Near the beginning of the new film Chef, Jon Favreau’s character, the executive chef at a swank L.A. restaurant, unwraps a whole pig in the kitchen. In a sequence choreographed for close-up, visceral detail, the chef butchers the hog. The camera does not spare us the decapitation. Soon, we’re makin’ bacon.
It’s a moment calculated to explain the modern chef to the modern cinemagoer. This is our subculture, writer/director/star Favreau wants to impart. This is our offering in the hushed temple to Epicurus (the kitchen, that is). A real chef sources the ingredients himself, and knows how to work with them. The old way is the true way.
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Chef is clearly a movie that chefs will love.
Favreau (above) plays Carl Casper, an executive chef locked in an endless battle with his restaurant’s owner, played by Dustin Hoffman. The chef has visions of wild menus starring sweetbreads, carne asada and various other random dishes that scratch his creative itches. The owner demands that Casper stick to the menu: the soft-boiled egg topped with caviar, the frisee salad, a traffic light of three scallops in a row, looking just as the veteran fine-diner expects them to, served on a rectangular plate.
Casper finally reaches the breaking point in a confrontation with a prestigious food critic/blogger played by Oliver Platt. The chef is fired, and in his liberation, he finds himself carrying the first film that salutes the modern, tattooed, pot-smoking, follow-your-own-star, post-Food Network chef – and the first film to chronicle the food-truck revolution.
Chefs and other restaurant-niks will adore Chef. In an interview about the film, Favreau said that it had to have an “R” rating because he had to depict chefs and cooks using the F-word liberally. Cursing is part of the culture, he explained.
(Still, said Favreau, this is a “soft R.” There is no nudity, and the plot leans heavily on the strained relationship between the chef and his adorable, tousle-haired son (below). The movie has a lot more cuteness – and sentimentality – than raunch.)
Casper has a full-sleeve tattoo. There are hook-ups between the restaurant’s staff members. Multiple trips to farmers’ markets are treated as serious pilgrimages. When our man is fired, he limps out the door with his knives like an itinerant samurai, noble and damaged, doomed to walk his rough road yet again. This is the modern, urban, romantic view of cheffing.
But you don’t have to be a chef to love the liberal number of food-porn sequences in the flick. Bacon and eggs fry sensually in a cast-iron pan. Casper chops veggies with the rapid-fire machine precision of a Gatling gun. A perfectly browned grilled cheese made for a chef’s son is not so much grilled as coaxed from the immortal plane down to a less rarefied dimension.
The second half of the film is basically a food travelogue. Casper, his son, and a sous chef sidekick played by John Leguizamo enjoy Cuban sandwiches in Miami, smoked brisket enrobed in a drool-worthy bark at Austin’s Franklin Barbecue, beignets at New Orleans’ Cafe DuMonde, and other treats.
The gang gets to taste America because they’re driving their new food truck cross-country, back from Miami to L.A. Casper’s story, of a chef disillusioned with common tastes who’s fired and decides to hang his own shingle from a glorified lunch wagon, was directly inspired by the real-life story of Roy Choi, Favreau has said. Choi’s Kogi Korean taco truck brilliantly joined fusion food, food trucks, and social media to jump start a revolution in the L.A. of 2008. Choi trained Favreau, Leguizamo and co. on the finer points of cooking for the film.
When Favreau, director of the mega-successful Iron Man series, makes a movie about a food truck, you know the food-truck renaissance has hit some kind of noteworthy plateau.
Watch for the never-not-hilarious Amy Sedaris as a bronze-skinned, fast-talking publicist, and Robert Downey, Jr. as a slick Miami businessman. The voluptuous Sofia Vergara (below) and Scarlett Johansson distract with their scene-stealing curves like Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita.
Chef wears its heart on its sleeve (tattoo), but for all its unsubtle emotional tugging, it is destined to join the ranks of Films Foodies Must See. Like Eat Drink Man Woman, Tampopo, Babette’s Feast and so on, Chef is a paean to great, soul-satisfying food prepared with great care.
It also includes a scene of Chef Casper freaking out that does for chocolate lava cake what Paul Giamatti’s character did for merlot in Sideways.
Chef opens Friday, May 9 at select cinemas.
Relish enjoyed a sneak preview of Chef at a New York Film Critics Screening at the Chase Park Plaza Cinema, featuring a live simulcast of interviews with the filmmakers afterward.
