The way Jon Favreau sees it, the world is divided into people who are interested in food and people who aren’t.
“And I,” he declares, “am a member of the former category.”
That will be obvious to anyone who watches this weekend's new film Chef, which Favreau wrote, stars in and directed, and which displays food in a wonderful way.
Even a simple grilled cheese sandwich, prepared by a father for his young son, is almost too delicious to look at and evokes immediate empathy for this divorced dad trying to make a connection with his child in the most elemental way: through his stomach.
And it makes ours growl. Which is what Favreau is going for.
“There’s something hypnotic to me when I watch food being prepared on a cooking show,” he says. “And it’s amazing that it can actually make your mouth water.”
What his film Chef comes down to is a simple dish: the Cuban sandwich.
Carl Casper (Favreau) is a gifted but volatile chef at a swanky Los Angeles restaurant. His boss (Dustin Hoffman), orders him to play it safe on the night a major food critic is coming. Reluctantly, he does, and gets excoriated by the critic. Casper is fired and attempts to rebuild his life by going back to basics: sprucing up a filthy old lorry and using it to create the perfect Cuban sandwich.
To get the food right, the Los Angeles chef Roy Choi was brought on as a consultant and was on set every day.
“If you do a commercial, the food gets sprayed with glycerine and then gets thrown away,” Favreau says. “But when you’re dealing with a chef it’s about honouring the food. And so everything we cooked, we served up afterward.”
There was also serious training involved. John Leguizamo, who plays Casper’s buddy and line cook, spent a month doing research at a Manhattan restaurant.
Both speak of Chef as a passion project, which explains the happily-ever-after ending. Favreau confesses to having injected a dose of his own life view.
“You know, I think life’s hard,” he says. “I believe in my heart that if you’re a hero in your own story, then there’s a happy ending.”
Chef opens in the UAE today