudou Athie's hopes of becoming a sommelier are jeopardised when father Courtney B. Vance insists he joins the Memphis family's barbecue restaurant in Prentice Penny's Uncorked (2020).
