This is why i love that movie, there’s no evil person but one who doesn’t want the restaurant to run by someone who can’t even cook nor run a business, and he doesn’t want the restaurant to shut down by health inspection. The crew quitting over it signified the seriousness of this issue. Linguini almost ruined the restaurant if not for Remy.
I didn’t mean to suggest that. Simply that he was a business man doing business in a capitalist society. If you lose the talent of your main chef, what do you do? You ride his name and legacy for as long as you can.
Also: Linguini did ruin the restaurant. Wasn’t that kind of the point of the whole “Everyone can cook” idea?(i.e.: Haute-cuisine is not that important)
For that case we need to separate the two protagonists, Linguini and Remy. For the ending, i guess it’s fair to say Linguini ruined the restaurant as he invited rats into his restaurant and to cook, but if we look at Remy as a separated entity, then the restaurant closed down due to Remy’s and his family. The instance where Linguini almost ruined the restaurant is when a critic were served the same pot of soup he ruined, Remy saved the soup, thus saved the restaurant reputation.
Nah. Confit byaldi is ludicrously haute-cuisine, needs three-star levels of manual prep work. The tag line is “Not everyone can be a great cook – but a great cook can come from anywhere”. And so can a good recipe or idea, that wasn’t ever new in French cuisine it’s been riffing off peasant recipes for ages, Escoffier did plenty of that.
Good food isn’t special in the sense that everyone so inclined, with enough obsession, can learn to combine aroma, to cook things to point, all that stuff, which is how excellent home cooks are made. What sets haute cuisine apart is the time and labour invested in every dish for increasingly diminishing returns.
Because of the health inspector, yes. The restaurant critic, now disgraced for having talked up an “unsanitary” restaurant, is eating at the new place, happy as a clam.
The social status and renown that comes with haute cuisine indeed is unimportant, it’s the food that’s important.
Social status and exclusivity plays into it in practice, for sure, in a right-out fetishistic sense: Like there’s chefs who have onions chopped so fine, using a special technique (not the usual chef technique you see) that they melt in the sauce, very labour-intensive. Now, having the onions melt into the sauce is a nice and valid thing, however, why in the everloving fuck aren’t you using a blender. Even if there’s a difference, which all my experience tells me there isn’t, it’s going to have such a minimal return on investment it’s utterly pointless but as an exercise in exclusivity.
Also I like my potato mash chunky but that’s another topic.
This is why i love that movie, there’s no evil person but one who doesn’t want the restaurant to run by someone who can’t even cook nor run a business, and he doesn’t want the restaurant to shut down by health inspection. The crew quitting over it signified the seriousness of this issue. Linguini almost ruined the restaurant if not for Remy.
They kind of had to add that bit of him being a sellout who wants to ruin Gusteau’s legacy.
Late-stage capitalism is hardly all on his shoulders.
I don’t think that Ratatouille had that much of an anti-capitalist angle. Let alone a late-stage capitalism one.
I didn’t mean to suggest that. Simply that he was a business man doing business in a capitalist society. If you lose the talent of your main chef, what do you do? You ride his name and legacy for as long as you can.
That’s just the world we live in.
In reality, you’re right. But that stuff doesn’t exist in the narrative of the movie. In the movie, he’s a sellout and therefore: evil.
So he was evil?
Also: Linguini did ruin the restaurant. Wasn’t that kind of the point of the whole “Everyone can cook” idea?(i.e.: Haute-cuisine is not that important)
For that case we need to separate the two protagonists, Linguini and Remy. For the ending, i guess it’s fair to say Linguini ruined the restaurant as he invited rats into his restaurant and to cook, but if we look at Remy as a separated entity, then the restaurant closed down due to Remy’s and his family. The instance where Linguini almost ruined the restaurant is when a critic were served the same pot of soup he ruined, Remy saved the soup, thus saved the restaurant reputation.
Forgot the soup. Why do I always forget the soup!!??
Nah. Confit byaldi is ludicrously haute-cuisine, needs three-star levels of manual prep work. The tag line is “Not everyone can be a great cook – but a great cook can come from anywhere”. And so can a good recipe or idea, that wasn’t ever new in French cuisine it’s been riffing off peasant recipes for ages, Escoffier did plenty of that.
Good food isn’t special in the sense that everyone so inclined, with enough obsession, can learn to combine aroma, to cook things to point, all that stuff, which is how excellent home cooks are made. What sets haute cuisine apart is the time and labour invested in every dish for increasingly diminishing returns.
But the restaurant closed. The movie ends with Remy in a bistro.
Because of the health inspector, yes. The restaurant critic, now disgraced for having talked up an “unsanitary” restaurant, is eating at the new place, happy as a clam.
The social status and renown that comes with haute cuisine indeed is unimportant, it’s the food that’s important.
In my mind, that was haute cuisine. I never thought of that distinction between social status and all that diminishing returns stuff.
Social status and exclusivity plays into it in practice, for sure, in a right-out fetishistic sense: Like there’s chefs who have onions chopped so fine, using a special technique (not the usual chef technique you see) that they melt in the sauce, very labour-intensive. Now, having the onions melt into the sauce is a nice and valid thing, however, why in the everloving fuck aren’t you using a blender. Even if there’s a difference, which all my experience tells me there isn’t, it’s going to have such a minimal return on investment it’s utterly pointless but as an exercise in exclusivity.
Also I like my potato mash chunky but that’s another topic.