Mendel Groner
Professor Sassone
ENG 101
November 2015
The Passion of the Cuisine
The movie Burnt is about a highly-skilled but terribly tormented man who feels that he is not adding enough to the table. His redemption comes when he realizes that not only does he add to the table, but the table is set because of him. He sees how so many other people need him to sustain their inspiration and continue with their passion and lust for perfect cuisine. When he finds that out, he feels at peace with himself and others. He begin to see the value — nay, necessity — of teamwork in the kitchen, and in all monstrously difficult achievements, including drug addiction.
Bradley Cooper acts as Adam Jones, a harsh, perfectionist, short-tempered chef who has ruined his career due to drug use and destructive behavior. He appears ten years later in the city of London, aiming to open a restaurant which will attain three michelin stars — one of the highest forms of regard a restaurant can achieve. He recruits a team and a sponsor to open his restaurant, Adam Jones: The Langham. Some of his team are acquaintances from Paris, where he worked before his ten year interlude. Some are new fresh faces. One of them is Helene (Sienna Miller), a single mother in whom Adam saw true skill. Over the course of the story, a romance between the two blossoms.
First thing, I’d like to say which was most prominent of the movie’s flaws: too much screen time was invested in the relationship between Adam and Helene. It was unnecessary, because Jones’ liberation came about completely regardless of her presence. It feels like it was just put in the movie because the director thought it would be boring without a significant romance involved, or because the main plot isn’t substantial enough. The character’s distress had not begun with her and she didn’t end it; it began ten years earlier with his original kitchen crew, all under the supervision of master chef John Luke, Adam’s mentor and father figure. Adam has felt like he failed John by not acting ethically. John, who was everything to him, was — in his eyes — disapproving of him. That is not immediately clear in the beginning of the movie. It is gradually unraveled by the plot that that is the source of his current drive to make a new restaurant and keep away from drugs. But, when at a pivotal point in the film, he believes (wrongly) that he has failed at his mission, he relapses. This is showing that up until now, he was only suppressing his inclination to get high, because he still didn’t feel at peace; something was missing in his conscious and heart that was pushing him over the edge. Two events occur which radically change this. One, is that after his relapse, he ends up at the restaurant of his rival, Reece (Matthew Rhys). In seeing Adam’s plight, Reece explains how Adam is truly a much better chef than his peers, and he is the one who kept the spirit going when they were under John Luke. Shortly afterwards, Luke’s daughter, Anne Marie (Lily James) presents Adam with her father set of knives. She says, “He sharpened them before he died. He said, ‘Adam likes everything perfect.’” With this, Adam realizes how much he meant to the person who meant the most to him. He is calm in the kitchen now, and enjoys when the kitchen works as a team rather than in a oppressive frenzy. This entire development is very believable. In any case, one can see how the romance has nothing to do with Adam’s personal journey to redemption.
I have recently read Marcus Sammuelson’s autobiography titled “Yes, Chef.” In it, Sammuelson chronicles his journey from Ethiopia to France to New York and everything in between. One attempts to draw parallels between these two stories of two great chefs, one fictitious, and one real. Such an individual may find it difficult. In certain fundamental ways, the two perhaps share mutual ideas, but in character and behavior and even taste, Adam and Marcus differ. First, let’s start with the passion for the cuisine. In this, they are both equally ambitious. In one of the beginning scenes, Jones remarks “When I was 16, I took all the money I had in savings and spent it on a one-way ticket to Paris” (Burnt). He went to Paris to work in a restaurant for none or very little pay. Marcus early steps follow a similar path. He went from place to place, always with just enough money to get where he was headed.
Work ethic. Both marcus and Adams are hard workers. It seems that that is an inseparable part of being a chef. Too long hours, high pressure. But the two people deal with it in different ways. While Marcus says that no matter how high the pressure was, “I was always working with a sense of urgency, not panic” (189). Marcus mentions how, for years, he would vomit every day because of the pressure. He seemed, however, to deal with it in a very mature and admirable way. Jones, on the other hand, when in the kitchen is the angriest chef in the world. Practically every third word coming out of his mouth while directing the kitchen was a curse word. He is constantly worried and throwing finished dishes at the wall because he doesn’t believe that they’re good enough. He also had a serious drug problem in his former years. It is implied that this was due to the amount of pressure he felt to perform. In fact, at the culmination of the movie, when Adam is redeemed, he is calm and patient as chef.
One of the emphases in Marcus’ ideas about food is the diversity of it. He wishes to veer from the traditional dishes and french ways of making certain foods, and wants to blend all the amazing flavors of all the different ethnicities which he’s seen and come to know. He wants to make something that has many cultures speaking in it as one. While the movie does not stress this idea about Jones’, it seems that this is what he wants too. There is a montage where he is travelling through different areas of London, tasting different exotic ingredients and foods and asking about them, reminiscent of Marcus’ travels through New York City. He also mentions how he “wants to make people have a culinary orgasm” (Burnt) and goes on to explain how he wants his food to blow people away. From all this it is derived that he too wishes to introduce something new to the history of fine dining, even while still retaining the tradition he had learnt in Paris years ago.
Overall, the tale of Adam Jones is very different from Marcus Samuelson’s story. Adam Jones is a broken man looking to be fixed, while Marcus is a hard worker who wants to prove his worth to himself and his loved ones. But the underlying current of the two is the passion of the cuisine. Like religious zealotry, it cannot be waived as unrelatable and ambitious blindness to outsiders attempting to understand the way of the Crusaders. This tenet is a unifying chain which is perhaps stronger than the distinctive individual plights of these two great chefs. So, in a way, “Yes, Chef” and “Burnt” are two in a series of “the passion of the cuisine”, and in another way, they are two separate stories about two separate quandaries which one can find his or herself trapped in.
Works Cited
Burnt. Dir. John Wells. Perf. Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller. The Weinstein Company, 2015. Film.
Samuelsson, Marcus. Yes, Chef: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2012. Print.
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