Chef (2014) on Netflix
Carl Casper is head chef at Gauloises, a Los Angeles restaurant where owner Riva overrules his menus. Ordered to cook the usual dishes for critic Ramsey Michel, he faces the fallout.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb7.3/10254,053 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes87%
Trailer
Plot summary
At Gauloises, an upscale restaurant in Brentwood, Carl Casper runs the kitchen and is well liked by his staff and the hostess Molly. Owner Riva insists the menu stay safe and traditional, while Carl wants to cook the inventive dishes he longs to create. Outside the kitchen, he is distant from Inez, his ex-wife, and from their son Percy, a tech-savvy preteen. When Ramsey Michel, a food critic who blogs, plans a visit, Carl writes a bold new menu to impress him, but Riva orders the standard fare at the last minute and the review is scathing. Carl fires back at Ramsey on Twitter, not grasping that his remarks are public.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Chef (2014)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Writer-director Jon Favreau based the story on his own life, including being a father with a demanding career and coming from a "broken home," and deliberately mirrored his own move away from big-budget studio filmmaking with lead character Carl's decision to leave a fine-dining restaurant for a food truck.
- To research the role, Favreau trained at a culinary school and then actually worked as part of restaurateur Roy Choi's kitchen crew, with Choi (creator of the real Kogi Korean BBQ food truck) later promoted to co-producer and credited with creating the Cuban sandwiches central to the plot.
- John Leguizamo prepared to play line cook Martin by actually working as a real line cook at The Lion restaurant in Manhattan's West Village.
- All the food cooked for the shoot was genuinely eaten by cast and crew afterward, and much of the food-truck banter between Favreau, John Leguizamo and Emjay Anthony was improvised rather than scripted, to capture the real feel of a working kitchen.
