For many people, a “food movie” is where the preparation and cooking of food are the focus. At the defunct Copia, the American Center for Wine, Food and the Art in Napa Valley, California, there was a room where scenes from “food movies” were projected and visitors were made to identify the movie titles. For me, however, a food movie should focus not on the food but on the story. Food should be just a setting or props complementing the story.

For instance, Danish film “Babette’s Feast” is supposed to be the ultimate “food movie.” I have heard that some chefs even had a viewing party and identified the French dishes cooked by the French chef Babette—turtle soup, roasted quail in puff pastry with foie gras served with truffle sauce, rum sponge cake with figs and candied cherries.

While Babette does tell her story, as important is the story of the two Danish sisters, daughters of a Protestant minister in Jutland, who decide not to marry their distinguished suitors and instead stay single and assist their pastor father take care of his congregation while living a spartan life devoid of sensual luxury.

How they and the remaining congregation of their late father react to Babette’s feast provides the resolution and the point of the story.

The funniest introduction to a nominated foreign film at the Oscars was the host imitating how Arnold Schwarzenegger would say the title—“Eat Drink Man Woman”—in his scary macho Austrian accent. The film from Taiwan opens with the father preparing dinner for his three daughters.

Some would classify it as a food movie, where preparing and cooking the food is the story. But the food isn’t as important as the story of the father, a distinguished Chinese chef who has lost his acute sense of taste but not his cooking expertise, and about his three unmarried daughters all looking for romance.

 

Ultimate ramen

Making the ultimate ramen is what most people remember as the plot of “Tampopo,” the Japanese film described as a “ramen Western.” But that is only one of the stories in that movie. There is the lesson for women wanting to learn how to slurp spaghetti noodles. Another is about a young corporate nobody who knows how to order in a French restaurant, to the consternation of his bosses who don’t.

But what cracked me up was the scene where a hobo retrieves a wine bottle from the dump and describes it with words a wine connoisseur would use. First he says that 1980 was a bad year for Bordeaux, then he decants the 1980 Chateau Pichon Lalande and describes the taste as “light but firm,” describing further how “the tail that trailed down my throat was so long.”

“Toast” surprised me the first time I watched it because it is the story of future chef and food writer Nigel Slater. Growing up in an English town, he repairs to toast, his comfort food, when his mother’s attempts to cook fail dismally even if she is only heating canned food. His stepmother, however, is a great cook, and his teen life is spent trying to outdo her dishes, starting with lemon meringue pie.

 

Historical drama

None of my friends in food know “A Chef in Love.” Its online description as a “comically accented historical drama with culinary appeal” is apt.

It tells the story of a French chef who tires of Paris and goes to Russia in the early 20th century for a change of flavor and ends up in Tbilisi, Georgia. His main talent is a keen sense of smell, so he can tell what the ingredients are in a dish. That is how he’s able to tell that the president’s food has been poisoned, and having foiled the assassination attempt, he’s rewarded with a restaurant.

The historical part is how the Soviet Army invaded Georgia in 1921 and made it a part of the Soviet Union, forcing the chef to flee and abandon not only his restaurant, but also his young wife.

Those are my favorite movies that happen to have food in their narratives.

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