Food Goes Hollywood

Have you noticed how much more entertaining chefs have become? Once upon a time, they were anonymous backstage laborers, sometimes amusingly temperamental ones. Now they’re showing up more and more as characters in dramas. The kitchen is going front stage.

Television, which spawned the modern foodie movement with Julia Child, has actually been a little slow off the mark here. One character in the 1980s sitcom “Three’s Company” was an aspiring chef, but Jack Tripper was devoted to stuffy, old-fashioned French food. Even while California Cuisine was exploding all around him, his ideal was Raymond Oliver of Le Grand Vefour in Paris, a great chef, but nowhere near the cutting edge.

Beginning in the ‘90s, “Friends” has had its own aspiring chef in Monica Geller, whose obsessiveness clearly makes her a good cook. But her adventures have revolved around ordinary personal conflicts with her boss and co-workers. Apart from providing scope for getting her spotless chef’s jacket dirty, they could be happening in an office.

Meanwhile, a lot of people have shown they’re interested in what actually goes on behind the scenes at the gastronomic pleasure palaces they visit. There’s a market for the arcane backstage stuff.

This season’s “Emeril” on NBC is a backstage show about a TV cooking show. Time will tell whether Emeril Lagasse’s personality will translate to a sitcom, but “Emeril” shows food in a lot more detail than any network drama ever has.

Of course, restaurant chefs have also become, in effect, athletes, with the cable Food Network’s Japanese-produced series “Iron Chef,” which is about nothing but nuts-and-bolts cooking--under a lot of pressure.

UPN has filmed two contests in much the same format: “Iron Chef USA: Showdown in Las Vegas” features William Shatner as host. Talk about entering the mainstream.

But on the whole, movies and live theater have been going further. You only have to think of 1987’s “Tampopo” and its quest for the perfect noodle, 1988’s “Babette’s Feast” with its celebration of a (retired) chef’s spiritual resources and 1996’s “Big Night,” about winning artistic acceptance from the dining public. All showed kitchen work in appetizing detail. Tony Shalhoub, the chef in “Big Night,” hung out with Los Angeles chef Fabio Flagiello to get the feel of restaurant work.

In 1994, years before his “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Hong Kong director Ang Lee showed Chinese food in luscious detail in “Eat Drink Man Woman,” a drama about a restaurateur facing the fact that his three daughters don’t want to follow him in the business.

This year’s “Tortilla Soup” translates the story to East Los Angeles, and the restaurant connection is even closer. The food was designed by Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger of Border Grill, Ciudad and other Southland restaurants. The appetizing shots of food preparation were largely performed by Paul Rosenbluh, chef at the soon-to-be-opened Bayou Bar & Grill in Alhambra. To add the final foodie touch, parts were filmed in the Encino kitchen of Larry and Doris Silverton, parents of Nancy Silverton of Campanile.

The film rights to Times columnist Michael Ruhlman’s “The Making of a Chef” and “The Soul of a Chef” have been optioned by Universal Studios. How will those books translate to the screen? All we can say is that the writing and direction will be by Chris and Paul Weitz of “American Pie.”

Now that Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” has ridden the best-seller charts for more than a year, it’s become plain that the public is ready to see the restaurant at its grittiest: as brutal, high-pressure work. And perhaps it’s not coincidental that the people involved in presenting that picture have experience in the food biz.

Take “Fully Committed,” a one-man stage show about an actor who works as the reservation clerk at a fashionable New York restaurant, which has had a long run in New York and on the road, including six months in Los Angeles.

Author Becky Mode and actor Mark Setlock, who created the role, have worked in restaurants; Setlock was the reservationist at Manhattan’s savagely fashionable Bouley (and cordially hated the job). “Fully Committed” is a tour de force, the actor performing more than 30 roles in 80 minutes, including the owner, a doddering old lady, an arrogant chef, employees who aren’t going to be in on time, his father and various highhanded diners.

If anything, there’s even more restaurant background in the new film “Dinner Rush.” Director Bob Giraldi owns 10 restaurants; executive produce Phil Suarez has developed several restaurants and co-founded (with co-producer Patti Greaney) a chefs’ Web site, https://www.starchefshttps://.com.

“Dinner Rush” makes the backstage doings at a restaurant the center of the action to the greatest, and grittiest, degree yet. Though the main plot involves a chef taking over the restaurant from his father just when the Mafia is trying to muscle in, the script is crammed with pungent restaurant characters, such as a receptionist who’s two-timing with the chef and the sous-chef, an arrogant diner dissing his waitress and a sardonic restaurant critic (a performance of pure, glittering brass by Sandra Bernhard) being shamelessly feted by the chef.

Above all, “Dinner Rush” gives a vivid picture of the down-and-dirty line chefs, handling every horrific emergency with gallows wit. If anybody ever doubted that a restaurant is a natural scene for drama, “Dinner Rush” should settle the question. It’s “ER” with less blood and more parsley.