‘La Cocina’ Shows the Ugly Side of Restaurant Kitchens

Writer and director Alonso Ruizpalacios discusses why glossy food porn had no place in his new restaurant-set drama

“You can’t dream in a kitchen,” one of the characters says in La Cocina, the latest film by Mexican director and writer Alonso Ruizpalacios. The suffocating reality of restaurant work takes center stage in his English language debut, which resists the contemporary urge to showcase refined and intricately plated dishes in favor of highlighting the raw — and toxic — intensity of behind-the-scenes kitchen operations. Instead of closeups of hands kneading dough or tweezing petals, there are faces; and in place of the usual cast of wide-eyed culinary school graduates and Michelin star aspirants, the protagonists are undocumented cooks and dishwashers from all over the world. In La Cocina, cooking is not art, but a livelihood — a means to an end.

La Cocina

The film begins in the chaos of Time Square, as a young Mexican immigrant Estela (Anna Díaz) wends her way through the city streets before arriving at her first day on the job at The Grill, a Cheesecake Factory-esque restaurant that churns out uninspired food to hungry tourists. (Ruizpalacios was unaware at the time of writing that there is a very real, different restaurant called the Grill.) Forced to enter quite literally through the back-alley door, Estela serves as guide into this bustling world of hierarchical division — front of house versus back of house, worker versus manager, American versus foreign-born.

Gliding with balletic precision, the camera gradually shifts its focus from Estela to the romantic entanglement between undocumented Mexican cook Pedro (Raúl Briones) and American waitress Julia (Rooney Mara) who discovers she is pregnant. Their differences are again symbolic of larger ones. Tensions start to rise when the restaurant’s bookkeeper discovers $800 some-odd dollars missing from the till and begins to individually question every employee.

Based on Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play The Kitchen, La Cocina is not subtle — a Statue of Liberty figurine lies submerged in the restaurant’s lobster tank — but it delivers a searing portrayal of displacement and the shattered promises of the American dream, the expressionistic black-and-white cinematography imbuing the film with a parable-like quality.

The film opened in New York on October 25, with more cities to follow. La Cocina’s producers have also teamed up with the advocacy group One Fair Wage to host a series of events, including one in Times Square on October 28th that will provide restaurant workers with professional headshots and a chance to win rent vouchers.

Eater interviewed Ruizpalacios to discuss why he wanted to show the ugly side of kitchens, his time in restaurants, and how he made Wesker’s play his own.

Eater: I read that you came across the play while working at the Rainforest Cafe. What was that experience like and how did it inform the movie?

Alonso Ruizpalacios: It was in London’s Piccadilly Circus, which is a bit like Times Square because it’s a tourist vortex. I went there because I heard the tips were really good, which they were. But overall it was a traumatic experience for me. Very busy, very loud, and super aggressive. Kitchens are like that, but this was over 20 years ago when there was no observance from an HR department. I was studying theater at the time and discovered Harold Wesker’s play The Kitchen, which really helped the working days feel more bearable and interesting. I didn’t want this film to capture that “glossy food porn” part of the industry, but the other one that I got to know at this restaurant.

I also met really interesting people, some of whom ended up as characters in the film, which is a very free adaptation. For example, the character of Samira, played by a French Moroccan actress [Soundos Mosbah], is based on a French Algerian cook that I met, who just kind of grounded everyone. She didn’t lose her cool, and when she did she always came up with a sweet word after slapping you. Kitchens are a magnet for weird and wonderful characters.

Samira is one of the few female cooks in the kitchen, and she can really go head to toe with the guys. I’m thinking of the scene where everyone’s one-upping each other with the most crass things they can say. I thought it was a great example of the fine line between things being fun and joking around, before a line gets crossed later in the film.

That’s exactly what I was going for — to have both the good and the bad sides. There’s a lot of goofing off that happens in the kitchen or any other workplace. It’s a big part of what helps you stay sane and make it to the end of the shift. I also worked in a bar for a long time, and it was the same dynamic. You have to joke around because otherwise you’ll go completely crazy.

Speaking of dynamics, Pedro and others walk this line of fear and respect for those above them, like the restaurant owner Rashid — even when he’s clearly exploiting them and promising papers.

That aspect isn’t present in Wesker’s play, but it emerged during my research for the film. When I traveled to New York, I conducted numerous interviews with undocumented cooks in Manhattan. Several of them shared a similar experience regarding their bosses, who would make soft promises about helping them with their papers. It’s a cruel trick — like a dangling carrot. Many spend 20 or 30 years chasing that promise, yet still have no green card.

