I keep making the mistake of assuming that my partner, a fine dining chef, might enjoy watching films set in his workplace. We discovered the opposite may be true on the morning the trailer was released for Boiling Point, a British film starring Stephen Graham as the tempestuous head chef of an East London restaurant. About 20 seconds in – more precisely, at the moment Graham started screaming at the young commis chef – he asked to turn it off and muttered something along the lines of “why would I want to spend my spare time watching something I have to experience for 16 hours a day”. Fair point.
For everyone else, there seems to be a growing appetite for stories that take us into the kitchen. This year there has been the breakout success of The Bear, a series which follows high-end chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) as he returns to his family’s failing sandwich shop in Chicago. The Menu, a dark comedy-thriller that brings new meaning to the phrase “eat the rich”, gave the production company Searchlight its most successful opening weekend at the box office since 2008. If you’re still hungry, the BBC is to serve up another helping of Boiling Point when it returns as a television series next year.
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