Weekend Cooking: Chef

A few days ago I went to see Jon Favreau's new movie Chef. If there is just one thing you need to know before seeing this film, it is this.....

Don't watch this movie if you are hungry!! Eat before you go to see it because the food in it looks delicious. Even the toasted cheese sandwiches look A-MAZ-ING!

Now that we have that out of the way, what is the movie about?

Chef Carl Casper (played by Jon Favreau) is about to have one of the most important nights in his career as a chef. His restaurant is about to be reviewed by the most influential food critic/blogger in the city. Carl has big plans to serve up the food that he is passionate about until the restaurant owner (Dustin Hoffman) insists that he needs to cook the tried, tested and somewhat tired menu that has been the restaurant staple for many years.

After a very bad review, Casper asks his son to teach him about Twitter and he somewhat naively and inexpertly reacts to the review, eventually trending on Twitter (you can view a short clip of Casper learning some of the intricacies of Twitter here).  This leads to him goading the food critic to come to the restaurant to eat the food that he wanted to cook in the first place. Once again the restaurant owner steps in and suddenly Casper finds himself without a job.

In order to spend some quality time with his son, Casper flies to Miami with his gorgeous ex-wife (Sofia Vergara). Miami is the place where his food journey began and for Casper it is a chance to start afresh, in this case with a food truck.  It is really once we get to this part of the movie that it picked up for me as the initial set up of the story took quite some time.

In some ways it seemed to me that this movie tried to do too many things. Whilst it is undoubtedly a foodie movie - an ode to Cuban food and to a certain extent music - it was also a father-son road trip movie giving us glimpses of places like Miami and New Orleans along the way, a commentary on the power of social media to make or break something or someone (the book lovers amongst us might recognise some of the chef/critic relationship in some of the author/critic/blogger dramas that breakout fairly regularly) and for good measure throw in a small tasting of misplaced romance.  Comedy wise there were times when this was kind of charming but other times when it played a little too obviously for laughs.

I have mentioned a few of the people who have roles in the movie but there are also a couple of other big names. Scarlet Johansson plays a maitre-d/love interest and Robert Downey Jr also plays a small role.

Whilst I quite enjoyed the movie despite the slow start and the fact that the father-son dynamic took too long to resolve, the reviews were mixed. My friend's review of the movie was "shite, shite, shite". We do have mixed success in going to the movies. This year we have been three times. The first time we saw The Book Thief which we both quite liked, then we went to see Monument Men with her husband. She hated it, I didn't mind it and her husband loved it. We did joke that maybe I should just go to the movies with her hubby from now on but that might be a bit odd!

I gave it 3.5 frying pans!

 

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