Hi everyone, welcome to pot luck food talks.
Today we have for the first time, Sander with us.
Hello, hello.
Sander is a producer of the show and also partly guilty of creating this concept and
this space to talk about food.
Hi, Sander, how are you doing?
I'm good.
I'm happy to finally be on the show and not only behind it.
Sander has a background as a filmmaker and he works on food commercials.
And that's the reason we have him today.
We're going to talk about food movies, food film, great movies with great food scenes.
So what are your thoughts on that?
What are my thoughts on movies about food?
I think food is a lot about story.
Every dish, everything in life has to do with, I don't know, a mom cooking a soup for their
sick child or like a guy making some dessert, you know, for the lady he's trying to impress.
And I think, I mean, amazing food movies, they have amazing food photography, but I
mean, especially, you know, putting it into like some context, I think there's some very
memorable movies about food for sure.
Well, also to mention Sander and I, we've been friends like for 30 years already, probably.
Yeah.
I always say that our parents knew each other before we were even born.
So yeah, we hung out a lot.
We lived together and while Sander was still studying to become a filmmaker, we were living
together and we were working on a movie script about cooks.
So we were brainstorming a lot what would be interesting to do.
And at that time we watched a lot of culinary movies.
I also remember that we wrote a few scenes that we completely discarded them after Ratatouille
came out because it had two specific scenes, exactly the concept and the way we had thought
of it.
Do you want to talk about it?
But first, I guess it's important or interesting to say you had just started your adventure
as a cook.
I had just started an adventure studying film.
This was 2007.
So I think we had already lived outside our homes for two years and you were completely
excited.
You had all these crazy stories and I was studying film and I was excited about doing
some things.
So I wanted to tell stories about those things you were telling me.
And I guess all these outrageous things that you were telling me that were super interesting,
how these fine dining kitchens work and how crazy the characters inside it are.
And I mean we're always film buffs.
I think we always watched all its per se movies like I don't know, casino and stuff.
And we wanted to take these movie genres that we know and love and just take it into the
cooking world.
And for sure we started like writing some scenes.
And yeah, this was 2007.
I think the same year Ratatouille came out and when we went to the cinema, there were
at least two scenes that you know, they nailed exactly some scenes that we were writing and
it was kind of like, no.
But I guess, I mean, it's probably common sense because these are very common space
feelings.
One was, I would say that's the most iconic scene of the movie.
Both of them I think, scenes or moments.
So one is when this food critic eats something and he gets like an instant flashback to his
childhood where his grandmother is cooking.
We had the exact same concept for that interaction in that moment.
But it's probably because we have felt the same thing many times in our lives.
When you try something that reminds you of your childhood, I guess everybody has experienced
that.
And the other one was the moment when the chef eats like two different flavors and I
think like something like fruit holograms appear in front of him and he mixes them like
flavor combinations or something like that, right?
Obviously, it being Pixar, they made it in a way that was much cooler than we would have
ever imagined.
So yeah, I remember him eating, I don't know, some cheeses or like some-
You mean cheese and grapes?
Cheese and grapes, but like first he has like the cheese and then he has the nutty flavors
of blinded, he grabs it and it's like, you know, in the air around him, like all these
colors and then he eats the other flavor and then it becomes like this animation of this
mixture of flavors.
And hey, I remember us talking a lot about taking weird things that fit together and
yeah, that was again something where obviously Pixar found a way of visually describing a
mixture of flavors, which was mind blowing for us at that time.
Well, also a few things to mention about that movie.
Not everybody knows that the culinary consultant for this movie was Thomas Keller.
Thomas Keller, yeah.
And also the French chef Gusteau is inspired in Bernard Loiseau, who was a major figure
in the New York cuisine and also like, especially in the nineties, he was like a super famous
chef in France.
And yeah, he kind of looks like him, like the face and everything.
Jacques Cousteau, no, not Jacques Cousteau, something Cousteau.
Yeah, exactly.
I think another super cool and super iconic food scene is garlic slicing in prison and
good fellas.
Oh yeah, for sure.
That is a classic.
Yeah.
