Admit it, Food Network changed your life. It opened up your perception to a whole new world of culinary excitement. Suddenly, you desired more. You developed romantic fantasies about your dinner plate. Food Network gave restaurant culture a new life, especially in larger cities. For every successul restaurant though, there are people surrendering their lives to it. It's not necessarily a tragedy, but blood, sweat, tears and a little insanity are often needed in order to achieve great things. SOUL KITCHEN is a movie about the gap between success and personal happiness. It's a quirky, versatile and surprisingly ambitious comedy/feel good movie that's kind of predictable, but enjoyable nonetheless.
Zinos Kazantsakis (Adam Bousdoukos) is the owner/chef of a local dive called Soul Kitchen. The restaurant is not very popular, but it manages to keep its head above water with a crowd of regulars. When his brother (the immortal Moritz Bleibtreu) is released from prison, his girlfriend Nadine (Pheline Roggan) is leaving for China and an old acquaintance from school (Wotan Wilke Mohring) is resurfacing on the same week, the dominos start falling and his life start changing at a ridiculous speed. Zinos meets chef Shayn Weiss (Birol Unel) at Nadine's going away party and his presence alone begins the transformation of Soul Kitchen. Almost overnight, the restaurant becomes THE new hot place in Hamburg. But success never shows up alone, doesn' it? It always comes with its quota of aggravation.
SOUL KITCHEN is not REALLY a comedy, per se, because it doesn't harvest laughter. It's a comedic film, it has tremendous timing (especially with Zinos' back injury), but it's trying to tell a story, first and foremost. There is only one scene that exists for pure comedic purpose (when Mortiz Bleibtreu takes vengeance on the impolite DJ), which was uproarious, but I appreciated that SOUL KITCHEN was about more than chasing laughs like that. It's not a movie that's easy to pigeonhole in one genre. Part of it is comedy, sure. But it's also a coming-of-age movie about fighting your own self-destructive instincts. It's also kind of a fictionalized version of Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, at least for the first half. The ambitious nature of SOUL KITCHEN is one of its calling cards. Movies that tackle that much material with efficiency are rare.
Hilariously americanized trailer for SOUL KITCHEN.
The knock on SOUL KITCHEN is that it's rather predictable. The screenplay is based on a recurrent structured used in Hollywood, called ''the hero's journey''. You've seen a lot of movies that were built like SOUL KITCHEN and it's rather easy to guess where it's going. For exemple, the characters of Mortiz Bleibtreu is a small-time criminal and a gambling addict. It's a question of time before he endangers the restaurant because of who he is. Thomas Neumann (Wotan Wilke Mohring) is quite early pinpointed as the antagonist. He keeps looming and looming around Soul Kitchen, but it's a question of time before he engages in destructive behavior and since the movie tackles a lot of themes, it takes forever until the narrative comes full circle. It would've been incredibly irritating in any other movies, but SOUL KITCHEN keeps you busy enough with comedy and social commentary about restaurant culture to make it digestible.
I liked SOUL KITCHEN. It's a good natured movie with a head on its shoulders. I don't think it's a movie that was meant to move mountains, but it certainly has a couple things to say about its subject. You know, I hate the phrase ''turning your brain off.'' Not wanting to torture your brain cells on a difficult movie is one thing, but turning your brain off is something else. SOUL KITCHEN is light-hearted and predictable, but will keep your mind working nonetheless. Maybe not every movie has to teach you something, but not every movie that teaches you something has to be pompous and melodramatic. You should watch SOUL KITCHEN for the swipes it takes at restaurant culture, yeah, but mostly because it's a fun, fast-paced movie that everyone can appreciate.