Jon Favreau's Chef is a foodie's delight | Film | Denver | Denver Westword | The Leading Independent News Source in Denver, Colorado
Navigation

Jon Favreau's Chef is a foodie's delight

Chef, the back-to-his-roots indie flick from Jon Favreau (Iron Man), is to modern foodie culture what his own Swingers was to the '90s swing revival. Favreau plays Carl Casper, a culinary bad boy, barreling egotist, and divorced father with a chef's-knife tattoo stretching down his right forearm and "El Jefe"...
Share this:

Chef, the back-to-his-roots indie flick from Jon Favreau (Iron Man), is to modern foodie culture what his own Swingers was to the '90s swing revival. Favreau plays Carl Casper, a culinary bad boy, barreling egotist, and divorced father with a chef's-knife tattoo stretching down his right forearm and "El Jefe" across his knuckles. Casper is hungry to follow food trends: pork belly, kimchi, carne asada. (Roy Choi, of Los Angeles's famous Kogi truck, was Favreau's technical adviser.) But his nouveau-rustic passions have been tamed by a restaurant owner played by Dustin Hoffman, who only wants Casper to be a brand-name kitchen slave turning out snooze-worthy cruise-ship food like deviled eggs with caviar and chocolate lava cake.

After a brutally personal pan by a restaurant blogger (Oliver Platt) who doesn't understand that the owner, not the chef, is calling the shots, Casper blunders into a Twitter feud — and goes viral when he invites the critic to sample his sweaty ass. He's too unstable to find another gig, too smart to say yes to an appearance on Hell's Kitchen. So he and his former sous-chef (John Leguizamo) are forced to launch a food truck that drives across the country serving up honest, simple Cuban sandwiches.

Watching an actor play a chef is like watching an actor play a pianist. You're not just watching a kitchen scene; you're closely scrutinizing the close-ups to see how much he fakes. Favreau's Casper spends as much time in the film cooking as a porn starlet does on her back. He sautés with confidence, minces with skill, and artfully arranges a bowl of pasta even when serving it in bed to the hostess (Scarlett Johansson) he sleeps with on the sly. If you close your eyes, Favreau sounds exactly like Anthony Bourdain. And when he makes a humble grilled cheese for his ten-year-old son (Emjay Anthony, fantastic), he monitors the sear with a devotion worthy of a Benedictine monk.

Of course, Chef is its own type of fantasy: that a restaurateur can get 10,000 Twitter followers overnight and spin his fame into an immediately profitable independent business. Even the truck itself is a gift, thanks to his ex-wife's (Sofia Vergara) wealthy ex-husband (Robert Downey Jr.). It's also a crowd-pleaser — a romantic comedy between a man and a sandwich, all heart-melting good cheer punched up by some nicely sour jokes. And it's flattery for entry-level foodies who feel special when it pays tribute to a restaurant they know. As the food truck tweets its way from Miami to L.A., it stops to snack at New Orleans's Cafe du Monde for beignets and Austin's Franklin's Barbecue for brisket.

With its gags about Twitter and food-truck-triggered flash mobs, in ten years it'll feel as dated as the '80s nouvelle cuisine in American Psycho. But for today, the irony is that Chef is so charmingly middlebrow that it's exactly the cinematic comfort food it mocks: Favreau has made not a game-changing meal to remember, but a perfect chocolate lava cake.

BEFORE YOU GO...
Can you help us continue to share our stories? Since the beginning, Westword has been defined as the free, independent voice of Denver — and we'd like to keep it that way. Our members allow us to continue offering readers access to our incisive coverage of local news, food, and culture with no paywalls.