I think Antony Bourdain would reference that scene a lot, like in a lot of his writing
and food shows and everything.
Everyone uses it as reference.
I think people know exactly how to slice garlic because of that scene.
Yeah.
Also in this line of American Italian movies, there is this movie that I also watched while
we were writing movie scenes.
I didn't watch it, but I definitely have to put it on my watch list.
It's called Big Night by Stanley Tucci.
The movie is not specially a great movie.
Also the, well, the food scene is really nice and they cook like a secret home recipe called
timpano, which is an Italian American dish and it's a large baked pasta drum filled with
layers of pasta, meatballs, sausages, eggs, cheese, tomatoes.
So it's like kind of like a lasagna, but all like in a drum shaped thing.
So that was also pretty cool.
It sounds deliciously nasty.
And I will say if we talk about serious movies like high cinema and a movie that portrays
feelings of the culinary craft and all these kinds of things, I would say Babette's Fest
is my favorite one.
I think the movie even won on a best foreign film Oscar.
And it's a story about like in the 1900s, a French female chef that is running away
from Paris.
She probably did something, but I think in the movies never revealed what.
So she hides in a small village in Denmark and she learns to cook from the Danish and
she also at the end has the opportunity to cook for them.
And it's this kind of like culture shock, but also I think there are a lot of values
that a chef looks for in his career that are very well portrayed in this movie.
No, if you want to talk about like movies where you show every side and story and element
of food, I think anyone should watch Tampopo.
Oh, amazing movie.
Yeah.
I think Tampopo, the interesting thing, and I'm going to leave the whole like cinematography
or whatever out, but I mean, this is the only movie that I know or the only piece of art
that I know that shows every aspect of food in any moment.
I mean, like the main story is like these guys want to help Tampopo to save her ramen
shop and make better noodles, make better broth.
So they call it a Western ramen.
Ramen Western.
Ramen Western instead of spaghetti Western.
Exactly.
So, you know, you have the lone ranger who comes into town and he helps the town or it
saves the day by helping Tampopo, you know, make a really good ramen and save a ramen
shop.
But then you have all these slices, all these little scenes in between that has nothing
to do with the main story.
It is like from the beginning that you start with, like you're in the cinema and the people
are about to watch the movie we're going to watch and how, you know, even in cinema, you
know, snacks and food is part of the watching experience.
But then they're already telling you to eat quiet because I'm going to watch the movie.
And then there's this amazing scene.
I think that's one of my favorite ones in the movie where this old lady goes into a
supermarket and she has a fetish with squeezing things.
So she squeezes the ripe peaches or like the soft cheeses.
And you know, she's obviously destroying the food because she's like squeezing it in her
hands and then the guy who works at the supermarket starts chasing her because he obviously doesn't
want her to keep squeezing these things.
And it's a thing that you can relate with so much that like, yeah, obviously food is
about texture and soft balls and you just want to put it in your mouth or in your hands.
Also the cultural thing about Chure, there's this one scene where there's this mother of
a family and she's dying and you know, the father and the kids are around her and the
doctor is there.
And I think the dad, the father, he doesn't know what to do.
So he just tells her to make dinner.
And the woman, like she stands up and she makes rice and makes a dinner for the family
and then the family eats while she's just there watching them.
And once the family has eaten, she drops dead.
You know, the function of the mother in this society is making food.
So she has to sort of like cook before she drops the head away.
Or you have a, there's a scene about this group of Japanese ladies who are learning
how to properly eat pasta.
Oh yeah, which is like a protocol class, right?
There is this super Westernized Japanese guy explaining them how to behave properly and
this kind of thing.
Exactly.
And how you, you should never make a sound while you're eating.
And then right next to them, there's this, you know, fat old white guy who's slurping
away like, and then like all these ladies, you know, stop paying attention to this etiquette
master and just start enjoying the food and slurping and just like not giving a fuck about
the etiquette.
Yeah, because slurping is part of ramen culture.
You have to slurp if you're ramen.
Yeah.
I mean, this movie is, if you want to dig into what food is and what food can be and
how food affects culture and...
Absolutely.
