Before the Movie Opens, The Knives Come Out

True, white truffle dealers actually do charge $2,200 per pound, and Guas admired the way Kate arranged food on the plate. But the multicolored peppers cooking on the grill never blackened, and almost every order that came out of the kitchen was for Table 9. ("Must be the VIP table," joked Amernick.) Even though Kate was the head chef at one of New York's best restaurants, she was unrealistically responsible for such menial tasks as torching a creme brulee. How could any director resist the chance to show a hot chef using a blowtorch?

But the biggest complaint: Aside from the caramelizing sugar on that creme brulee, nothing in the kitchen appeared to be hot. "Did you see the way she kept picking up copper pots off the stove without a towel?" Armstrong said with a laugh. "When she sauced the quail -- which was squab, not quail -- she picked up the pot with her bare hands."

When it came to Aaron Eckhart's opera-loving sous-chef, Nick, Armstrong said, "His only job was to put cold carrots on every plate."

Director Hicks defended the film's accuracy: "It's often this way when you make something about someone's world. I'm very conscious of those issues. We want to see them reflected correctly."

And the squab? This was not a case of the art department's requesting something more photogenic -- and larger -- than what the plot specified. "There's no reason that shouldn't have been a quail. I think it was a big quail," Hicks said. Then he added: "If it wasn't a quail, I want to shoot someone."

The film also raised questions larger than whether Hollywood chefs know a Sazerac from a Sauternes. Wiedmaier unintentionally unleashed a debate about women in the kitchen when he proclaimed that he'd been shocked by the way Kate's staff disrespected their head chef. "They're all sitting at the table, and they're all giving her crap. That would never happen," he said. "There are only two answers: Oui, chef. Non, chef."

But Greenwood disagreed. "You're talking about men. I'm not treated like that. I take [expletive] from dishwashers. I take [expletive] from servers. I take it from tax guys and business people. I had a guy who worked for me for three months turn around and tell me I was telling him to do it wrong. And I just said: Out."

"It's because you're a woman," said Amernick. "There's no getting around it. Being a woman chef is a different thing."

Chastened, the men nodded. "It is a fact of life that as a woman you have a lot more to prove," Armstrong said.

What the chefs instantly agreed on was Kate's relationship with the restaurant's owner, Paula, played by Patricia Clarkson. To the average viewer, Paula seems pretty righteous, trying to rein in Kate's prima-donna tendencies, such as when a customer sends back his steak twice for being overcooked and Kate marches out and slams a raw slab of meat onto the table in front of him.

But to the chefs, Paula's attempts to tell Kate how to behave were inappropriate. "That's why restaurants go out of business. Because she's an owner, not a chef. She doesn't understand, and that's the biggest problem," Wiedmaier said.

Paula "undermined her in the kitchen, and that's why she didn't get the respect she deserved," Amernick agreed. "There comes a point where you just can't work for anyone else."

Finally, the conversation turned to the impact "No Reservations," "Ratatouille" and other Hollywood visions are having on the restaurant business. Chefs' rise from anonymous grunts to media superstars is "affecting our workforce," Wiedmaier said. "When I opened up [Brasserie] Beck two months ago and Michel [Richard] opened up Central, we couldn't find any cooks!"

Recent culinary graduates "don't want to be cooks; they want to be celebrities," Greenwood said. "They don't know how to clean a salmon, and they don't want to clean their station. They get out of culinary school and they think they're chefs. It's a really desperate situation."

Desperate, maybe, but not exactly the stuff of Hollywood. As the chefs see it, "No Reservations" is a great flick -- as long as viewers don't expect anything revelatory about food or the harsh realities of working in a kitchen. "No one would want to see what it's really like," Greenwood said. "It's just not as interesting."