Since the joy of eating out has been dashed by coronavirus quarantines, perhaps the best way to get in the spirit of sharing food is by curling up with a glass of wine and watching food-related movies. Many of the best are in fact set in restaurants, and you can watch again and again for what they tell us about the seductive interplay of food and wine, cooking and canoodling, elation and exhaustion.  Here are my faves.

 

Woman on Top (2000)—The breathtaking Penelope Cruz plays a brilliant Brazilian cook named Isabella—clearly the prototype for cleavage-popping TV chefs like Giada De Laurentiis—who cooks with such sensuality and abundant chilies that she trails an aroma that renders all men on two continents insensibly in love with her. This hilarious fantasy by director Fina Torres is one of the most joyous proofs that, as Isabella, says, “The secret ingredient in cooking is sharing it with someone you love.” The bossa nova music is a big part of the mix and the scenes of Bahia are gorgeous.

Mostly Martha (2001)—A German film about a beautiful workaholic haute cuisine chef (Martina Gedeck) whose perfectionism is a shield against intimacy, until she is forced to take in and cope with her late sister’s angry daughter and to be forced to compete with the highly emotional, operatic charms of a new Italian cook (Sergio Castellitto). Admirably re-made as “No Reservations” with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart, which is almost as good.

 

Big Night (1996)—One of the sweetest films of brotherly love ever made, with Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci as the owners of a 1950s New Jersey restaurant on the brink of disaster because the demanding chef Shalhoub refuses to cook insipid Italian-American food for undiscerning customers.  The feast they prepare for no-show star Louis Prima is as overblown and sexy as a Fellini-esque orgy, complete with the voluptuous Minnie Driver and Isabella Rossellini at the table, and the last kitchen redemptive scene, played without words between the two brothers, is as beautiful as anything made in the Silent Era of film.

 

Like Water for Chocolate (1992)—Yet another Latin-American fantasy, this film tells a series of erotic stories built around recipes. The exquisite cooking of th heroine, Tita de la Garza (Lumi Gavazos), causes all sorts of passions and emotions to collide within a Mexican ranch family. The climax comes when Tita and her lover bring so much heat to the bedroom that a fire literally consumes them and the ranch house, leaving behind in the ashes only her cookbook. The double meaning of the title refers to sexual arousal, as when boiling water is poured onto chocolate.

 

Babette’s Feast (1987)—I have never entirely warmed to this Danish movie about two sisters who live in the harsh environment of Jutland, where pleasures of any kind are considered quite sinful. But the arrival of a French housekeeper and cook, at first held suspect for her foreign ways, brings an awakening of modest sensual pleasure to the townspeople. It’s pretty cold and austere throughout, but the preparation and enjoyment of the beautiful food is worth seeing. 

 

Chocolat (2000)—Though seemingly a French movie, this is actually an American film shot in Burgundy and directed by Swedish-born Lasse Hallström, starring Juliette Binoche as a mysterious unmarried mother and artisanal chocolatier arriving in a very conservative French village. Johnny Depp is a river gypsy, Judi Dench is an embittered old woman, and Alfred Molina is a rigorously religious mayor—all of whom are seduced and changed by the taste of Binoche’s remarkable chocolates. There’s also a mouthwatering scene of a bourgeois backyard roast chicken dinner, and of the debauchery of wallowing in chocolate bliss. 

 

Tortilla Soup (2001)—A small, completely beguiling film about a Latino L.A. family whose widowed father and master chef (Hector Alizondo) tries to prevent his three daughters from leaving him for husbands, while he himself tries as hard to keep love at bay and to avoid a brassy, pushy woman played with engaging vulgarity by Raquel Welch. The youngest daughter, Carmen (Jacqueline Obradors), cooks with her father in beautiful scenes of closeness and breaking away. The movie is a remake of Ang Lee’s “Eat Drink Man Woman,” but I find the Latino style much more affecting.

 

The Hundred Foot Journey (2014)—A clash of culinary and social cultures—Indian and French—begins when an expatriate Indian family buys a restaurant in a small French town and names it Maison Mumbai and eventually the son, Hassan, wins acclaim in Paris for his fusion cuisine. But the drama is the fierce competition between the family and a French restaurateur (played impeccably by Helen Mirren), who seeks to put the newcomers out of business. All is well by film’s end, united by a love of food as a bond between all people, including those who live across the street.

