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| FYI: Heathers is such a good freaking movie! |
These are screen shots from my actual account with my actual ratings.
CHEF'S TABLE - 4/5 ★★★★☆
I love hearing chefs talk about food, how they solved culinary problems, and what dishes and foods inspire them. This series is beautifully shot, and it features some really interesting chefs, but there are a few things that prevented me from giving this 5 stars.
There is only one female chef featured in the first season, and while the show does jump around to drastically different areas of the world, the chefs are mostly white males. This doesn't take away from their individual accomplishments in the culinary world, but it gets repetitive to watch and there's not as much diversity as I would have liked. (But that seems to be an issue in the culinary world in general.)
The series is very short, there are only 6 episodes and they're less than an hour each, so you can easily binge watch it in a weekend, but the best episodes (in my opinion) are 1, 4, and 6 because the people are so unique and passionate. I'd love to see a second season of this with some more diverse chefs.
So my last pick was a documentary series, this time we have a fictional movie about a Chef named Carl Casper (played by Jon Favreau). I don't think the Netflix summary does it justice, so here's my version.
Carl Casper was once an innovative young chef who received stellar reviews during his debut, but now he's a one trick pony at a high end restaurant. He's getting older and, due to the restaurant owner limiting him to his tried-and-true recipes, he's losing his passion for the craft and for life in general. After his paint-by-numbers menu is given a terrible review by a well known critic who once loved his food, he snaps. Casper confronts the critic and the horribly embarrassing altercation goes viral thanks to social media. He's lost his job and no restaurant will touch him, so he's gone from being a culinary golden-child, to owning a run down old food truck and starting over from scratch while bonding with his son, who up until this point has been on the back-burner due to his career.
This is a fun movie that will make you want to eat some really good food and visit some food trucks and dive-bars. It's a little on the cheesy side, and the main character has not one, but two extremely attractive young women as love interests, which seems a bit unlikely, but thankfully the romantic storyline takes a back-seat to the food and the budding father-son relationship.
Chef is a foodie-rom-com-rock-bottom kind of movie. It has some funny moments, mostly due to co-star John Leguizamo, but it showcases some really delicious looking food, and I really enjoyed it.
BOB'S BURGERS - 5/5 ★★★★★
Bob's freaking Burgers! I love this show so much. The amount of times I have re-watched the 4 seasons available on Netflix is almost embarrassing, but it's such a good show that I stand by my obsession. It's my go-to background noise/show when I'm stuck at my computer all day doing design work. When the first season aired I didn't watch it at all, since the animation looked odd to me, but I watched an episode from season 2, The Belchies, that referenced The Goonies (one of my favorite 80's films) and I fell in love. Now, I can't get enough!
The series revolves around the Belcher family, who run a small burger joint in a tourist-y town by the sea. The business is small, and it struggles, but Bob has a passion for food and from what other characters have said, he is really good at what he does. The only employees are his supportive, musical-loving wife Linda, who sings in nearly every episode in some form or another, eldest daughter Tina, who is dealing with a ton of puberty right now, son Gene, who makes songs using fart sounds on his keyboard and dreams of making it big in the musical world, and youngest daughter Louise, who an evil genius and a total daddy's girl.
This show has a similar feel to the earlier seasons of the Simpsons. There's wacky situations, plenty of comedy, some heart felt moments, and lots and lots of burgers. Every single episode there's at least one burger of the day shown on the white chalkboard inside Bob's restaurant, and it's always amazingly pun-y. The burger of the day gag is so popular, an actual chef is making them into real recipes for a cookbook, and several restaurants have made their own versions inspired by the show. Like Bob's "If looks could kale burger" (comes with kale), or the "Girls just wanna have fennel burger."
I love this show. Not every episode is a 5/5, but they always make me smile. (I personally don't like the Gene-heavy episodes, but they have their moments.) I recommend starting out with season 2, and working your way back to season 1, because the show took a few episodes to get things off the ground, but once it gets going, it's amazing.
Have you watched any of these? If so, what did you think?
Okay, I don't know if this will become a thing I do more often, but I tend to watch a lot of food-related shows, leave me a comment below if you liked this and would love to see more.
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