26 best food moments in film
Why are food movies so appealing? Maybe it’s the sensual pleasure of food. In so many movies, food has the power to bring people together, or release their inhibitions. It’s comic relief, and it’s serious business. Meanwhile we in the audience can only sit there — in the dark, with our popcorn — feasting our eyes. Here are 26 great moments.
1. The chocolate room in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory — Few scenes are as magical as Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) unveiling his chocolate room to the five lucky golden-ticket winners, where everything they survey is edible. As the children and their parents scatter to taste the earthly delights, Wilder sings Pure Imagination, about how sugar mixed with a little ingenuity has the power to send every kid straight to heaven, and to turn every adult into a child again.
2. The feast in Babette’s Feast — Babette, who cooks for two spinster sisters living on Denmark’s remote Jutland peninsula, has a secret. She was the legendary chef of Paris’s famous Café Anglais. When she wins 10,000 francs in the lottery, Babette decides to blow all her winnings on one great meal she cooks for the sisters and the pious townsfolk.
Too bad they’ve renounced all sensual pleasures and refuse to comment on the meal, much less compliment it. Fortunately, the feast — a wondrous menu that includes an amontillado, blinis Demidoff au caviar and caille en sarcophage (quail in puff pastry with foie gras and truffle sauce) — has one very vocal fan, a former suitor of one of the sisters who’s now a famous general.
3. The deli scene in When Harry Met Sally — Not so notable for the food — which is just sandwiches and salad — but the improbability of Meg Ryan faking an orgasm in a public restaurant to prove that women do so, Billy Crystal’s mounting discomfort level as she ends with “Yes! Yes! YES!” and the punch line from a nearby patron: “I’ll have what she’s having.”
4. The five-dollar milkshake in Pulp Fiction — Jackrabbit Slim’s has to be the best theme restaurant ever portrayed in cinema, with its celebrity impersonators, twist contest, and that $5 milkshake. Hit man Vincent (John Travolta) can’t believe anyone would pay that much for what is essentially milk mixed with ice cream, but after getting a taste, declares, “Goddamn, that’s a pretty f***ing good milkshake. I don’t know if it’s worth five dollars, but it’s pretty f***ing good!”
5. The opening credits of Eat Drink Man Woman — The father of the three female leads is a Chinese master chef, and as the movie opens, we see him in his home kitchen turning live produce into dishes like wok-fried fish, chicken soup and dim sum dumplings. So mouthwatering are all the food sequences that I actually heard people’s stomachs growling in the theater, and when the movie ended everyone made a beeline for Chinatown.
6. The restaurant scene in In the Mood for Love — More about mood than food, lonely spouses Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung are forever passing one another on the stairs of their favorite restaurant … she’s getting takeout, he’s about to dine in. It’s all about paths crossing, missed opportunities, and the possibility of finally coming together. Set to the melancholy violin of Shigeru Umebayashi’s Yumeji’s Theme, it’s heartbreakingly beautiful and unbearably romantic.
7. Remy fixing the soup in Ratatouille — The soup’s on at Gusteau’s but it lacks a certain something … Remy knows precisely what, but there’s one little problem: he’s a rat. But you don’t choose your calling; it chooses you, and despite the logistical problems he faces, Remy climbs up a soup ladle and, in a glorious sequence, starts elevating the broth into something truly great … that is, until someone suddenly turns the lights on and Remy’s caught in the act.
8. The soufflé-making scene in Sabrina — Sabrina (Audrey Hepburn), the chauffeur’s daughter, goes to Paris to learn about life, and one skill it seems every French woman must have is how to make a soufflé. At her cooking school we glean the secret of making those whipped eggs rise, not fall: “It’s all in the wrist.”
9. Mickey Rourke feeding Kim Basinger in 9 1/2 Weeks — Instructing her to keep her eyes closed, Rourke places a succession of suggestive foods into Basinger’s ripe mouth, from grapes to strawberries (“Ooh, a big one,” Kim coos) to squirts of honey, which he then proceeds to spread all over her thighs. The ne plus ultra of food porn.
10. All the vignettes in Tampopo — Juzo Itami’s Tampopo is possibly my favorite food movie of all time. I’m a noodle freak, and it’s a “noodle western,” about a Japanese cowboy who helps a struggling widow set up her own ramen bar. His scene about the proper way to approach and appreciate a bowl of soup is classic, and the movie is sprinkled with food vignettes that range from sexy to laugh-out-loud funny, like a Yakuza gangster and his moll passing a raw egg yolk from his mouth to hers, or the corporate salaryman who shows up his bosses by demonstrating his foodie knowledge at a gourmet French restaurant.
11. Maya’s wine monologue in Sideways: “I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing; how the sun was shining; if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it’s an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I’d opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity.” By the end of her speech, both we and Miles are in love with her.
12. The 50-egg challenge in Cool Hand Luke — To win the respect of his fellow inmates, prisoner Luke (Paul Newman) bets that he can eat 50 hardboiled eggs in one hour. Gobbling them whole (those hardboiled eggs are slippery!), the challenge almost ends up killing him, but in the end Luke prevails.
13. Like Water for Chocolate’s quails in rose-petal sauce — Talented cook Tita receives a rose bouquet from beau Pedro, and she immortalizes his gift in a dish he calls “the nectar of the gods.” Everyone at dinner has a visceral reaction to what Tita serves: her mother finds it too salty, her sister feels sick, while Pedro consumes — and is fully consumed by — Tita’s love on a plate.