 

Ratatouille (2011)—One of Pixar and Walt Disney Picture’s finest and oddest animated features, Ratatouille tells the story of a rat named Remy who lives secretly in a Parisian restaurant and learns all the chef’s secrets, which he passes on to a young cook who thereupon helps the restaurant win the praise of the toughest food critic in France (voiced by Peter O’Toole). As much for its superb computer-generated imagery as for its attention to every detail of a restaurant kitchen, the characters are fully rounded (literally and figuratively), the rat is goofy-looking but adorable and the whole screwy idea works for both children and adults.

 

Tampopo (1985)—Marketed as a “ramen western,” Tampopo (the name means “dandelion”) is a comedy about the search for secret recipes for noodles, but there are so many more smaller stories that include two lovers whose erotic experiments center around food, a women’s etiquette class on how to slurp noodles and much more. It is fast paced, borrows from American movie stereotypes and shows the way noodles are as much an obsession to the Japanese as pasta is to Italians.

 

Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)—Directed by Ang Lee and set in Taipei, Taiwan, is a tribute to the joys and frustrations of the family Sunday dinner, enforced by a stern widower with three independent daughters who try with respect to alter their father’s stringent views of how they should grow up, act and marry. The viewer will easily fall in love with all these characters for whom the dinner table is both a social necessity and a battlefield.

 
 

Vatel (2000)—Not really a great film by any means, but a view of  the decadence of the aristocratic courts in the time of France’s Louis XIV, when meals would extend over days and hosts tried to outdo each other through sheer extravagance. François Vatel, a real-life chef played by Gerard Depardieu, is a demanding perfectionist who would rather kill himself than work for Louis. Sumptuous in the extreme, it is also  fascinating in its kitchen detail.

 

NEW YORK CORNER
By John Mariani

©John Mariani 2020


CHAPTER TWO

        It was Teresa Santini who told her children of Michelangelo and Leonardo, of Dante and Manzini, and beyond that of the contributions the Romans had made to the world, followed by the extraordinary achievements of the Renaissance. 
    As happens with most children, Teresa’s attempts to impress her family with such a glorious legacy fell on dispassionate ears, for, after all, the children had spent their days in school learning about Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt, and they took for granted that Fiorello LaGuardia was one of their own, despite his mother being half-Jewish. 
    So, although Teresa had always favored her granddaughter Nicola because of her intelligence and beauty, she never deprived her other progeny of abundant affection, presents and individualized care, sitting for hours beside the bedside when one had the measles, going over their lessons for their First Holy Communion and telling them all the Italian fairy tales they loved, filled with princes and queens, witches and ogres, wolves and swans.

CITY ISLAND IN THE BRONX

        Nicola had a good deal of her grandmother in her and had long believed that she would find her own destiny outside of the neighborhood.  For however much she loved all her relatives and was proudly Italian-American, her dreams were of those places that her grandmother had always told her stories about.  One day, Nicola told herself, she would see Rome, Florence, Venice and Bologna—a kind of reverse emigration Teresa had encouraged in her granddaughter.
    Nicola’s mother and father, both born in the States after the First World War, were hard working and had done very well for the family.  Her father, Antonio Santini, called Nino by everyone, had picked up his father’s talent for tailoring and had worked his way up to a senior manager’s position at a prestigious women’s coat company named Originala in Manhattan.  Nicola’s mother, Anna, whose parents came from Naples, had completed high school and stenography classes and worked at some good secretarial jobs before her four children were born—Anthony Jr., Roseanne, Nicola, Natalie and Tommy.  It went without saying she would stay home and raise the children when they came. 
       Nino had tried to enlist in the Navy but was turned down because of a bad back, so during the war he was put in charge of making military uniforms at his company’s factory.  He and his workers were very proud when they learned that many of the American sailors wore his company’s pea coats and WACs kept warm in Originala overcoats. 
       The family had always lived in the Belmont neighborhood—made famous in the 1950s as the place where Dion and the Belmonts invented doo-wop music.  By 1980 the Santinis had moved into a two-story, four-bedroom house on Hughes Avenue, just a block from Teresa and Federico Santini.  
        By then Anthony Jr., had gone to junior college at C.C.N.Y., but found he liked the local restaurant business and had moved up from waiter to cook to manager of an Arthur Avenue pizzeria-restaurant named Bella Napoli, which he hoped to buy someday from its aging owner. 
        Roseanne married her high school sweetheart and had a baby within a year—Teresa’s first great-grandchild!—while Natalie and Tommy were both still in high school. Tommy, however, had shown extraordinary aptitude in math while in grammar school, skipped two grades and was accepted into the prestigious Bronx High School of Science in Bedford Park.  Tommy already spoke good Italian and, while at school, picked up passable Greek.  (All the Santini children had taken Latin in school.)
    Nicola, who everyone whispered was the most beautiful of the children, had never for a moment doubted she would go to college, and, buoyed by good grades and the anecdotal education she received from her grandmother, she won a partial scholarship to Columbia University, where she majored—as a star student—in art history, specializing, as might be expected, in the Italian Renaissance. 
    The Santinis were solidly middle class, nudging into the upper middle class, so Nino used to pretend exasperation by saying, “If I didn’t have all these damn kids, by now we’d be living in Westchester!”—the affluent county to the north—to which his wife would say, “Nino, what an awful thing to say!  We are the luckiest family we know.  Everybody’s healthy, we eat like kings, have nice clothes and everybody’s doing fine.”
    Nino would smile grandly, spread out his arms and say, “Hey, I’m kidding, I’m kidding! I’d rather live in the poorhouse with these kids than in a palace without them.” Then, still joking, “Well, maybe not with this one!” and he’d grab the cheek of the closest child, who’d pull away and growl, “Very funny.”
    Anna, whose own immigrant parents had come from poverty and had passed away after the war, would shake her head gravely and remind her husband that it was stupid even to joke about a poorhouse, and then she’d go off about her business.  But Nino never tired of the joke.

