Most chefs will attest to the fact that professional kitchens have a tendency to attract trouble and the troubled. Little wonder, then, that the stresses of this particular workplace are proving to be irresistible fuel for the small and big screen at the moment. Boiling Point has had several iterations, two of which predate the likes of Disney+ series The Bear and restaurant-set horror comedy movie The Menu: it was a short film, then it became a feature film, shot in one extremely tension-inducing take and released in 2022. Now, it has been turned into a four-part television series, which begins with a first episode that in effect asks, what if The Bear isn’t stressful enough?
You don’t need to have seen the film to pick this up, though it might help to fill in a bit of background and explain why Stephen Graham’s former head chef Andy isn’t on-screen very much. In the film – spoiler alert – we saw Andy’s decline over a single chaotic service, in which he lost staff, his reputation as a chef, and almost lost a customer, before promising to seek help for his alcoholism and then collapsing. The series picks up a few months later, with Carly (played by the fantastic Vinette Robinson) now head chef at another restaurant, a new venture called Point North, with most of the same team on board. It specialises in food from the north of England, to the scorn of the cartoonishly villainous investors who dine there and don’t know their scouse from their parmo.
