There’s a love affair happening with food. How various morsels of nutrition are ingested has become just as pertinent to the process of consumption as what kind of food is being consumed. Indeed, being a foodie is a viable moniker, a characteristic that in some ways also becomes a distinction for individuals. Food and eating, whether it’s breakfast, brunch, lunch, or dinner can be an experience where depending what’s on the menu, a certain echelon of artistry can be achieved.
The culinary culture is both about craft and the approach to the consumption of food. This same culture has blended into pop culture and into subsequent forms of art to visually display and express the singular and collective experience of dining. And there have been several movies made that use food, eating, and dining as a vehicle, sometimes a plot device, and even a character to tell their story. With pun intended, these films make for intriguing fodder for most moviegoers.
Here are some of the best culinary moments in movies.
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10 Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)
Paramount Pictures
Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a classic film starring Audrey Hepburn that revolves around a young woman with a secret past who falls in love with a struggling writer who has just moved into her apartment building. Billed as a romantic comedy, this film, which garnered several Academy Award nominations, is best known for a classic scene that has Hepburn’s Holly eating a Danish and drinking a coffee just outside the window of a Tiffany’s jewelry store. The wander-lust of not having but wanting, held in the simplicity of standing outside the window of a prominent and aristocratic store with a menial breakfast as she looks at the expensive jewelry, captures a very important message about the film itself.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
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This opening food moment is but the first of many in the movie, where food and choice of drink with Holly’s character is used as a symbol, reflecting the exploration the audience undertakes watching Holly’s trajectory.
9 Ratatouille (2007)
Pixar
Ratatouille is a Pixar Animation film that is about a rat who dreams of becoming a chef one day and attempts to achieve this dream by forming an alliance and partnership with a human who happens to be a garbage boy at a restaurant. Ultimately, in the film, a food critic tastes a dish, ratatouille, that Remy the rat concocts under the guise of the human Chef Linguin,i and is transposed to a very emotional place, seen visually in the film as flashbacks of his childhood and life.
This dish touches something deep within Anton Ego, the food critic, and transforms him from an uppity, aristocratic snub, who’d lost his passion and appreciation for food, back to a thoughtful observer and consumer. The film itself explores society and class through food, how it’s prepared, who’s preparing it, and the expectation and perception that goes along with dining.
8 Marie Antoinette (2006)
Sony Pictures Releasing
Historically speaking, “Let them eat cake!” stands as Marie Antoinette’s claim to fame, supposedly spoken after hearing that her subjects and denizens no longer had bread. Marie Antoinette does a great job of visually expressing that mindset through the over-indulgence of everything: clothes, shoes, champagne, and of course cake. The movie is about the young heiress and her rise to queen, and ultimately, ill-fated reign. The film captures her journey, emphasizing luxury and its trappings from her youth that are in manifold as she comes to reign.
7 Big Night (1996)
Rysher Entertainment
Set int he 1950s, Big Night is a comedy-drama about brothers who own an Italian restaurant that is struggling against a rival Italian restaurant. In an effort to gain business and outdo the competition, the brothers attempt to put on an event with genuinely authentic Italian food. The movie itself is a dish served to examine quantity versus quality. The brothers represent authenticity and the groan of immigrant small business owners offering a piece of their culture through culinary means. This is rivaled by the status quo of eateries and what has already been established. The scene where the brother’s il timpano, a baked dish comprising of shell pasta, various sauces, unmolded, triumphs over the rival’s dish, represents the change of guard and the potential arrival of how culturally food is looked at and experienced.
6 Eat, Pray, Love (2010)
Sony Pictures Releasing
Based on the book, Eat, Pray, Love: A Woman’s Search For Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love is about a woman who realizes how unhappy her marriage and life is and after divorcing her partner, takes off across the world to find herself. Needless to say, there are many food scenes in this movie, each one capturing the journey of the main character, Elizabeth, as well as the places and cultures that she visits and experiences. There’s a specific scene with pizza that explores Elizabeth’s acceptance of herself and the freedom to eat what and how she wants, which can be contrasted with societal expectations of how a woman should eat in conjunction to the perception of how a woman should look.
