Foodie’s Delight-Jon Favreau’s Chef

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Chef, starring Jon Favreau, Soffa Vergara, Emjay Anthony, directed and written by Jon Favreau, 2014    

Iron Chef, Chopped Chef, Sou Chef, Zen Master Chef, Chef de Cuisine, hell, salad chef and even dishwashers have grabbed a new found respect in the world of the professions ever since the food craze, fine food mainly, of the last decade or so had swept America (elsewhere too but we will stick to America on this one). Hell, there is even a new awkward and rather obtuse word added to the vernacular over the trend, foodie (ugh! okay). So it was kind of inevitable that a movie audience tired of watching lawyers, doctors, politicians and super-heroes, real or imagined, would be treated a film based on this new trend, the film under simply titled Chef.

Ordinarily the professional chef is well hidden in the back of the house along with his or her staff and the other auxiliary components that make up a restaurant, especially a fine dining restaurant. In this film we find those previously vague figures who work long and odd hours, devote themselves to serving the best meals possible, and trying to keep their weight down and their drinking habits in check have lives and dreams outside of the sweaty hectic kitchen and that is what drives this film.

Our chef du jour is one Carl Caspar (played by the person who wrote and directed the film, Jon Favreau) who is like lots of chefs concerned with providing good food and also being the master of his or her domain, the kitchen. Naturally like any organization there is a certain power structure when the chef works for somebody else while waiting on that dream of owning his or her own restaurant. So that provides one tension (especially when the owner is played by over the top Dustan Hoffman one of many known stars  in a film with many cameo performances by big stars who must sense this food thing will illuminate their careers). But the big dust-up is between Chef Carl and the local blogger and food critic out in Los Angeles who has panned Chef Carl’s latest efforts. Panned him mercilessly when all Chef Carl wanted to do was showcase his own work and that controversy between boss, critic and chef lead to Chef Carl leaving his cushy job.

Of course the trials and tribulations of any professional are thin gruel for a film of a couple of hours so there is another story-line to draw you in, or rather two parts of a story-line. One is all about owning your own shop and Chef Carl by hook or by crook goes about that task with a vengeance when after he left that cushy fine dining job his options got significantly reduced and he wound up making a go of the latest craze in fast food dining-the food truck. Not just any haphazard food but specializing in cubanos and other culinary delights reflecting his Miami birth and his ex-wife’s Cuban-American heritage (played by Soffa Vergara) who helped set him up with the truck (via an ex-husband of hers). Chef Carl would turn out so successful in that enterprise that even the bastard food blogger who had previously panned him wanted to back him into his very own restaurant.

The other part of the story-line is his renewed relationship with his young son (played by Emjay Anthony) who has chaffed under the strain of his parents’ divorce and his overworked father’s lack of attention to him. That food truck and a cross-country trip from Miami (Little Havana, naturally) to the West Coast is something of a coming of age for both of them. And drives his parents back together. Check this one out.