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There are certain aspects of human existence which are difficult to properly translate onto the silver screen. Food is one such example; sure, you can show vast medieval banqueting halls, sleazy New York diners, or steaming home-cooked apple pie, but portraying the experience of food in a two-dimensional way is certainly not an easy task. As such, ‘food movies’ have always been a little frustrating for people like Anthony Bourdain, who dedicated much of his life to portraying the emotional quality of good food.
The people’s chef, Anthony Bourdain, was distinctly unpretentious about his love of food. Throughout his life, as was reflected over the course of his time making Parts Unknown, the chef sought out the ordinary food beloved by ordinary people across the globe. His all-time favourite dish was not a Michelin-starred tasting menu, it was a simple pastrami sandwich from a deli in New York City. Bourdian always affirmed that these seemingly simple dishes had more emotional weight to them than typical posh nosh, and he was right.
After all, it is easier to form an emotional attachment to a relatively cheap, everyday sandwich than a once-in-a-blue-moon dish. Emotional attachment is a key part of culinary joy, as reflected by the fact that many people’s favourite food is something that their mother used to make for them as a child. Still, Hollywood has consistently dropped the ball when attempting to reflect the emotional nature of good food.
According to Bourdain, there is one notable outlier in cinema’s repeated failure to reflect the joy of food. “It’s a measure of how deficient Hollywood has been in making an accurate restaurant-food-based film that far and away the best was about an animated rat,” he once shared to Entertainment Weekly in 2011. In case you cannot guess the film from that description, Bourdain was discussing the 2007 classic Ratatouille.
For the uninitiated few among you, the Disney Pixar film tells the tale of a rat, Remy, who dreams of becoming a chef at Auguste Gusteau’s prestigious restaurant in Paris, France. Over the course of the film, Remy forms an alliance with busboy Alfredo Linguini and ends up controlling Linguini via pulling on his hair underneath a chef’s hat. Although not the most prestigious culinary storyline ever created, it certainly endeared itself to Bourdain.
“They got the food, the reactions to food, and tiny details to food really right,” the chef affirmed. Adding to his love of the animated classic, he said, “I really thought it captured a passionate love of food in a way that very few other films have.” Previously, the chef also referred to the film as “The best restaurant movie ever made. The best chef movie.”
Seemingly, it was the attention to detail that impressed Bourdain most, owing to the extensive research carried out by the filmmakers. “The tiny details are astonishing: The faded burns on the cooks’ wrists. The ‘personal histories’ of the cooks, the attention paid to the food, and the Anton Ego ratatouille epiphany hit me like a punch in the chest.”
Bourdain certainly was not alone in his appreciation of Ratatouille. In fact, the film broke the record for the most Academy Award nominations for an animated film, with five nominations and one win, for Best Animated Feature. Still, the fact that the film managed to earn the adoration of chefs everywhere is arguably a more impressive feat, particularly given the repeated failings of cinema to properly represent the culinary world.
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