There’s a New Food Movie Out—and It Doesn’t Suck

UPDATE: We're giving away free shit!

Chef just came out on Blu-Ray and DVD, so we're giving a Blu-Ray pack and some tote bag swag to two lucky contestants. All you have to do is scroll down to the bottom of this post to enter-to-win.

For all you ungrateful urchins who have no idea what to do for their mothers tomorrow, Jon Favreau is here to save your ass. His new film, Chef, just hit theaters yesterday. It's got all the fixings for a great mom date: XXX-rated food porn, lots of Tito Puente jams, and plenty of warm and fuzzies. It's a movie that much of the food media has been breathlessly documenting—consequently, I was extremely dubious about if it would live up to the hype. But the resulting film harkens back to Jon's indie roots, which have been long-buried since he started working on projects like Iron Man.

This dude put in some serious legwork to get all the details right, down to the sad, lonely parts of a chef's life that are seldom seen in pop culture. We respect that. So I hopped on the phone with Jon to chat about the months of culinary bootcamp he was subjected to, this crazy thing called social media, and making memories, you know? Don't forget to check out the exclusive clip below.

MUNCHIES: You had quite a bit of training—both in culinary school and working in the kitchen with Roy Choi—for this movie. How long did that take? Jon Favreau: That was a while actually. I shadowed Roy the first night for like six hours from restaurant to restaurant. It became like a ride-along actually, like you would do on a cop movie, where you ride along with a cop in the car. He was talking me through everything he was doing, going through the walk-ins, tasting the mise, having conversations with everyone from the sous to the dishwasher. Then he said, "You will not step foot in my kitchen until you are properly trained." I thought he'd be training me. But no. He said, "People are better at that than me. I don't train." So I spent like two weeks in a culinary school with a traditional French chef—he was great—chef Bernard. It was in a big classroom and I somehow got him one-on-one from like 6 AM, all day. There he was, teaching me how to tie my apron, how to handle my knives, cleaning garlic, all the way to my knife cuts, tournées, and mother sauces…making demi glace and stock and consommé. It was everything that I had read about culinary school, but accelerated into a few weeks. Then I worked with Roy for three months.

That's a long time. It was a long time. I was prepping at first. I thought there'd be some sort of training orientation, but there wasn't. They throw you in on the line during a service and they show you once, they show you twice, and then you're doing it. And then as the service becomes heavier, you start taking on more and more responsibility within that service. Next thing you know, time stops and you've worked an eight hour shift. You have a deli container full of ice water and it's the best thing you've ever had in your life.

With all the time you've invested, would you ever return to a professional kitchen again? Yes, I'd love to. I'm installing one in my house slowly—to my wife's chagrin—ripping out the granite and putting in stainless steel and pizza ovens and lock rings and exhaust hoods that could pull hairpins out of people crossing in front of it. Now that I know these people, I'd love to continue the adventure. I don't think I'll be working the line, but I would love to be involved with it.

One of the keys to this movie's success was how much time you put in the research; Anthony Bourdain also tweeted a couple times about about how you got the important details right. This applies to the food, yes, but also about the realistic depiction of the life of a chef: long hours, sacrificing your personal life, etc. Why was this important to you to depict? Well, part of it is where I'm at in my life and seeing versions of this happen in the movie business. In the restaurant business, it's long hours and people working weekends and holidays. They kiss their sleeping children before they go to bed and maybe see them for breakfast, and that's all the interaction they have. In the film business, you have people who go out of town for months at a time. Like whalers, you know? It's a cruel twist on living your dream: It's going to keep you from having a good shot at a healthy personal life.

I also found the portrayal of the chef/restaurateur relationship interesting, especially since the key to Carl escaping this situation—willfully or not—is social media. Twitter is almost like its own character in the movie. How do you feel that social media has affected chefs' roles and the restaurant industry in general? There's this wonderful flat playing field that social media creates. In the movie, the father puts his foot in it and the kid, who is native to the digital age, is able to show him a more nuanced, human side to it. I think that's part of why chef culture has bloomed: You don't have to wait in line and work your way up and play by the rules to get your vision through. If you are talented and have something good to say and will work hard, you can start your own pop-up or food truck; if you're good, the word will spread. You know the profit margins aren't the same as with the traditional brick and mortar businesses, but you can make a living and build something, as Roy Choi did. Now there's an empire of a half dozen restaurants and they're all good and different. Maybe this generation is different, but the generation that's my age never entered into the culinary world as a pathway to fame. It was always a calling, a passion. They were the people in the back room who spoke through their food, who spoke through what came through the window and was served. But the idea of a celebrity chef whose tweets are picked up by blogs…that's something that nobody [considered]. The generation of chefs my age are ill-equipped as a rule to handle that. Do you feel like digital culture changed the way we eat, then? In the digital age, everybody is staring at their phones and nobody is talking directly to each other. But people have a personal connection to the food they're putting out, so much so that it makes you stop everything you're doing to experience that specific moment. Food demands that you experience right then and right there, at peak flavor, at the right temperature, in that moment. When I started learning about food, I was like, All this work for something that's just gone? But what I realized was that the moment that exists only in that one flash is something that you'll never forget if it's perfect. Eating with Roy Choi at the chef's table at Emeril's when we were just on the way back to the airport after doing a Top Chef episode in New Orleans, having him serve plate after plate and explain everything, and watching him and Roy connect with such presence and such mutual respect—I'll never forget that. And there are movies that I've been in that I can't even remember the names of. You know what I mean? But that meal, I'll always remember.