The Best Movies About Cooking

Dec 21, 2024 13:15

There is no greater comfort than consuming a meal made with love. But the next best thing, perhaps, is watching a meal be made—especially if the food is shot by a master filmmaker under beautiful lighting with a food stylist hovering just offscreen.

Food movies are great, but cooking movies are divine, and this list focuses on the latter category. That may sound oddly specific, but this list would be endless if we included all movies about food. Entire pieces can—and have—been written on the suggestive use of food in Luca Guadagnino’s films alone. Montages have been cut of Brad Pitt snacking in nearly every movie he’s ever made. The steak scene in The Matrix, the chocolate cake scene in Matilda, the orange peel scene in The Godfather—all iconic, but more focused on the indulgent act of consumption rather than the gift of nourishing another person.

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The act of cooking, specifically, holds a special place in cinema. Preparing a meal for a loved one is an act of service, for some the ultimate expression of love. The process involves care, precision, and creativity. A complex relationship between the feeder and the fed can be deftly communicated by the camera without a whisper of dialogue.

Some of the movies on this list center on restaurants: Ratatouille, Big Night, and Chef feature professional cooks as their heroes. Others have one cooking scene so memorable that the film simply had to make the list: Annie baking a single cupcake in Bridesmaids, Paulie slicing garlic with a razor blade in Goodfellas, that final sequence in Phantom Thread.

Here is a list of the best cooking movies, in no particular order. Just make sure that you already have a delectable meal in front of you before you start watching or you’ll be famished by the time the credits role.

Ratatouille (2007)

Yes, one of the greatest movies about fine dining happens to be animated. But with famed chef Thomas Keller as a consultant on the beloved Pixar film, it’s no surprise that Ratatouille gets every tiny detail of cooking in a French restaurant right, from the copper pots to the way the chefs roll up their sleeves. Director Brad Bird’s story centers on a rat with immaculate taste named Remy. He dreams of becoming a chef but elicits screams any time he enters the kitchen. The message—anyone can cook, even a rat—will melt your heart. But it is the film’s famous climax, involving a particular diner experiencing a Proustian madeleine moment while dipping into one of Remy the Rat’s dishes, that proves Bird understands the power of food to evoke memory, emotion, and empathy.

Review: Savoring Pixar’s Ratatouille

Big Night (1996)

The star power of Big Night is, well, big: The unbelievable lineup includes Stanley Tucci, Tony Shalhoub, Isabella Rossellini, Minnie Driver, Allison Janney, and even Marc Anthony. But the stakes are seemingly small. Two brothers from Italy have opened a restaurant in the U.S., but the philistine Americans don’t understand their food. They’re running out of money and have one shot hosting a famous dinner guest to save the business. The movie, directed by Tucci, quickly evolves into a larger meditation on the elusiveness of the American dream. The film reaches its apex towards the end as the story slows down to savor each course of this monumental meal—primi, secondi, etc. Tucci and Shalhoub demonstrate an enviable deftness in the kitchen; there’s a reason Tucci went on to become the Internet’s favorite boyfriend-who-cooks. Watching this movie is like joining a chaotic and delightful dinner party.

Tampopo (1985)

Juzo Itami’s Tampopo is a raucous Japanese comedy filled with vignettes about different characters eating, cooking, and—in the case of a dapper gangster and his girlfriend—engaging erotically with food. Early in the movie, a ramen-eating expert instructs an acolyte (played by a young Ken Watanabe), “While slurping the noodles, look affectionately at the pork.” The silly scene sets the tone for a movie that at once masterfully satirizes foodies—before the term even existed—and also luxuriates in the specificity of its food-loving characters: A young office worker embarrasses his superiors with his oenophile tendencies; a grocer chases down an old woman who damages all his produce by squishing fruits to test for freshness; an adult offers a child forbidden from eating sugar his first taste of ice cream. The through line is the story of Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), a ramen chef who wants to master the art of broth. A cowboy-hat wearing trucker who happens to be an expert on the cuisine coaches her, demanding she carry a heavy pot full of broth and run laps like Rocky. Totally unexpected in its diversions, yet enduring in its themes of endurance and triumph, Tampopo is simply one of the best food films ever made.

