Tonight's programme
Screen
Photo: Teatrul Național de Operă și Musical Ion Dacian, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Some people watch films about cars. We watch films about stockpots. These are the ones worth your evening, from a Tokyo ramen counter to a Chicago sandwich shop, chosen because the cooking is real and the hunger is honest.
Start with these four
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Chef
With Jon Favreau, John Leguizamo, Sofía Vergara
A chef gets roasted by a critic, loses his temper in public, and ends up running a food truck with his kid. That is the plot, and it is plenty. Favreau clearly loves kitchens, and it shows in every shot of a sandwich going under the press. It is a film about getting your joy back by cooking the food you actually like. Watch it hungry. Leave the phone face down.
Watch for The Cuban sandwiches and yuca fries coming off the truck as it works its way home through New Orleans and Austin.
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Toscana
With Anders Matthesen, Cristiana Dell'Anna, Andrea Bosca
A Danish chef who plates with a ruler and tweezers inherits his estranged father's estate in Tuscany and goes there to sell it. You know where this is going. Go anyway. It is a gentle film, light as a long Sunday lunch, and the food montages do the heavy lifting. The real subject is a perfectionist learning that a good tomato does not need his help. Some of us need that lesson every year.
Watch for Theo's tweezer-and-ruler plating back home in Denmark, set against the unfussy Tuscan cooking that slowly gets under his skin.
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The Bear
With Jeremy Allen White, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Ayo Edebiri
A fine dining chef comes home to Chicago to run his late brother's Italian beef shop, and the place is a wreck in every sense. The show gets the noise right. The yelling, the tickets, the bad plumbing and the worse grief. It is stressful television made by people who understand what a line feels like at full tilt. It has won a shelf of Emmys, and it earned every one.
Watch for "Review," the first season episode shot as a single twenty minute take of one service going badly wrong at the sandwich shop.
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Burnt
With Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Daniel Brühl
Bradley Cooper plays a gifted, impossible chef who burned his own career down and comes back to London chasing a third Michelin star. It is glossy and a little silly, and the kitchen scenes are better than the script. Gordon Ramsay was an executive producer, which explains the volume. Watch it for the plating, the pressure and the idea that a brigade is only as good as its worst night.
Watch for The first service at the new hotel restaurant, where so much goes wrong that the kitchen shuts early.
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Then work through the rest
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Tampopo
タンポポ
With Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Ken Watanabe
Two truck drivers help a struggling shop owner turn her noodle counter into a proper ramen joint, and the whole thing is shot like a Western. Then the film keeps wandering off into little side stories about food, sex, manners and death, and every detour is worth taking. Juzo Itami made a comedy about appetite in all its forms. It is strange, generous and very funny. You will want ramen within ten minutes.
Watch for The early lesson in which a ramen master teaches his apprentice the proper, almost ceremonial way to eat a bowl of noodle soup.
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Babette's Feast
Babettes gæstebud
With Stéphane Audran, Birgitte Federspiel, Bodil Kjer
Two devout sisters in a bleak Danish village take in a French refugee as their cook, and for years she makes the plain food they ask for. Then she gets the chance to cook one real dinner. It is slow, severe and quietly devastating, a story about art, grace and what a meal can do to people who have forgotten how to want anything. It was the first Danish film to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Watch for The feast itself, with turtle soup, buckwheat blinis with caviar, and quail in puff pastry with foie gras and truffle sauce, served to guests who fear enjoying it is a sin.
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Like Water for Chocolate
Como agua para chocolate
With Lumi Cavazos, Marco Leonardi, Regina Torné
A youngest daughter is forbidden by family tradition to marry, so she pours everything she feels into her cooking, and whoever eats it feels it too. Magic realism with an apron on. It is lush, overheated and completely sincere, which is how a good mole should be. Adapted from Laura Esquivel's novel, it became the highest grossing foreign language film in American history at the time.
Watch for The quail in rose petal sauce, which Tita cooks with so much feeling that her sister Gertrudis eats it and begins, quite literally, to steam.
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Eat Drink Man Woman
飲食男女
With Sihung Lung, Kuei-mei Yang, Chien-lien Wu
A widowed master chef in Taipei cooks an enormous Sunday dinner for his three grown daughters every week, whether they want it or not. Ang Lee makes a family drama where nobody says what they mean and everybody says it with food. It is funny, tender and sharp about how parents and children talk past each other. It earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
Watch for The opening sequence, a Sunday feast prepared entirely by hand, which took more than a week to film.
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Big Night
With Stanley Tucci, Tony Shalhoub, Minnie Driver
Two brothers from Calabria run a failing Italian restaurant on the Jersey Shore in the 1950s. One is a genius cook who will not dumb down his food for anybody. The other is trying to keep the lights on. They bet everything on one big dinner. It is funny, warm and a little heartbreaking, and Roger Ebert called it one of the great food movies. He was right.
Watch for The timpano, a great domed drum of pasta baked inside a pastry crust and carried to the table like a holy relic.
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Mostly Martha
Bella Martha
With Martina Gedeck, Sergio Castellitto, Maxime Foerste
Martha runs the kitchen at a smart Hamburg restaurant with total control and no life to speak of. Then her young niece comes to live with her, and an easygoing Italian sous chef turns up in her kitchen. It is a small, grown-up film about grief and appetite, and it never oversells either. Hollywood remade it as No Reservations. Watch this one instead.
Watch for Mario's plate of spaghetti, the first food Martha's grieving niece Lina will actually eat.
