Cooking is a chef's business

Jacky Bonnot (Michael Youn) is a chef with heart and soul. His great talent should have propelled him to the Olympus of celebrity chefs long ago. But unfortunately Jacky can't take a joke when it comes to food. And he sometimes takes away his guests' food if they order the wrong wine to go with it, or he goes berserk if the wrong spice is used with a certain dish. There is no compromise for Jacky when it comes to his passion. And so the cooking enthusiast loses one job after another. His heavily pregnant wife Béatrice (Raphaelle Agogué) has had enough: she puts a gun to Jacky's head and demands that he settle for the next best job or she'll put him out on the street. And so a talented chef becomes a painter in a retirement home.

Jacky's great idol Alexandre Lagarde (Jean Reno) also faces enormous problems as Stanislas (Julien Boisselier), the boss of the financial group to which his restaurant belongs, insists that the celebrated Michelin-starred chef switch to trendy molecular cuisine should his job and his name still mean anything to him. Lagarde has only a few days to create a new menu to prove that his classic cooking is better than modern molecular cuisine. But he just can't come up with any new ideas. But then fate brings Alexandre and Jacky together and it seems that the combination of ingenious spirit and unadulterated passion could positively influence the professional careers of both. But sometimes it's true that too many cooks spoil the broth...

Director Daniel Cohen's idea of offering his viewers a double treat with Cooking is a Chef's Job by making them laugh and at the same time spoiling their eyes with tasty images of attractively prepared delicacies is really good in itself. But even if the ingredients of his culinary comedy are right, from the story to the actors, it ends up being hard to see the film as anything more than a very tasty but not particularly sustainably filling snack. There's no question that Jean Reno is quite wonderful as a star chef in identity crisis. And Michael Youn provides the perfect counterpart to Reno's more sedate Alexandre as the somewhat hyperactive Jacky. The scenes where Jacky tries to make the patrons of a fast food restaurant like his culinary skills or revolutionize the kitchen of a nursing home, almost causing a revolt among the residents, are extremely funny. The film is filled with such moments, which then again and again ensures that you can laugh heartily as a viewer or at least smile in amusement.

However, every now and then the whole thing threatens to slide too much into overwrought silliness. The undercover visit of Alexandre and Jacky in a very successful restaurant thanks to its molecular cuisine, for example, would have offered great comedic potential, but this is completely wasted in favor of astonishingly unfunny clamor. Admittedly, the successful scenes are clearly in the majority. But the comedy loses a lot of its charm, which can still be felt in fragments, because of the little slips. While this doesn't completely spoil the cellulouid dish, it does leave a slightly bland aftertaste in the end.

Cooking is a Chef's Matter is an amusing and even very funny film in places. If you like French comedies and culinary cinema, you'll definitely be well served here. But if you're expecting a wish-fulfilling charm offensive of the caliber of Pretty Best Friends, you'll be rather disappointed due to the numerous sillinesses. Nevertheless, the bottom line is: still worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp