La Cocina review - New York restaurant drama lingers too long

La Cocina is one of those films that cuts an excellent trailer, succinctly delivering just enough characters, plot and visual flair to entice an audience that enjoyed recent dramas set in restaurant kitchens like The Bear, Boiling Point and The Menu.

But if the trailer is a tightly-edited taster that whets the appetite, the film itself shows little evidence of the director’s ability to exercise similar restraint in the cutting room. At 139 minutes, La Cocina somewhat outstays its welcome, particularly with a series of false endings. To overcook this metaphor, it’s like going to a restaurant with an elaborate tasting menu where each dish is presented with an artistic flourish but you spend just a little too much time waiting around between courses. 

The film is inspired by Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play, The Kitchen, one of the first great workplace dramas. It grew out of the playwright’s own experience grafting as a sous-chef in London's Soho. Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios, has set his version in The Grill, an upscale brasserie in New York's Times Square that appears styled along the retro-chic lines of The Odeon in Tribeca.

The decor also echoes the mid-century setting of the original production. Wesker’s play – last seen in a heavily choreographed revival at the National Theatre in 2011 – focused on the contrast between gracious dining room and chaotic kitchen. Its theme was the tension between different nationalities in postwar Britain and Ruizpalacios has amplified it. Relocating the play to a modern-day city kitchen allows the director to tackle contemporary American obsessions with illegal immigration.

We first meet Estela (Anna Diaz, pictured below), the latest in a long line of undocumented hopefuls trying to work off the books in The Grill's kitchen. Her contact is Pedro (Raúl Briones), a hotheaded chef from her hometown in Mexico. Pedro is having a passionate affair with waitress Julia (Rooney Mara), but she doesn’t seem too sure about their relationship's future. Between Pedro throwing longing glances and exchanging blows with Max (Spenser Granese), another fiery cook, there’s quite a lot of fireworks.

It’s not exactly the League of Nations in this kitchen as tensions mount between Latin American, Arab, and African-American and the white staff. The bosses dangle the possibility of official paperwork that would secure illegal immigrants a future in America, but only as a way to ensure they work long hours for low pay. Ruizpalacios has added a few twists to the play: over $800 is missing from last night’s takings and both front and back of house staff are under suspicion. And is Pedro really in love with Julia or just using her to get a green card?

The lustrous black and white cinematography works brilliantly in the interior settings but isn’t quite so convincing in the outdoor scenes. There’s a poetic burst of colour in two key scenes when Ruizpalacios showcases his ambitions to elevate his film from a realist drama into a surreal vision. A chaotic first service is thrown into near biblical apocalypse when a soft drinks machine keeps pumping swirling dark liquid onto the floor of the kitchen.

Repeated jokes and a fable told by pastry chef Nonzo (Motell Gyn Foster) about a miraculous green light add to the fantastical atmospherics that lifts the film out of kitchen sink realism. Meanwhile Pedro giving away an expensive lobster to a hungry homeless man who once worked in finance brings the film back to its themes of inequality in the land of plenty.  

La Cocina didn’t do well at the box office in the US, perhaps because it’s not enough about the physical dishes that come out of restaurant kitchens. We live in an era where culinary journalism online is booming; Instagram influencers upload snaps of elaborate platefuls that they don’t eat or enjoy, just to prove they got a reservation at the hottest new restaurant. The Bear, Boiling Point and The Menu went heavy on relationships, hierarchies and family tensions but those dramas also focused on the lavish presentation of food. 

Ruizpalacios isn’t that interested in what’s being plated up in La Cocina. No-one is going to try and copy any of the dishes glimpsed here, unlike fans of The Bear and its Boursin and crisps omelette.

Personally I was relieved not to get dollops of on-screen food porn as I prefer watching people act when I go to the cinema rather than lavish close-ups of tweezers and micro-herbs. But the lengthy running time and the director’s inability to know when to let us ask for the bill and go home, stops La Cocina from being quite as great as it could have been.

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