5 The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014)
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
In The Hundred-Foot Journey, a family from India moves to France to open a restaurant. However, they end of directly across the street from a Michelin-starred eatery that conflicts with their business. In this movie, the distance between understanding of cultures is explored, and it’s done through food. There’s one particular scene where one of the main characters, Hassan, attempts to master different sauces in French cuisine. Learning how to cook foods and meals from other cultures is a major part of this movie’s storytelling. Using the direct contrast between the novice Hassan and the Michelin-starred restaurant owner, Mallory, the film explores differences, but also offers moviegoers a bridge over the gap that separates cultures.
4 Chef (2014)
Open Road Films
In Chef, a head chef, portrayed by Jon Favreau, quits his restaurant job to buy a food truck in an effort to reclaim his creativity as a cook, in addition to trying to win back his estranged family. Chef is about restoration, and how the mundane and monotony of success, and even possibly getting what is wanted in life, can stifle the passion and creative force behind what it is that person loves doing. In the case of this film, that message in given to moviegoers through food and dining, and ultimately, Favrea’s character, Carl Casper leaving status for something off the beaten-path, a food truck, which can be seen as a lesser vessel or a step-down.
This idea is best captured and understood in the scene where Carl makes a grilled cheese sandwich for his son. Visually, the aesthetic of constructing the grilled cheese is fully on display and can be observed with intricate detail. For Carl, this exemplifies what his cooking is really about and the creative control that he desires to exist in as a culinary artist. The fact that something so complex can be captured in the simplicity of a grilled cheese sandwich is what the movie is all about.
3 Julia & Julia (2009)
Sony Pictures
Julia & Julia is about blogger Julia Powell as she attempts to cook all the recipes in the book by famous and well renowned cook, Julia Childs. The movie intertwines Julia Child’s story as she starts out in her cooking profession. The entirety of the movie is about food and cooking and the love that is embedded in the process. One of the most dynamic scenes is where Julia Childs is in the kitchen cooking dinner for husband, and it’s nothing short of a performance that is rhythmic and artistically captivating as Julia literally dances through her movements in the kitchen, showcasing the pure and unadulterated love affair she has with food preparation and the emotionalism that is involved within.
2 Chocolat (2000)
Miramax
Chocolat revolves around a French woman and her young daughter who open up a chocolate shop in a small village that evokes questions of rigid morality within the community. Juliette Binoche’s character Vianne Rocher’s arrival in the small village with her daughter draws from the similar storytelling nuance and convention as the Scarlet Letter, using the single-mother trope, alone and without a man, in a religiously strict setting to examine oppression of both thought and action. How she is viewed as a person and woman and mother is directly connected to her making chocolate as a profession. Chocolate, in this sense, is symbolic and her owning a business and actually making the chocolate is as provocative as her daring to be a singular being and individual.
Through the course of the film, the pairing of chocolate with other foods serves as a metaphor for the commonplace and already perceived value of things connecting with the out-of-the box things and that the pairing of both can actually work, that things do not need to one way to be right.
1 The Menu (2022)
Searchlight Pictures
The Menu is a black comedy/horror that revolves around an ensemble casts of foodies who attend an exclusive remote fine dining restaurant led by Ralph Fiennes’s character Chef Slowik. From the onset of the film, moviegoers are imbued with the arrogant and narcissistic proclivities of most of the guests to Chef Slowik’s restaurant. Through the courses of meals, each one more lavish and complicated than the other, the story beats of the film intensify and the understanding that there’s a social message and commentary being delivered with each dish by the Chef and his extremely loyal team becomes obvious. The Menu uses its “menu” to give an impactful message about the indulgence in entitlement and privilege in the form of something similar to lasciviousness, and ultimately, the compunction that it should engender.
