The title, Burnt (2015), says much about how I feel about the restaurant business.  Amongst my closest family and friends, I am just about the only one who has not worked in that industry.  My parents and my sister all held positions in food service, as with my best friend from high school, and some of them have been in management positions.  In each of them, I observed a soul sucking occupation with long hours and little reward.  If you make it into those august places where you are in charge of a kitchen or the overall running of the restaurant, the pay is good but the pressure is commensurate.  If this describes your employment, then I pray for you.  Having all this in mind, why do people do it?  For today’s main character, the ambitious and famous chef Adam Jones (Bradley Cooper), it is an obsession to gain more fame and fortune at any cost.

As we see early on in Burnt, this pursuit has cost him much.  He has already earned two of the highly coveted Michelin stars while working in one of the best restaurants in Paris.  However, that soul sucking lifestyle I mentioned led him into the use of alcohol, drugs, and becoming a womanizer, destroying his personal life no matter his achievements.  We meet him as he is completing his self-imposed penance, shucking 1,000,000 oysters at a dive in New Orleans.  Taking with him two years of sobriety, he heads to London to make a run at getting a third star.  To do so, he first approaches Tony Balerdi (Daniel Brühl), whose father owned the restaurant in Paris in which Adam had worked.  Tony, like many of the people we are about to meet, are not happy to see Adam, the chef having ruined the lives of many people he knew in France. Despite trying to get rid of Adam, he tells Tony that the hotel’s restaurant will soon be his.  One person who is friendly to Adam is Conti (Henry Goodman), an old industry friend who introduces Adam to one of his cooks, Helene Sweeney (Sienna Miller).  She had prepared the dish Adam had eaten at Conti’s place, and Adam wants to recruit her.  She is aware of Adam’s reputation and rejects him until he gets Conti to fire her, giving her no choice.  Getting back to the people who are not keen on Adam, there is Michel (Omar Sy), who Adam immediately runs away from when he sees Michel on the London streets.  There is a brief scuffle until they calm down and Michel proclaims all forgiven, offering to be Adam’s sous chef.  The last problem is what to do about Tony’s stubbornness.  To get the restaurateur to bend, Adam turns to an old flame, Simone (Uma Thurman), who is also a food critic.  Simone visits Tony’s establishment, and so as to avoid negative publicity, agrees to bring on Adam and the staff he has been gathering.  There is one condition: Adam must visit once a week Dr. Rosshilde (Emma Thompson), a mental health therapist who will draw blood in order to ensure that he is staying clean.  What follows is a few weeks of preparation during which the restaurant is remodeled and the menu is reconfigured.  Despite the groundwork, the opening night is a disaster.  The seats remain unfilled, the kitchen is slow, and a rival chef, Montgomery Reece (Matthew Rhys), comes to taunt Adam.  Once the service is complete, Adam yells at everyone individually, and so much so at Helene that he fires her.  In the aftermath, Adam realizes that he may have gone too far and accedes to Tony’s demand that Adam appears on television to promote the restaurant.  Because of the poor performance on the first day, Adam promises a round of free meals, leading to a full booking.  Further, with some help from Tony, Helene is convinced to return.  Upon entering the kitchen, she introduces him to a time saving device that helps them get their food out in a timelier manner.  Things seem to settle into a routine, though there are some lingering issues.  One is two large men who occasionally appear in the back and menace Adam.  These are French men from his questionable past to whom he owes money.  Each time they come, they get progressively rougher with him.  It gets especially bad when, after a night at a party to which Adam had brought Helene, they arrive as the two chefs are bringing ingredients they bought back to the restaurant.  Adam is gone most of the day and it is not until well into their preparations to open that Helene finds him bloodied in the alley.  He is brought inside and told to rest in his office.  What brings him out is the report that the Michelin judges are seated and awaiting their meals.  He puts on his uniform and is hyper-focused on everyone’s work, sending the plates out with precision.  Surprisingly, they are promptly sent back, the reason being that the food is too spicy.  It is at this point that Michel shows that he purposely put in cayenne pepper instead of regular pepper, angrily reminding Adam of Paris before quitting.  Seeing everything for which he had strived crumble in an instant, Adam takes to the London streets and gets drunk.  He ends up at Montgomery’s kitchen as they are cleaning for the night, making fun of their work before passing out.  Adam awakens to Montgomery making him breakfast, who also reminds the hungover Adam that he is the best of them.  Further, when he gets back to his restaurant, he learns that the daughter of his former mentor and his ex-girlfriend, Anne Marie (Alicia Vikander), had paid off his drug debts, citing her being at least half responsible for them.  Finally, Tony informs Adam that they had not actually served Michelin critics.  With some encouragement from Helene about the kitchen being a family, Adam is able to return to work stronger.  Eventually, the critics patronize the place, and by relying on his staff, Adam gets his third star.

For a movie called Burnt, which usually denotes something that is overcooked, you would think this culinary drama would end in failure.  Truth be told, there is a great deal of it throughout the proceedings.  One of my favorite moments is when Dr. Rosshilde is talking to Adam about his long sought after goal of a third star, and asks what is a difficult question: what if he does not get it?  It is something every Christian needs to ask themselves.  We have dreams of vocations, of being married or taking religious vows, but what if God has something else in mind for you?  Of course, you could forge ahead anyway, and be reasonably happy with your life, but will you gain that clichéd fulfillment that so-called self-help gurus like to talk about?  The problem with Adam is that his goal becomes everything.  It becomes an idol, and for one thing, that is specifically talked about as a no-no in the Ten Commandments.  One can make the argument that if God did not exist, the worlds of billions of Christians would cease.  However, I am not here to talk about whether God is real.  I take it as a matter of Fatih that He is, and I rely on the arguments of people like C.S. Lewis when in times of doubt.  The difference between Adam and a devout Christian is that for the latter, God is everything.  He is the Creator and Redeemer.  He died for our sins and put an end to death.  He inspires the creative impulses of people whether they want to admit it.  In this last vein, there is a cool description from Helene as to why she cooks.  She refers to it as an act of love by providing sustenance.  There are parallels to this that can be found in Scripture, such as when Jesus feeds the multitude with two fish and five loaves of bread as in Matthew 14:13-21.  Indeed, there are more than a few passages in the Bible when Jesus’ interactions with others revolves around food.  It is human to want to make it tasty, and the care that is put into it is an expression of God’s creative love.  What the movie shows us is that when you become too focused on your own achievement, you lose sight of what is important: the support of others.

Yes, Burnt has an all too familiar cinematic conclusion that we are all family, which you can see in plenty of other movies.  It should be appreciated, though, that it does not hide the darker side of food service.  These are flawed individuals, but they use their God given talents in the right way.  If these kinds of stories interest you, then this one gets my recommendation.