The tabloids became very excited recently when a “hot chef” arrived in London. Wearing a “leather jacket and aviator shades” as well as “neatly trimmed facial hair” he could have stepped straight out of Saturday Kitchen or any other cooking programme gifting the press multipurpose words such as “tasty” and “hunk”. He wasn’t, however, a real chef. He was Bradley Cooper, The Hangover star, in town to shoot a film that was supposed to be called Chef until another film, Jon Favreau’s Chef, nicked that title last year.
From all this confusion you can probably guess that chefs are the hot new thing in movies. And actors like Cooper are going to great lengths to try to get the whole chef thing just right. The Daily Mail reports, for example, that the facial hair was “grown for the role”. And, as well as studying Marcus Wareing, to learn how to chop veg and so on, Bradley also chatted to Gordon Ramsay about some other key chef skills. “As well as giving Cooper a few top tips on cooking,” Shouty Gordon said, “I’ve taught him the most important thing he needs to know in order to get by in a kitchen – how to swear.”
This is all very well, but isn’t it all a bit 1990s? Favreau’s film did have had a modishly street-food vibe (it’s about a chef from a top restaurant who learns to live and love again when he gets an upmarket burger van), but it’s still pushing the idea of the chef as a kind of oversensitive caveman.
Parallel with this “battle of the chefs” there has also been a recent spate of very different films featuring actual chefs, particularly those from the Iberian peninsula, and they’re a very different kettle of deconstructed fish.
Currently doing the rounds of the artiest film festivals, for example, is Andoni Luis Aduriz’s Mugaritz BSO a documentary in which the Basque experimentalist, “officially” one of the best chefs in the world, is filmed inviting musicians to try to represent his cuisine through the medium of music. It’s more imaginative and daring than anything most fictional chefs have done.
And last year the Roca brothers of ex-“best restaurant in the world” El Celler de Can Roca released a documentary called El Somni (The Dream) that tried to make sense of the “gastronomic opera” of the same name that they put on in Barcelona. This was a meal where 12 guests were served dishes such as toffee apples filled with apple foam and sobrasada (a kind of chorizo paste), while images were projected on the walls around them and a special musical score introduced each dish.
Since elBulli closed in 2011 the chefs that it inspired have been moving steadily towards the concept of a meal as something akin to a trip to the theatre or the cinema. In Madrid and Ibiza ex-elBulli alumnus Paco Roncero offers extraordinarily elaborate (and expensive) meals with their own soundtrack and projections beamed directly on to the plates.
Bringing this phenomenon full circle, a TV crew are currently filming elBulli’s behind-the-scenes innovator Albert Adrià (the Catalan chef Ferran Adrià’s younger brother) in a bid to show that he was an underappreciated co-author of the elBulli project. What it will certainly show is that he, like others of his generation, is almost as passionate about cinema as he is about food. He describes himself as a “frustrated film director” and his new restaurants in Barcelona as like “films by the same director but in different genres”.
Early rushes from the film, Constructing Albert, show that the younger Adrià sports “neatly trimmed facial hair”. He almost certainly owns sunglasses and perhaps a leather jacket, too, so full marks to Cooper for getting the look right. If the makers of the new Chef, or “Untitled John Wells project” as it’s currently known, are going to produce an equally realistic portrait of their hero, though, they’ll need more than just the right clothes and a moody expression. In Spain, at least, real Michelin-starred chefs are weirder and more interesting than anything we’ve yet seen from Hollywood.
