Comme Un Chef

Last time I watched a French movie, some cannibals started to fly spontaneously. No, not in real life, but in that visual stomach ache called movie. Still I am pretty sure, in real life as well, any respectable cannibal would have thrown himself off a cliff at the sight of it.

However, the French movie I watched last night was a nice surprise. Because instead of aiming at openly killing the cannibals, it was rather targeting their reconversion to humanity by alluring them with a non-human food: French Haute Cuisine! 

Yes, it was a sort of tribute movie to the great French gastronomy tradition, in the lines of Auguste Escoffier, Brillat Savarin and all the other big names that I absolutely don’t know. 

Why? Because, I already reached the top of culinary sophistication one time when I opened the fridge and the pork steaks were smelly, but since I had no plan B, I pretended it was viande faisandée (gamey meat), that is “game meat which has been given time to soften by the beginning of decomposition, and thus to take on all its aroma”. There you go! What do you want more? I reached the top and had to stop! 

So how was the movie? 

Cheesy to the bone! 

Is this the name of a French recipe and I don’t know ? 😛

But hey, it was a comedy after all, and it did make me laugh out loud a few times. The start was salty and à point! I savored the opening credits – so well done for the amuse-bouches!

Despite its highly glycemic tear jerker ingredients and the nauseous simplification of how life’s cooking us in the melting pot, this movie does give you something to chew on: your own nails!

It is dedicated to French gastronomy but its real topic is excellence. 

Excellence vs mediocrity: in which stew are you simmering in your life?

The grand chef Alexandre Lagarde is getting old and struggles to keep up with the culinary innovations of our times, like molecular gastronomy (Omg, I remembered my time in a Gran Canaria restaurant where they served reconstructed pork leg!)

And right at the height of its existential crisis, when his 3 Michelin stars are threatened, a little saving mouse shows up! Ok, it was a human, but this guy is exactly the reincarnation of Ratatouille, the genius cooking mouse in the eponymous movie cartoon. Exactly that mouse! A Mozart of cuisine, a freak of nature who tap dances in the realm of culinary excellence wrapped up in fairy dust! He looks greymousy, he talks greymousy, but when he is in the kitchen he’s a wet dream! 

Deep inside, if we are honest with ourselves, the hottest personal fantasy of any human is to tap dance wrapped up in fairy dust. Maybe not in the kitchen, not in the garden, not in the garage, but somewhere! 

Feel the fairy dust in your fingertips at least when you are licking stamps at your job as the postman who always rings twice 🙂 

Have you ever felt it?