For his culinary dramedy, expanding nationwide this weekend, Favreau turned to the celebrated chef to create dishes so tasty you would want to eat them off the screen. “I really tried to tell a story with the food,” said Choi.
John Leguizamo, Jon Favreau, Bobby Cannavale, and chef Roy Choi on the set of Chef
Open Road Films
With a title as direct as Chef — the indie dramedy written and directed by Jon Favreau (Iron Man) that is expanding nationwide this weekend — it is perhaps no surprise that the food in Favreau's film looks good enough to eat. And that's because it was.
"We were eating the food," Favreau told BuzzFeed. "There was nothing that we shot that wasn't amazing."
The food in Chef wasn't just delicious, though. (Warning: Some plot — and food — spoilers follow.) It was also crucial to telling the film's central story about lauded chef Carl Casper (Favreau), whose many years at a middlebrow Los Angeles restaurant have dulled his culinary senses so much that it takes a scathing review by a famed food critic (Oliver Platt) — and a subsequent social media meltdown — to jolt Carl back into making great food again. That journey comes to a head with a sequence in which the food critic is served Carl's old menu a second time while Carl, who has been fired, cooks up a far more adventurous — and mouthwatering — menu at his home.
With so many different dishes appearing on screen at the same time, Favreau turned to one of L.A.'s most celebrated cutting-edge chefs, Roy Choi, to construct it all. Choi, 44, became a star of the foodie world when he launched the food truck phenomenon with Kogi, which fused together Korean BBQ and Mexican cuisine so effectively that it has launched countless imitators. In addition to Kogi, Choi now oversees a string of Los Angeles restaurants. When it came time to find a culinary adviser for Chef — which ultimately leads to Carl starting his own food truck serving authentic Cubano sandwiches — Favreau understood that Choi's sensibility was so spot on for his story that he gave Choi an unusual degree of creative control over his movie. "His whole thing was, as long as you do it right, and as long as we get it authentic, he would put the work in and do whatever I needed and teach me whatever he could," said Favreau. "Everything — whether it was the script, what I was wearing, what I was cooking, what the kitchen looked like — everything was cleared through him."
John Leguizamo, Emjay Anthony, Jon Favreau, Oliver Platt, and chef Roy Choi at the SXSW Film Festival premiere of Chef
Michael Buckner / Getty Images
Choi took that wide latitude very seriously. "The way we designed the food, I really tried to get into Carl as a character, as a person, and what he was going through," he told BuzzFeed. "I really tried to tell a story with the food."
That proved to be a challenge when Choi was tasked with creating a menu that a food critic would not like.
"That was tough, man," said Choi. "It was really, really tough. It wasn't tough to create, but it was tough forcing yourself back there. Imagine some of the stuff you first wrote when you first started [in journalism], and having without judgment to go back to that place and use those same metaphors and same similes and ways of structuring your words, the over-the-top stuff before you kind of evolved. Going back there was weird."
Choi crafted a menu filled with what have become culinary clichés, including a poached egg topped with caviar, a bowl of French onion soup, scallops with beurre blanc, frisée salad, and filet mignon topped with a massive slab of butter.
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