  CROSS BRONX EXPRESSWAY

 Still, in the years they’d lived in Belmont, many of the neighborhoods around them, especially to the south, had begun to decay rapidly.  To a large extent that decay was set in motion when the building of the Cross Bronx Expressway, linking the George Washington Bridge on the Hudson River to the New England Thruway on Long Island Sound, disemboweled the borough, disrupting old ethnic neighborhoods of Italians, Jews, Irish, blacks and Puerto Ricans that had co-existed for decades. Many old timers who could afford to moved to north Westchester or Rockland counties or west to New Jersey.
        Maintenance of the old apartment buildings declined, crime grew rampant, gangs of teenagers roamed the streets, heroin use festered like a pox, and the quality of the public schools—once the glory of the New York City education system—dropped precipitously.  The remaining white residents yanked their kids out and sent them to private and parochial schools, with names like St. Helena, St. Raymond and All Hallows, all run by various orders of nuns, brothers or priests. All the Santini children had, in fact, gone to parochial schools. Tuition was low, but too much for the new immigrant minorities. 
    Walking the streets of most Bronx neighborhoods in the 1970s and early 1980s, even the once glorious Grand Concourse, had become dangerous. Teenage gangs had long been a part of the Bronx—the Golden Guineas and the Fordham Baldies were well known in the 1950s—but now the kids carried guns and used them against rival gangs with names like the Savage Skulls, Ghetto Brothers, Black Spades and the Spanish Mafia.
    The Santinis were well aware of all the crime and poverty that swirled around Belmont. But, owing to the solidity of the Italian neighborhood, where everyone watched out for one another and where the restaurants and pizzerias threw light onto the streets till midnight, Belmont continued to have one of the lowest crime rates in the city.  The residents would say that you could leave your daughter alone in the back seat of a Cadillac convertible and neither she nor the car would ever be touched.

        Above Fordham Road, where  Fordham University, a Jesuit school, began its stretch northward, the Bronx was still green with parklands that dwarfed even Manhattan’s Central Park.  To the east was Orchard Beach, with its majestic though decaying art déco bathhouses. A little south of that was a maritime community called City Island, which jutted out into the rough Long Island Sound and looked exactly as it had since before the war. Its one-mile Main Street was flanked with sea captains’ 19th century houses, seafood restaurants, marinas and shipyards where a dozen 12-meter yachts were built for the America’s Cup races.                                               ORCHARD BEACH

    So, while Anthony Santini harbored a dream to someday move his family away from the blight around him, he and his family were very happy living exactly where they did in Belmont, where everything seemed—for the time being—safe and sound.  In fact, Anthony worried more about his daughter Nicky traveling south to Harlem to attend her classes at Columbia, so that if their schedules coincided, he would always pick her up in his car on the way home from Manhattan, meeting her at the school’s majestic Delacorte Gates on 116th Street and Broadway with its plaque that read "May All Who Enter Find Peace And Welcome." 
    And if Nicky was coming home late after classes, or hanging out with friends, Nino would lie awake, waiting for the sound of her key in the lock, remembering a time when no one in Belmont locked their doors.  Then he’d sigh to Anna, “She’s home. She’s safe and sound,” then drop off to sleep.

 

NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR