El chef: La receta de la felicidad

Le Chef (2012)

Boy are there a lot of these kinds of cooking movies out there, and most of them fall into a familiar pattern. Luckily it's a pattern that works—in that feel good, root for the underdog way.

This is a very lightweight comedy, and the hero is a chef with unusual talents, but also with a lovely fiancée who is getting impatient with his other love—cooking. So he tries to get a real job, and of course that doesn't work and he ends up cooking on the sly. Which leads to a feeling he's "cheating" on his girl, at least mentally, and so on and so on.

The lovely parts of the movie are actually the cooking parts, where you see his talent come alive. There are the usual critics, the mean boss, the underdog friends who are there in a pinch, and so forth. Yes, it's a formula. And it's totally feel good fun.

And there's nothing more to it than that! Bon appetite. And don't confuse this title with "Chef" which is an American twist on the same basic formula.