The Taste of Things (2023)

The first 40 minutes of The Taste of Things are exclusively dedicated to a meal being prepared and consumed. The movie is set in France in 1889 so everything takes a bit longer than popping a plate into the microwave. Vegetables are uprooted from the ground, fish filleted, water fetched from a well. Eugénie, played by Juliette Binoche, cooks the exquisite meal for what we discover is her employer and sometimes lover, Dodin (Benoît Magimel). The epicure and his coterie of friends participate in friendly cook-offs at each other’s well-appointed homes. Dodin has spent years trying to convince Eugénie to marry him. (Binoche and Magimel were once married in real life.) But she fears that becoming a wife would undermine her identity as the house’s cook. Director Tran Anh Hung, who won the Best Director prize at Cannes, valued long takes of Binchoe and Magimel working with their hands and did not use doubles. Instead, a professional chef called instructions to the actors off-camera, his voice edited out later. The result are long takes, silent save for the bubbling of a stew or click of a knife on a cutting board. The audience comes away with an appreciation for the effort it took to make just a stew in the days of yore—and likely a craving for the movie’s show-stopping baked Alaska.

Review: The Taste of Things Is a Gorgeous Movie About Food, Love, and Sensory Pleasures

Babette’s Feast (1987)

In this Danish Oscar-winner, Babette, a chef, flees violence in France and comes to work for two saintly sisters leading a flock of believers in 19th century Denmark. The pious townspeople eat food for sustenance, not enjoyment, and for over a decade Babette dutifully prepares a rather drab-looking bread soup for the sisters, per their instructions. When Babette unexpectedly comes into a fortune, she insists on cooking a “real French dinner” for her employers and their friends. Greeted with foie gras, truffles, and a rum sponge cake, the diners indulge in a meal so sinfully pleasurable that they must partake in silent reverence. They learn, in the process, the godly power of a good meal.

Review: Dining Well Is the Best Revenge in Babette’s Feast

Bridesmaids (2011)

Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids is probably best remembered for the scene in which Kristen Wiig gets drunk on the plane, or the one in which Jon Hamm has sex like a clueless horny teenager, or even the one in which Maya Rudolph relieves herself in a wedding dress. But the sequence that sticks with me the most comes midway through the movie. Wiig’s character Annie, who had to close her bakery and is still grieving the business that was so personal to her, goes through the long process of baking and decorating a single ornate cupcake. She proceeds to eat it alone at her counter. The montage gives the audience a glimpse at what Annie lost—and her true potential if she can recover. It also captures the unique pleasure of cooking or baking for oneself and enjoying the spoils while standing in your own kitchen.

Review: Bridesmaids: Kristin Wiig’s Merry Band of Party Poopers

Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)

The Studio Ghibli films are often filled with delectable anime food. But the most memorable representation of cooking among celebrated director Hayao Miyazaki’s many features comes in Howl’s Moving Castle. Working as a cleaner on the titular wizard’s moving castle, protagonist Sophie bullies the fire demon Calcifer into helping her make breakfast, despite his protestations. (“I don’t cook! I’m a scary and powerful fire demon!” he grumbles.) Howl, an illusive magic-user, takes over the cooking from Sophie, placing bacon in the pan and feeding egg shells to Calcifer, who happily munches away on the detritus. This is Sophie’s first real introduction to Howl. The care the wizard takes in cooking the simple breakfast, even making sure the fire is literally fed, instantly softens Sophie and the audience to the illusive character. Indeed, we begin to fall for him. As an added bonus, I will shout out Miyazaki’s gorgeous short film Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess, which includes a lovely yet disturbing depiction of a witch baking bread that later comes to life. (Sadly, it can currently only be seen at the Ghibli museum in Tokyo.)

The Lunchbox (2013)

Each day in Mumbai, a group of about 5,000 white-coated men known as dabbawalas deliver hundreds of thousands of lunchboxes from kitchens to office workers across the bustling city. Despite having no labeling or app system, they transport all these meals to the right place (almost) every time—Harvard Business School researchers even studied the process. Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox centers on a rare case of a mis-delivered meal. A lonely housewife named Ila sends out a lunch to her neglectful husband only for it to arrive on the desk of a widowed office drone, Mr. Fernandez. He sends her a note, she replies, and soon an epistolatory romance evolves. Ila’s husband notices no change when her delectable food stops being delivered to his work. In Mr. Fernandez she finds someone who not only appreciates the culinary arts but what characters in the film often refer to as he “magic hands.” Ila often conveys her emotions through her food, adding spice as she tests the waters of this new correspondence, and expressing her ire at a snub in ways I will not spoil. Food becomes a form of communication.

Read More: Meals as Metaphors

Goodfellas (1990)

A review of cooking in film would not be complete without the infamous scene of the gangster Paulie cutting garlic with a razor while cooking an Italian feast in prison in Martin Scorsese’s iconic film Goodfellas. Paulie (played by Paul Cicero) deploys this technique because, he claims, the garlic will melt away in the pan when sliced thin and disappear into the sauce. As a garlic lover, I question why any cook would want garlic to disappear. But the precise slices suggest that Paulie possesses the meticulousness that aided old school mobsters in tasks like buying bodies where nobody could find them or keeping track of drug shipments. It’s a characteristic that the film’s young protagonist, Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill, ought to have cultivated. Paulie’s cooking scene stands in sharp contrast to the movie’s denouement during which a high and paranoid Henry’s improvised plans spin out of control.

