Review of Chef (2014) by Maksim B — 07 Dec 2014

A delicious, funny and sharp road-trip, Chef is a straight-forward feel-good comedy that delivers a flavored fun, biting dialogues and a talented cast. Never taking itself too serious, just as its main character, it provides the audience with all the ingredients needed to make it a delightful crowd-pleaser.

Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) is a top Los Angeles chef whose desire for food-gasmic experiments is always stopped by the owner of the restaurant where he is employed. When he gets trashed by a top critic Carl decides to take his career in his own hands again, but things seem not to be that easy, especially when it comes to the modern ways of online communication. One single tweet and an unexpected consequence of events storms Carl's life. Soon he finds himself in Miami, starting up his own food-caravan while travelling across the US and trying to re-build his relationship with his little son.

Chef is a road trip which would not have been anything special if it was not for its talented cast, flavored humor and delicious love for life and food. With a combination of good music, fresh supporting performances by Sofia Vergara and John Leguizamo and funny appearances by Robert Downey Jr, Dustin Hoffman and Scarlett Johansson, Jon Favreau's movie turns into a pleasant surprise. It is captures not only the love for cooking, but also issues of father-son-relationships, personal and career empowerment and above all the idea of being just a good person. There is nothing revolutionary in Favreau's delivery, but the way in which it is presented makes the whole 115 minutes a tasty journey.

Chef is probably the most interesting movie about gourmet that I have seen and why not the most delicious one. Without much tension, without the typical pretentiousness of some art-house movies, Chef remains a down-to-earth delivery which just smoothly goes and pleases everyone who is watching it.