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Ratatouille
With Patton Oswalt, Lou Romano, Ian Holm
A rat with a great nose and a garbage boy with no talent team up in a famous Paris kitchen. Somehow this is one of the most honest films ever made about cooking. Pixar did its homework, the kitchen feels real, and the idea that anyone can cook is kinder and tougher than it sounds. It won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Children like it. Chefs like it more.
Watch for The title dish, made as a fanned, layered confit byaldi on the advice of Thomas Keller.
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Midnight Diner
深夜食堂 (Shinya Shokudō)
With Kaoru Kobayashi
A small diner in Shinjuku opens at midnight and closes at seven in the morning. The cook, known only as Master, feeds whoever drifts in. Each episode is one customer, one dish and one quiet story. It is the gentlest thing on this list and the most addictive. Later seasons stream as Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories. Watch one episode before bed. You will watch three.
Watch for The red sausages cut and fried to look like little octopuses, a homely plate that carries more feeling than it has any right to.
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Julie & Julia
With Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci
Two true stories stitched together. Julia Child learns to cook in postwar Paris and writes the book that taught America French food. Decades later, Julie Powell cooks all 524 recipes in it in a year and blogs about it. The Julia half is the reason to watch. Meryl Streep is enormous fun, tall, delighted and fearless around butter. The Julie half is fine. Butter is the real star.
Watch for Julia's first meal in France, a sole meunière in Rouen, the plate that set her life on a new course.
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Jiro Dreams of Sushi
With Jiro Ono, Yoshikazu Ono
An eighty-five year old sushi master runs a ten-seat counter in Tokyo and is still trying to get better. His son, past fifty, is still waiting his turn. David Gelb shoots it like a cathedral and scores it with Philip Glass. It is beautiful and a little terrifying, a portrait of devotion that asks whether one life is enough for one craft. Probably not. Jiro seems fine with that.
Watch for The apprentice who makes the tamago, the sweet egg omelette, roughly two hundred times before Jiro finally approves it.
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Haute Cuisine
Les Saveurs du Palais
With Catherine Frot, Jean d'Ormesson, Arthur Dupont
A cook from Périgord is hired, to everyone's surprise, as the private chef to the President of France. The palace kitchen staff take it badly. She cooks honest regional food, and he loves her for it. Based on the real story of Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch, who cooked for François Mitterrand, it is a warm, small film about the politics of a plate. Catherine Frot is terrific in it.
Watch for Hortense winning over the President with authentic Périgord home cooking while the Élysée's main kitchen staff resent her for it.
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Chef's Table
With Massimo Bottura, Dan Barber, Francis Mallmann
Each episode is one chef, one obsession and a great deal of slow motion. It made fine dining look like opera, and plenty of restaurants have copied the look since. Hollywood borrowed it for The Menu and hired Gelb to help shoot it. Some episodes are better than others, but the good ones are very good. Start with the first season. Pace yourself. The strings will make you want to quit your job and forage.
Watch for The Francis Mallmann episode, in which the Argentine chef pairs his French training with the old Patagonian craft of cooking over fire and in the earth.
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Sweet Bean
あん (An)
With Kirin Kiki, Masatoshi Nagase, Kyara Uchida
A tired man sells dorayaki, little pancakes filled with sweet red bean paste, from a tiny shop. An old woman asks for a job and turns out to make far better bean paste than he does. That is the start of something very gentle and very sad. Naomi Kawase lets every scene breathe, and Kirin Kiki is wonderful. Bring tissues. Bring something sweet. You will need both before the end.
Watch for Tokue making the red bean paste from scratch, slowly and patiently, while Sentaro learns what he has been missing.
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Salt Fat Acid Heat
With Samin Nosrat
Samin Nosrat turns her cookbook into four episodes, one for each element, and travels to find them. It is a cooking show that actually teaches you to cook, by explaining why food tastes good, not just what to put in it. She is warm, curious and visibly delighted by nearly everything she eats. Watch it once for pleasure. Watch it again with a notebook.
Watch for Fat, the opening episode in Italy, which sets up the journey on to Japan for Salt, the Yucatán for Acid and home to Berkeley for Heat.
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Boiling Point
With Stephen Graham, Vinette Robinson, Jason Flemyng
One night in a busy London restaurant, shot in a single unbroken take. No cuts, no breathing room. Stephen Graham plays a head chef with a downgraded hygiene rating, a full book and a life coming apart. Anyone who has worked a line will feel it in their stomach. Everyone else will learn why cooks need a drink after service. Ninety minutes of pressure, and nothing feels fake.
Watch for The pass at the height of the rush, where the camera never cuts away as the tickets pile up and the kitchen starts to crack.
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Pig
With Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin
Nicolas Cage plays a former Portland chef living alone in the Oregon woods, hunting truffles with his pig. Someone steals the pig. You think you know what kind of film this is. You do not. It is quiet, sad and about what we lose when we stop cooking for the people we love. Cage has rarely been better, or quieter. It may be the best film here about why chefs cook at all.
Watch for Rob's visit to Eurydice, the fashionable Portland restaurant now run by a cook who once worked for him.
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The Taste of Things
La Passion de Dodin Bouffant
With Juliette Binoche, Benoît Magimel
Juliette Binoche cooks. Benoît Magimel eats, thinks and cooks alongside her, and for years they have not quite married. That is the whole film, and it is enough. Trần Anh Hùng shoots the kitchen in long, patient takes full of copper pans and steam. It won him Best Director at Cannes, and Pierre Gagnaire ran the cooking. Do not watch it on an empty stomach. Do not watch it on a full one either.
Watch for The long kitchen sequences, from a vol-au-vent to the pot-au-feu cooked for a visiting prince.
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