Food and film are made for each other: the heat, the pace, the drama, the shouting. That is not to say kitchen life always plays out accurately on the big screen. Volatile chefs at high-end restaurants are often the only version on offer: take forthcoming thriller-satire The Menu (in cinemas 18 November), in which a couple (played by Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult) go to a secluded island for some fine dining only to enter a dark funhouse orchestrated by a sadistic celebrity chef (Ralph Fiennes) instead.
Still, as sous chef Sydney Adams (played by Ayo Edebiri) puts it in new US drama The Bear, kitchens don’t have to be places where “everybody acts shitty”. The eight-part series, which has garnered rave reviews in the States for its portrayal of day-to-day life in the kitchen, sees high-end chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) return to Chicago to turn around the family’s failing sandwich shop after inheriting it from his late brother. It’s frantic and claustrophobic, with sharp knives and roaring flames in tight spaces, all set to a cacophony of “corner”, “behind”, “yes, chef!”