Review: Hollywood Hooks Up with Gangsters

Julie & Julia (2009)

This Nora Ephron film toggles back and forth between two stories: A home cook and blogger (Amy Adams) works her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking to rekindle her passion, while, in the past, Julia Child (Meryl Streep) finds her own identity at culinary school in France. The two cooks’ successes and failures are great fun to watch, particularly the series of scenes in which Child, having just enrolled in a cooking program, practices cutting hundreds of onions, the slices forming a pile that matches her own impressive height. Ephron was, herself, a famed dinner party hostess, and food played an essential role in all of her films. For her, eating was almost always intertwined with desire. I would have included the iconic “I’ll have what she’s having” sandwich scene from When Harry Met Sally or the postcoital carbonara scene in Heartburn had we actually seen characters make these near-orgasmic foods rather than just consuming them. (Heartburn admittedly includes a brief scene of Streep making pie.) If you are doing some cooking yourself, let me offer an additional recommendation: The audiobook for Heartburn, Ephron’s semi-autobiographical novel about her divorce from Carl Bernstein upon which the movie is based, is narrated by Streep and happens to be the ideal novel to play in the kitchen.

Review: Streep, Ephron, and the Joy of Cooking

Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)

Before he helmed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee directed one of the greatest openings to a film of all time. Eat Drink Man Woman centers on a semi-retired master chef Chu (Sihung Lung) losing his ability to taste, and the movie begins with a rapturous series of shots of this man cooking an entire meal, from butchering a chicken from his own coop to crimping dumplings. Chu is wrangling with his three daughters, each of whom drops a bombshell announcement at some point in the film. Structured around a series of family meals, Eat Drink Man Woman examines tensions between modernity and tradition—both in food and other aspects of life—while simultaneously demonstrating how food can unify a family across generations.

Review: A Chef’s Ballad

Burnt (2015)

Burnt is an inherently ridiculous movie that begins with Bradley Cooper’s all-star chef “sentencing” himself to shucking 1 million oysters for his drug-fueled bad behavior. Having completed his penance, he sets out to earn a third Michelin star (as one does). But Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller look ridiculously good in chef’s jackets, and the cast is rounded out with a terrific group of actors, including Matthew Rhys, Uma Thurman, Emma Thompson, Omar Sy, Daniel Brühl, Alicia Vikander, and Lily James. And to its credit, the movie did tackle the issue of toxic masculinity in the kitchen before we as a society acknowledged that was a pervasive problem in the restaurant world. This is a fable of an angry man who learns that throwing pots at people’s heads doesn’t earn Michelin stars. It’s not revelatory but it is entertaining. And the movie delivers up some incredible food porn along the way.

Phantom Thread (2017)

If food serves as a metaphor for love and care in many of the movies listed above, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread flips that expectation on its head. Anderson explores the kitchen’s more dangerous corners. The movie is one of appetites and control: The famed dressmaker played by Daniel Day-Lewis meets his love interest Alma (Vicky Krieps) when he orders an absurdly large breakfast and demands that she remember the entire order. She playfully calls him by the maternal nickname “the hungry boy.” But Alma struggles to find a way to exert herself against the exacting man who becomes her lover until the end. Spoiler alert for Phantom Thread, but it turns out this movie about power dynamics in a relationship centers on a woman ritually poisoning her lover’s food…and him consensually submitting to the poison. The domineering man becomes so weak that he must accept her care. It’s a shocking twist marked by the most sensual of cooking scenes in which Alma heaps butter into a pan to brown the poisoned mushrooms tucked into an omelette. The movie reminds us that feeding someone is not just a means of nurturing but, sometimes, one of control.

Review: Phantom Thread Works Hard at Being a Masterpiece. But Is It?

Chef (2014)

Jon Favreau has a rather eclectic directing resume, from launching the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Iron Man to cementing the live-action animated remake trend with The Lion King to helming the instant Christmas classic Elf. Chef is one of his smaller movies and clearly among the closest to his heart. An avowed foodie, Favreau learned some impressive knife skills for the role. He plays a restaurant chef who falls into a creative rut and, after a bad review, goes on a Twitter rant. Finished with the world of fine dining, he decides to open up a food truck and sling sandwiches. There’s little conflict in this sunny roadtrip movie that will buoy even the most cynical culinary critic. And boy do those Cubanos look good.

Review: Jon Favreau’s Chef Serves Up a Modest Meal

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The Best Movies About Cooking