Popular wisdom has it that a good food-themed movie will leave viewers feeling hungry and craving the type of culinary repast featured in the film. But, then, it is not every day that a food-themed movie is like South Korea’s Le Grand Chef, which starts off with its chef protagonist being accused of inadvertently poisoning a group of gastronomic experts and goes on to see him carving up a gentle creature he had been treating like family!

This is not to say, however, that Le Grand Chef doesn’t possess its share of delicious scenes in which people are enjoying their food and taking great pains to prepare a variety of delectable-looking dishes. There is also a pretty funny subplot that has a fellow desperately entreating a former army buddy to share his secret recipe for making a bowl of ramen worth being beaten up for! For all this though, the film’s focus is a personal as well as professional rivalry between the handsome Sung-Chan (Kim Kang-Woo) and not so good-looking Bong Joo (Lim Won-Hie) that has its roots in a family feud and also links to a historic nationalist incident.

After being cast out of the centre of culinary excellence known as Woonam-Jung for the apparent crime of having failed to detoxify a fugu dish, Sung-Chan goes off to live in bucolic surroundings with his largely senile grandfather. Five years on, he seems surprisingly content with being a vegetable farmer cum seller, so popular with his middle-aged housewife customers that, when first approached by a pair of media folk, including perky Jin-Su (Lee Ha-Na), and told about an upcoming cooking competition (for the blade of a royal chef which has great symbolic value and the title The Royal Chef of Modern Times), his immediate inclination is to ignore the whole affair.

But, as nefarious villains too smarmy for their own good are apt to do in movies, certain of Bong Joo’s unsavoury actions backfire on himself and cause Sung-Chan to decide to publicly challenge the claim of the now head of Woonam-Jung for culinary supremacy. So, with the help of a few good friends, including Jin-Su, but mostly relying on his own considerable talents and genius, Sung-Chan enters the demanding national contest.

Since Le Grand Chef’s story arc is really very predictable, it is easy to figure out who will emerge as champion of the cooking competition. Additionally, it should come as no surprise that Sung-Chan will, at some point in the contest, be asked to once more prepare the dish that had caused him to be disgraced some years earlier. Still, director cum scriptwriter Jeon Yun-Soo makes up for the lack of plot creativity with a good amount of inventiveness in the parts of the film to do with food, both during and outside the cooking contest, and audiences will at least be left with little doubt of the inspiration for the imagination, and food for thought, culinary creations can provide!

Yvonne Teh