Jon Favreau is most renowned for kickstarting the Marvel Cinematic Universe with 2008’s Iron Man, remaking The Jungle Book and The Lion King in live-action for Disney, and creating The Mandalorian for Lucasfilm. But he’s also done plenty of acclaimed original work outside of the major blockbuster franchises. Favreau’s directorial debut Made is a delightfully goofy crime comedy, while his sophomore feature Elf is one of the funniest and most heartwarming Christmas movies ever made.
After directing the first two Iron Man movies and dropping out of directing the third one, Favreau returned to smaller-scale original stories with 2014’s Chef. The world isn’t at stake like it is in Marvel blockbusters – in Chef, the highest-stakes situation is whether or not a Cuban sandwich gets burned – but it’s a wonderful character piece with a poignant balance of comedy and drama.
In addition to writing, directing, and co-producing Chef, Favreau also stars as a celebrity chef named Carl Casper who works at a prestigious L.A. restaurant. After receiving a bad review and confronting the food blogger responsible at his table, Carl is fired from his job, and since his very public meltdown went viral on social media, he can’t get hired anywhere else. Out of options, he finally agrees to his ex-wife’s proposal to open his own food truck.
The supporting cast is filled with terrific actors, like John Leguizamo as Carl’s best friend, Sofía Vergara as his ex-wife, and Dustin Hoffman as his stubborn boss. Favreau also recruited a couple of high-profile MCU collaborators to play minor roles in Chef: Scarlett Johansson plays the hostess at the restaurant, while Robert Downey, Jr. cameos as Carl’s ex-wife’s ex-husband, the financier of his food truck and kind of a scumbag (which Downey plays hilariously as one would expect).
Chef Roy Choi, who owns his own food truck in real life, worked on Chef as a co-producer and made sure that all the on-screen food preparation was accurate. Choi’s contributions brought an authentic quality to the cooking in Chef. Even to viewers who wouldn’t know the difference if the culinary techniques were wrong, it just looks right. As a result, Chef has a well-deserved place in the pantheon of movies prized by foodies alongside Ratatouille and The Trip and Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Choi and Favreau went on to co-host The Chef Show, a Netflix cooking show spun off from the movie.
Visually, Chef is an absolute feast, but it has an emotionally resonant story to back it up. Above all, it’s a father-son tale. The opening scenes introduce Carl as a pretty lousy dad. In his strained relationship with his son Percy (Emjay Anthony), Carl is the kind of dad who leaves their kid waiting on the doorstep for hours. The heart of the movie is Carl reconnecting with Percy as he takes him across America in the food truck and teaches him how to cook.
Wanting to try out a new menu at a high-end restaurant when the manager wants to stick to the current menu is hardly a universally relatable problem, but Favreau presents Carl’s story in a way that is universally relatable. Carl follows his passions, doesn’t respond well to criticism, and wants to avoid getting stuck in a rut, which everybody can identify with.
On a meta-level, the story of a chef who leaves fancy restaurants behind to get back to his creative roots as the proprietor of a sandwich shop on wheels can be seen as an analogue for Favreau’s own situation. He made Chef to go back to basics after making a string of big-budget movies that left him inundated with studio notes. Setting an $11 million movie on the back of a truck allowed Favreau the kind of creative control that’s impossible to achieve with a mega-sized Hollywood blockbuster, just like Carl opens his own roving eatery to get more creative with his dishes than the owners of high-end restaurants allow.
In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, a comedy with a high-concept “food truck road trip” premise would jump right into it and bury the audience under a series of one-liners and slapstick gags. But Chef takes its time to introduce viewers to Carl before he hits the road at the midpoint. When he finally cleans out the truck and fires up the grill, Favreau has established Carl’s flaws and what he needs to do to fix them. Road trips are already one of cinema’s most overdone narrative frameworks, so road movies need to go above and beyond to stand out. Chef manages that by building up to its road trip storyline with layers of emotional substance.
With laugh-free duds like Dirty Grandpa and Holmes & Watson, the comedy genre has slowly died over the course of the past decade. But there are still a few diamonds in the rough that provide relatable characters, sharp storytelling, and above all, big laughs. Chef is a prime example: a sweet, heartfelt, life-affirming movie that avoids clichés and never falls into Hollywood’s usual schmaltzy pitfalls.