14. The pie eating contest in Stand By Me — A boy ridiculed as “Lardass” plots his revenge on the town during a blueberry pie-eating contest. Downing castor oil beforehand to ensure a truly gross result, Lardass gorges on pie to the point of projectile vomiting, inducing one epic barf-o-rama the town will never live down.
15. The omelet in Big Night — After their big night preparing for a famous guest who never arrives, two brothers who run a restaurant quarrel. In the final scene, younger brother Stanley Tucci enters the kitchen where a waiter is sleeping, and starts making an omelet. He dishes it out for himself and the waiter, tearing off pieces of bread. At first you think it’s about how the simplest of dishes can be the most comforting, until older brother Tony Shalhoub arrives. Tucci shares the rest of the omelet with him, and the brothers put their arms around each other as they eat, in the ultimate conciliatory gesture.
16. Making spaghetti sauce in The Godfather — Clemenza teaches Michael Corleone the finer points of a good ragu, in case he ever needs to “cook for 20 guys someday.” It’s quick, it’s easy, and so much more effective than the kissing cousins’ gnocchi rolling in Coppola’s bloated Godfather 3.
17. The raw-egg cocktail in Rocky — As part of his training for his fight versus Apollo Creed, Rocky wakes up at 4 a.m. every day and saunters over to the fridge for breakfast: three raw eggs he cracks one-handed into a glass and doesn’t even bother to stir. Let’s hear it for pure protein!
18. The chocolate-making scenes in Chocolat — Single-mom Vianne (Juliette Binoche) comes to small-town France and shocks the traditional townspeople with her liberated ways. Luckily she’s a gifted chocolatier, and her decadent confections bring them around one by one. Chocolate has that transcendent quality, but we chocoholics already knew that, didn’t we?
19. The prison dinner in Goodfellas — Wiseguys do time in what seems less like jail and more like a high-end Italian restaurant. They split kitchen duties: Pauly slices garlic paper-thin with a razor blade, Vinny’s in charge of the tomato sauce (“You got to have the pork — that’s the flavor”), Johnny pan-roasts the steaks (they also have fresh lobster in the icebox), while Henry bribes the guards so he can smuggle in salami, scotch and wine — life is sweet on Mafia row.
20. The mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind — During dinner, Richard Dreyfuss starts sculpting the Devil’s Tower out of a mound of mashed potatoes while wife Teri Garr looks on in disbelief. When the kids start crying, Dreyfuss reassures them with, “Well, I guess you’ve noticed there’s something a little strange with Dad.”
21. The bologna in Take the Money and Run — Failed criminal Virgil Starkwell (Woody Allen) is on the run with his pregnant wife, and they’re so hard up they can barely afford food. A meal consists of Virgil opening his wallet and taking out a slice of bologna, which he proceeds to unfold for the entire family to share. Painfully funny.
22. The Thanksgiving dinner in Gold Rush — Times are tough in the Klondike, and Charlie Chaplin resorts to serving boiled shoe for Thanksgiving dinner. Watch him carefully remove the “bones” — the nails — from the heel and chew his way through a slice of “tongue,” then casually twirl his shoelaces on a fork like a mouthful of spaghetti. Priceless.
23. The ”world’s most fabulous meal” in Who’s Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? — Pastry chef Jacqueline Bisset and other chefs in a London kitchen prepare a meal fit for the Queen: baked pigeon in crust stuffed with goose, cognac, truffles and aspic; fresh Venetian lobster; pressed duck; and Bisset’s specialty, “Le’ Bombe Richelieu.” Then they drop dead, one by one, in a poetically fitting manner. Not sure what’s more appetizing: the spreads of outrageously gorgeous food and produce, or Bisset spreading crème layers over her “Bombe Richelieu.”
24. The arrival of food in La Grande Bouffe — Not to everyone’s taste — four friends weekend in a French villa and attempt to gorge themselves to death in Marco Ferreri’s 1973 black comedy — but you can’t argue with the method of suicide: a van full of goodies, including wild boar, a dozen chickens, a cow’s head, “two dozen semi-wild guinea fowl fed on grain and juniper,” “two superb deer with soft eyes,” “five innocent salt-meadow lambs from Mont Saint-Michel” and so on. It’s all in the details.
25. The visual feast in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover — The titular thief, played by pre-Dumbledore Michael Gambon, owns a fine French restaurant. He pretends to be a gourmet but is strictly noveau-riche — he wouldn’t know a duck al’orange if it bit him in the ass. He terrorizes wife Helen Mirren, who retaliates by having an affair with a refined bookshop owner. Rife with sex, violence, and scatology, this is more of an anti-food movie that will probably kill your appetite instead of whetting it, but so beautifully art-directed by Peter Greenaway (costumes by Jean Paul Gaultier!) that it’s a must-see.
26. The spaghetti slurp in Lady and the Tramp — Tramp takes his Lady to Joe’s Restaurant in this Disney classic. Of course they’re dogs, so table manners are pretty much ignored as they slurp up spaghetti from a common plate. Captivated by Joe’s accordion serenade, they don’t notice their last strand is drawing them together for a kiss. Tramp gallantly nudges the last meatball toward Lady with his nose. Ah, dog love.
