Food and film

I don’t know why but I recently binged on a bunch of food movies.  It started with Big Night with Stanley Tucci, Tony Shalhoub, and Minnie Driver.  From there, I went to Chef with Jon Favreau and One Hundred Foot Journey with Helen Mirren.  I’m really not much of a movie guy but the next time I feel a movie I’ve got Julie and Julia, Babette’s Feast, and Ratatouille lined up.

I loved all three.  I have no idea whether they are considered “good” movies or not or whether they were hits at the box office, but I had a lot of fun watching all three.  All three present a concept of cooking as an act of both craft and self-expression.   Big Night is about two Italian brothers (Tucci and Shalhoub) who run an unsuccessful restaurant in the 1950s. Shalhoub is the chef and insists on cooking his food the way it should be cooked (and the way it was cooked in the old country).  With the expectation that big band singer Louis Prima will be arriving for dinner, the brothers pull out all the stops for one big magnificent meal.

I first saw Chef on a transatlantic flight. I first heard about it when writer, director, and star Favreau and food truck master Roy Choi guested on an episode of Top Chef as part of their research.  In Chef, Favreau is a brilliant cutting edge chef working in a successful, if stodgy, restaurant (owned by Dustin Hoffman).  He is also divorced from Sofia Vergara and is so committed to his work that he neglects his son.  He loses his job at the restaurant (where Scarlett Johansson is the hostess) but his ex-wife connects him to Robert Downey Jr. who finances his purchase of a food truck where he will make the best Cuban sandwiches in the world.  Favreau is charming (as is the boy who plays his son), there are some great running gags, and the soundtrack is fabulous.

I also saw One Hundred Foot Journey as an in-flight movie.  Helen Mirren runs a Michelin-starred restaurant in a small country town in France. An Indian family that runs a restaurant in Mumbai is forced to flee the country after their restaurant is bombed and the mother (and chef) is killed. The family eventually arrives in the same town as Mirren’s restaurant and winds up buying an abandoned restaurant 100 feet away from Mirren’s.  One of the sons (Manish Dayan) was being groomed to replace his mother and is extremely talented.

All three of these movies deal with issues of authenticity and simplicity.  In Big Night, Shalhoub is dedicated to the basic Italian approach of taking great ingredients and preparing them simply to show them off.  Much of the movie revolves around his dedication this basic concept.  In Chef, Favreau finds success and happiness by walking away from the high-pressure competition of top shelf restaurants in favor of a food truck serving great Cuban sandwiches.   In One Hundred-Foot Journey, I can’t talk about this too much without giving away parts of the plot but striving towards that third Michelin star competes with superstardom in the molecular gastronomy world and cooking just like Mumbai Mom used to.

I suppose this plot line isn’t all that different from the hundreds of films that have been made over the years about musicians, or artists, or whatever who discover that creative and personal success is best achieved by being true to one’s soul.  There’s also a little subtext that simple done perfectly is better than complicated, even if it is done perfectly.  Those are both pretty good ideas, I guess.

As I said before, I’m not much of a movie guy.  I have no idea if these are good movies, but I found all three to be enjoyable and entertaining.  And for me, Big Night went a bit beyond that and gave the heartstrings a good tug.

What are your favorite food flicks?