I think it's a great example of good old classic naive and cartoony Japanese humor, but at
the same time, all the food scenes are very well thought and are very well representative
of Japanese food.
So if you look about what they're doing, I remember at the beginning, there is this lady
with, is it Tampopo?
I'm not sure.
It has this sukemono, like Japanese pickles in a rice bran, which is like a specific elaboration.
And you see, it's funny because it's like this Western where, with this tough lone rangers
that walk into a bar and it's like a tough bar, but it's a ramen bar and they're looking
the way they cook and the mistakes they do if the water is not boiling properly or if
the stock is not at point.
And then they start making like this benchmarking of the different ramen bars in the city to
see which one is the best.
And it becomes like a heist film, like Oceans 11 of ramen, like the team gets together and
every person in the group is like a specialist in something else.
So one knows about the broth, one knows about the past then.
So they also go and steal secret recipes from other restaurants.
From the competitors, exactly.
They walk into the competitors to see how they do it, which is also like a common place
for a chef that wants to open a restaurant, something many of us have done many times.
And to end, I would say another super nice food movie because there are a lot of movies
that are famous and many of them, like I've watched many of these movies that try to portray
the paths of a chef and they're very fake.
You see this chef like completely clean and they don't know how to properly hold a knife
and the dynamics you see in the kitchen are not realistic.
So that's quite annoying.
But another two good examples I wanted to mention, one was a Taiwanese movie called
Eat, Drink, Man, Woman.
It's from the nineties.
And the intro of this movie, I think it's the best cooking scene ever portrayed in the
cinema.
It's so simple.
It's just a man making dumplings.
Yeah, but if you see the skills of this man, like chopping vegetables and doing different
things and it's so pleasurable and the sounds you feel in the scene, it feels like anyone
who has worked in prep cooking will get that feeling of prep cooking, you know, where the
kitchen is quiet and the only thing you hear is like the cooking sounds and there is not
the stress of service where everything has to be quick and everybody's screaming.
And that moment is very, very well portrayed.
I think also something that you said about like movies we hate about food is and I guess
you can say, okay, there's movies about food where it's more like home cooking, like a
very skilled person is cooking at home and they're making really nice dishes.
And there are things you could call like restaurant movies.
And what I hate and I mean, unfortunately, what the tweet kind of goes into that direction
as well is the whole the critic is the most important villain of the thing.
Like it almost seems like these characters are only motivated by, you know, getting the
Michelin stars or whatever.
Which is realistic.
You will see that you will see this kind of attitude and Michelin star restaurant.
Because I mean, I remember that when we were writing our cute little food film, you had
this character that said like, hey, as cooks or this particular character said like, hey,
I come from nothing.
I'm very uneducated.
The only thing I know how to do is cooking, so I really want to, you know, if I want to
be someone in this world, I really want to, you know, elevate my cooking skills and take
it to the highest for possible.
But I don't give a fuck about stars and about, you know, awards.
You see everything.
But I mean, like the character of the chef of stars with stars is not like something
made up.
I know, of course, of course.
But that's why I think one of the and you haven't watched it and I tried to convince
you to watch it because I think in a way the essence of this new show catches a little
bit what we were trying to go for 15 years ago, which is the show, The Bear.
OK, let's make a deal.
I'll watch The Bear and well, when we should both watch this Hannibal Lecter series that
was for sure.
Yeah.
The main consultant for this series was Jose Andres.
Oh, OK.
Wow.
Yeah, he was the advisor of how to cook humans for this series.
And he would do like...
It's lazy.
Yeah, like because, you know, the character Hannibal Lecter is this super Bon vivant gourmet
guy who knows a lot of about food.
So he would do like this super obscure, ancient, sophisticated French dishes with his victims
advised by Jose Andres.
I mean, it must be so crazy that, you know, you get a phone call from a production company
and they tell you like, listen up, you have a couple of weeks to think about, you know,
what would be the best way of cooking humans or like what organs would you use to make
like really tasty seafood and dishes?
Yeah, sounds like a fun project to do.
That's it for this week's episode of Potluck Food Talks.
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