Before the Movie Opens, The Knives Come Out

By Jane Black
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 25, 2007

In the opening scene of the new romantic comedy "No Reservations," chef Kate Armstrong (Catherine Zeta-Jones) stands by the window in her Manhattan shrink's office and muses sensually about her signature dish, roast quail with truffles:

"There is no greater sin than to overcook a quail," she begins. "I prefer to serve them roasted. That makes their taste richer and more robust, and a side of truffle ravioli and wild mushrooms goes deliciously well with them."

After more waxing, cut to the kitchen where, dressed in pristine whites, Kate is plating that very dish for a customer. To the untrained eye, it looks delicious: a plump golden bird garnished with potato-chip-size shavings of black truffle.

To Restaurant Eve chef Cathal Armstrong, it looked ridiculous. "It was a squab, not a quail!"

"Any quail that big would have to be on steroids," scoffed chef Robert Wiedmaier of Marcel's.

Funny the things chefs notice when they go to the movies.

This summer, food takes the spotlight in two of Hollywood biggest releases, plus a popular indie flick. Pixar's "Ratatouille" tells the tale of an ambitious rat who dreams of being a chef, while "No Reservations," which opens Friday, shows how food can bring two very different people together. "Waitress," meanwhile, casts pie as a key player in the story of an abused wife searching for liberation. Critics have proclaimed this the summer of food love: the triumph of supertasters over the Applebee's crowd. But what do the chefs think?

To find out, we invited six Washington chefs to a screening. Along with Armstrong and Wiedmaier, our critics were Ann Amernick, pastry chef and co-owner of Palena; Carole Greenwood, chef-owner of Buck's Fishing and Camping and Comet Ping Pong; David Guas, executive pastry chef for the restaurant group that owns, among others, DC Coast and Acadiana; and chef Joe Raffa of Oyamel.

Overall, the chefs gave "No Reservations," a remake of the 2001 German film "Mostly Martha," six thumbs up. But, like any group seeing itself portrayed on the silver screen, the panel couldn't help picking the film apart -- from such small details as the way Kate filleted a black bass (wrong) to the way she tried to tame an overbearing restaurant owner (right, but fruitless). It was the equivalent of a half-dozen nuclear submarine operators cringing at "Crimson Tide."

First, the food. Like the animators behind "Ratatouille," who hired the French Laundry's Thomas Keller as a consultant, "No Reservations" director Scott Hicks ("Shine," "Snow Falling on Cedars") says he went to great lengths to get the details right. New York's French Culinary Institute helped design the menu for the fictional 22 Bleecker restaurant and created the food for the set. The line cooks in the film were real line cooks (and no, not "actors" who happened to be making a living as line cooks). And a chef from New York's Fiamma Osteria was on the set to ensure that nothing was utterly unrealistic.

"It's like having technical advisers you'd have if you were doing a sword-fighting scene," Hicks said in a telephone interview. "You have to have people to tell you when you get it right."

Or, for that matter, wrong. And on that score, the Washington chefs caught quite a few kitchen bloopers the advisers missed.

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."