Food

2007 · Brad Bird · 111 min · Animation / Comedy

Ratatouille is Pixar operating at peak confidence, telling a story about a rat who wants to cook and somehow making it one of the most thoughtful animated films about creativity ever produced. The animation is stunning, Paris has never looked this good in any medium, and Anton Ego's climactic scene remains one of the most powerful moments in Pixar's entire catalog. Linguini is a bit of a blank slate and the romance never fully lands, but everything surrounding those weak spots is so assured and so smart that they barely register. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and earned over $620 million worldwide, and close to two decades later, it still holds up beautifully.

2009 · 5 Seasons · TBS · Drama

A beautifully understated anthology about a Tokyo diner that opens at midnight, where each dish served tells the story of a customer's life with warmth, humor, and quiet wisdom.

2015 · 7 Seasons · Netflix · Food Documentary

A gorgeously filmed documentary series that elevates food television into art, though its reverential tone and repetitive formula can wear thin across multiple seasons.

2000 · Anthony Bourdain · 320 pages · Memoir

Anthony Bourdain's 2000 memoir ripped the curtain off the restaurant industry and revealed a world of chaos, addiction, brilliance, and terrible behavior that the dining public never saw. His voice is electric on the page, his stories are outrageous and frequently very funny, and his love for the craft of cooking comes through even when he's describing its worst excesses. Some of the shock value has faded with time, and the book's structure is loose in places. But Bourdain's writing has an energy and honesty that most food writing still can't touch, and reading it now carries an additional weight that he couldn't have anticipated.

2014 · Jon Favreau · 114 min · Comedy / Drama

Chef is Jon Favreau's palate cleanser between blockbusters, a small, warm film about a celebrity chef who torches his career in a viral meltdown and rebuilds his life, his craft, and his relationship with his son from the window of a Cuban sandwich truck. The food photography set a standard the genre still chases, the father-son road trip supplies real feeling, and the film's love of process, knife work, mojo marinade, a perfectly pressed cubano, is infectious enough to send audiences straight to the kitchen. The conflict dissolves early and the wish-fulfillment runs unopposed. As comfort cinema with garlic, it remains the genre's gold standard.

2009 · Phil Lord, Christopher Miller · 90 min · Animation / Comedy

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs took a slim picture book and detonated it into one of the funniest animated films of its decade, a joke-a-second disaster comedy about a machine that makes it rain food, and the debut that announced Phil Lord and Christopher Miller as comedy's next great directing team. The gag density is absurd, the food-weather spectacle commits completely, and under the spaghetti twisters sits a sincere story about a father who can't say what he means. It's frenetic by design and thin in spots between the punchlines. As pure comedy per minute, almost nothing in the genre outdelivers it.

2009 · Nora Ephron · 123 min · Comedy / Drama

Julie & Julia braids two true stories across half a century, Julia Child discovering her calling in postwar Paris and a frustrated blogger cooking through Child's entire cookbook in a Queens apartment, and one half of the braid is among the great biographical performances ever filmed. Meryl Streep's Julia, warbling, towering, and radiantly in love with food, her husband, and her own late-blooming purpose, earns every frame, with Stanley Tucci matching her as the marriage the genre still measures itself against. The blog half is thinner by every measure, and the film knows it. Watch it for Paris, butter, and the best marriage Nora Ephron ever put on screen.

2023 · Ashley Poston · Fiction / Romance

The Seven Year Slip hands a grieving book publicist her late aunt's magical New York apartment, a home that occasionally slips seven years into the past, and lets her fall for the aspiring chef renting the second bedroom back then, a man whose present-day self she could meet any time she's brave enough to look. Ashley Poston runs the impossible premise as a grief novel wearing a romance's clothes, lemon pies and pistachio-sauce mornings against the ache of a life on pause. The magic follows feelings rather than rules and the middle idles a loop too long. The landing, when it comes, earns the tears it collects.