Matt Preston gives his thoughts on how chefs are portrayed by Hollywood
Playing a top chef is surely a meaty role for an actor, but must they be so mean? Have the popcorn at the ready as Matt Preston weighs in.
Playing a top chef is surely a meaty role for an actor, but must they be so mean? Have the popcorn at the ready as Matt Preston weighs in on how Hollywood is serving up cooks onscreen.
Mad, bad and dangerous to know. It seems that on TV and in the movies, high-end chefs are all brutal narcissists with zero emotional intelligence and total disrespect for others.
I’ve looked at how English- language film and TV has portrayed top culinary creators and, from the chaotic muppet known as the Swedish Chef to Ralph Fiennes’ diabolical chef Slowik in The Menu, the results aren’t good. (Please note, this column contains spoilers!)
The pretension and madness of the head chef are at the core of satirical romp The Menu. Slowik is coolly unhinged as he plans a final service that will serve as the last supper for both his loyal staff and his dreadful, self-absorbed guests: he’s going to turn them into sizzling, bubbling human s’mores.
Not since Mrs Lovett was making pies out of customers’ bodies in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street – lovely work from actor Helena Bonham Carter in the 2007 film adaptation, by the way – has a cook been so unremittingly bonkers.
Now, sure, customers and critics at posh places have occasionally been skewered at the hands of Hollywood. (And I admit that I shifted uncomfortably in my seat with self-awareness at the affectations and smugness of the diners in The Menu.)
But, truly, it is the top chef that gets the worst of it from Tinseltown. Other than real estate agents and fascist dictators, few other careers get as heavily denigrated on screen.
About the only top chef who doesn’t get such a celluloid working over is Auguste Gusteau, the haute cuisine titan in Ratatouille.
His catchphrase – in a rare moment of egalitarianism from a genre that usually demands head chefs to be autocratic martinets – is “anyone can cook”. But sous chef Skinner, the human who has taken over the late Gusteau’s restaurant, is the very definition of the angry cook who wields his power like a club.
It’s true that the heroic Remy also has all the good qualities of a chef, but, um, err … he’s a cartoon rat.
At least the use of physical violence in the kitchen is rare for screen chefs. On The Muppet Show, the Swedish Chef would fling utensils about or hurl chickens as basketballs, but we never witnessed any carnage. Even the cook in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover only prepares the murdered lover for the wife to feed to her thief husband at gunpoint – he doesn’t do the actual murdering. And at the start of the ABC comedy Aftertaste, Erik Thomson’s celeb chef Easton West merely throws a pig carcass on a critic’s table in a career-destroying meltdown. Still, none of this is what society might class as good behaviour.
The light on chef-owners seems the harshest. Seinfeld’s Yev Kassem, better known as the “soup Nazi”, makes his patrons sweat with his exacting rules, often leading him to yell, “No soup for you!”
Junior chefs, however, are treated far more kindly. Think of South Park’s Chef in the school canteen, or SpongeBob SquarePants, who flips the krabby patties at The Krusty Krab.
He is a line cook, but he’s joyous, loving his work and his customers. The message is he’s not yet jaundiced by the job.
It seems as if Hollywood is telling us that the only way for a high-end chef to make it back from the dark abyss is to put stuff between bread.
In the 2014 film Chef, Jon Favreau’s spoiled Carl Casper is only redeemed when he trades fine dining for a food truck to make fried Cuban sandwiches, and in streaming cult hit The Bear, the main story arc has Jeremy Allen White’s smouldering Carmy – a temperamental one-time super chef – returning to Chicago to run the family’s sandwich restaurant.
Or maybe it’s all about the food? Onscreen, anyone who makes fiddly, foamy, pretty degustation dishes is a douche and anyone who makes honest, home-style cooking is a hero. After all, the only glimmer we get of the man that once lived behind the rage of chef Slowik in The Menu is when he cooks a classic cheeseburger at the end of the movie.
Flipping a burger reconnects him with a love of food that he’s lost while travelling down a twisting career path where he’s ended up in a shallow world of concept dishes for the super rich and self-satisfied.
The mere act of asking for the burger – and rejecting his wanky degustation menu (a bread course without any bread, how droll) – means that Anya Taylor-Joy’s unimpressed Margot ends up the only guest who survives the imminent mass murder at Slowik’s restaurant.
Interestingly, these highly charged portrayals are mostly reserved for male chefs, and are less often seen in Asian and European cinema.
Maybe chefs there just behave better? The title character in the wonderful Danish film Babette’s Feast is secretly an ex-top chef, but she acts with kindness and generosity.
I’ll leave it to your experience to work out whether the portrayal of most chefs is fair or not fair. But right about now off to make myself a cheeseburger.
This story was originally published by delicious.com.au.
Originally published as Matt Preston gives his thoughts on how chefs are portrayed by Hollywood
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