The Art of the Foodie Film

There’s no point comparing this season’s foodie movie, “A Chef in Love,” with last year’s “Big Night.” It’s not about being true to your art as exemplified in a single monumental dish. It’s more like “Babette’s Feast”--a paean to a great cook’s ability to transcend destiny. On the eve of the Soviet takeover of the Republic of Georgia in 1921, the hero makes an inspiring speech about how the eternal art of gastronomy will outlive any transient political regime.

Great stuff, and the exotic Georgian setting is beautiful, though you might wish for a little more detail on the food. When the chef meets a Georgian princess in a railway compartment, he whips up a salade composee while she’s out in the corridor having a cigarette. His palate is so sensitive he can identify all the ingredients in a Georgian sausage called kupati, including the kind of animal the soupcon of liver came from.

Under the new regime, the chef’s restaurant stops serving classic French poulet en demi-dueil and croquembouche and starts serving Georgian food. Nevertheless, from the attic where he is confined, his sensitive nose can tell that the new cook is messing up, so he sends a note recommending the right seasonings for everything--e.g., for a lamb stew called kaourma, cumin, marjoram and ginger.

All this is credible enough, even the chef’s supersensitive honker, but one scene is not: the one where a food photographer is evidently satisfied after taking about five shots of a dish. Try five rolls of film, and all the shots would look exactly the same to a lay person. Photographers have their art too.

Mr. Fast

Nobody’s neutral about TV personality Mr. Food. His fans love his air of jolly practicality and his simple recipes; foodies tend to see him as the spawn of the devil--or at least the resurrection of the open-a-couple-of-cans school of cooking that Julia Child and the post-’60s foodie movement were reacting against in the first place. Now, after 17 cookbooks, he’s started publishing a quarterly magazine, Mr. Food’s EasyCooking.

Surprisingly, a couple of foodies are involved in the first issue. John Mariani contributes an article on regional restaurants and James Villas a peculiarly defiant confession of his love of peanut butter. There are also articles on healthy foods, how to redo your kitchen cheaply and people who have made careers out of their cooking.

But mostly EasyCooking is Mr. Food’s recipes: a “bearnaise” sauce made by adding vinegar, tarragon and parsley to mayonnaise; a dessert called death by chocolate (brownies, chocolate toffee bars, chocolate pudding, frozen whipped topping), shortcut versions of recipes from “Joan Lunden’s Healthy Cooking” (use canned mandarin oranges instead of peeling fresh oranges). If this is your cup of tea, Mr. Food doubtless has a suggestion for brewing it faster.