While Thomas Lennon’s film Knife Skills did not win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject last week, it’s a film that manages, within 50 compelling minutes, to capture the excitement and stress around opening a restaurant—and offer a model for how to reduce recidivism rates in the country.
Located in Cleveland, Ohio, EDWINS Leadership and Restaurant Institute is both a culinary school and a French restaurant that aims to be the best of its kind in the United States. EDWINS’ founder, Brandon Chrostowski, is a Culinary Institute of America graduate; a sommelier and fromager; has worked at places like Charlie Trotters, Le Cirque, and Picholine; and is an ex-convict himself.
Halfway through the film, the camera follows Chrostowski from behind while he bikes home from the restaurant to his wife and son, while the following statements are made in voiceover: “I’m trash. I’m a piece of shit.” Trying to explain what’s at “his core” and what motivated him to found the restaurant, Chrostowski says, “I’m no different from these guys.”
The “guys” and women referred to by the restaurant’s founder include Alan, Dorian, Marley, and Daudi. Viewers meet these trainees on their first day when, among nervous laughs, measurements are taken for chefs’ coats. The film then tracks the individuals’ progress through the institute as they learn about French regions from chef Gilbert Brenot, study the ingredients in the menu’s more than 20 dishes, and cook on the line.
In one scene, Daudi tastes cheeses with Chrostowski and offers his philosophy on why ex-convicts make ideal employees: They “have something to prove” and will work harder than others. The filmmaker often accompanies the trainees outside the restaurant, capturing, for example, a touching moment between Alan and his mother as he shows her pictures of chef Gilbert, as well as Marley’s hearing in which she tearfully tells the judge how she has finally found a family at EDWINS.
As in other food documentaries, Knife Skills includes close-ups of food being plated and the high-stakes suspense tied to a restaurant’s success—success at the individual level of a sauce thickening correctly and at the larger level of opening night running smoothly. The considerations at EDWINS are the same as those at other restaurants: Will the team be able to endure beyond the hype of opening season, will they continue to learn as the menu changes, will they continue to get along as an industry family?
As in other restaurants, too, not everyone makes it. Of the 80 trainees invited into the program, only around 35 made it to the first graduation in 2014. The film appears to end with the graduation ceremony but then cuts to Chrostowski addressing his newborn son with a teary speech—second only to Professor Perlman’s speech to Elio at the end of Call Me By Your Name—for delivering a punch to the collective gut of moviegoers.
One wishes there were an entire docuseries built around the restaurant, as 50 minutes wasn’t nearly enough time with these people, and the enterprise has grown immensely since the documentary was filmed.
EDWINS Second Chance Life Skills Center, which provides a residence for its trainees, has opened, and a butcher shop is in the works. Left craving more, one is tempted to support EDWINS’ mission in some way, whether by visiting Cleveland for dinner or a tour of the facilities, donating money toward the butcher shop’s construction, or becoming involved with other efforts that help the nearly 2,000 men and women leaving prison every day find ways to transition back into society.