Food-related movies and shows like The Bear have become very prominent in today’s pop culture landscape. Were you familiar with them before starting this project?

I know of them, but the journey for this film started many years ago. I directed the play about 14 years ago, and then I started writing it into a screenplay. When I finally finished and we were in pre-production these films and shows like The Bear and Boiling Point came out and that really depressed me. I was like, Come on! I’ve been working on this for a really long time!

I made a point not to see any of them, and I still haven’t. I need to get this film out of my system first. But I am curious — because I’ve heard The Bear is great. My main reason for not watching though is that I didn’t want to lose focus on what I wanted to convey. The film and the play are about the perils of unchecked capitalism, and what we’re reduced to when we value productivity above everything else. I wanted to make sure not to lose sight of that and turn this into a sumptuous experience. I find that kind of glossy romanticization of restaurants to be misleading to some extent. Of course I love Chef’s Table as much as the next person, but that’s not a common denominator and it doesn’t capture most people’s experience of working in a restaurant.

There is one moment though in the film that you could call food porn — when Pedro makes a sandwich. That was very deliberate, and in script and stage direction I had even written that descriptor in, and that’s because it’s the only time we see cooking as an act of love. It was important that it looked and felt delicious then because the rest of the time food is a transaction. It is work. It is an assembly line. They could be making computers or iPhones or cars. But this one time it’s different.

What was it like working with food on set?

We rehearsed for a month before shooting, which is a generous amount of time for film. That was one of my deal-breakers with the producers. We got all the actors from — from Marrakech and England and Americans and Haiti — to Mexico for a month. They would go to cooking school in the morning and then this theater space where we’d improv for the afternoon. We spent a long time choosing what each character would cook. That’s another interesting thing with food and restaurants: The cooks kind of become their dish. The person who handles meat and the grill kind of becomes muscular and whoever does the salads tends to be light. That was something really interesting that I saw, how people sort of become their plate. So, we picked the dishes very carefully and then they went through this process of learning how to make them. Of course we had a whole crew who was there to redo the food as needed, but for the most part the actors are all cooking. By the time we shot, everyone knew exactly how to make their dishes and how that kitchen worked.

Were you filming in a restaurant or did you create a set for the film?

We filmed on a sound stage in Mexico and basically had to reverse-engineer the set because our chef advisor told us we needed to know what they’re cooking, in order to lay out the kitchen. So first we created the menu and identity of the restaurant, and then a space to fit that. It was a really interesting process doing different versions of the layout.

Had you been opening a restaurant, these are probably the same kind of things you’d be thinking about!

We joked when we were shooting that we could just open this restaurant now, and we would have made more money for sure.

Do you see a lot of similarities between filmmaking and running a restaurant?

I do actually and I thought about that a lot when writing. When I was writing the staff meal scene, I remember telling myself to just think about what lunch was like during filming [as a reference or jumping off point]. Suddenly, all hierarchies are erased while people eat. For an hour, we’re all in the same space and it’s very democratic. Some people do go off to their trailers, but in Mexico even famous actors typically eat with the crew. When it’s over, we’re back to a hierarchical society. That’s what ties film crews to kitchens. Anyone in a higher position makes sure that the person below knows it. People are waving their status and bandying it about, which is kind of sad, but that’s the way it is.

Another aspect is that they both have like military elements, like literally, a lot of Ideas from the military are applied to the organizations of a film crew and the kitchen. You see it in the whole Escoffier thing, and how it influences the structure and flow of those spaces.

There is an incredible scene in the film where the cherry Coke tap on the soda fountain won’t shut off, and the staff continue to work even as the kitchen is quite literally flooded. Can you talk about that scene? I can’t imagine that was in the play.

Not at all. The origins of that come from 13 or 14 years ago when my wife and I were in New York. It was the last Christmas as just the two of us before we had our first child. We had no money, no plans, and didn’t know anyone, so we spent Christmas Eve wondering what to do. We couldn’t afford a big meal, so we decided to go to the movies and went to this shitty multiplex in Times Square. While I was getting popcorn at the concession stand, I noticed the carpet was mushy and really wet, and as I got closer, I realized the cherry Coke machine was spilling out, like a fountain. It was so weird to me that it wouldn’t stop. It just kept gushing, and nobody paid any attention to it. I even told the guy giving us our popcorn, and he was like “I know” and carried on working. That to me was the perfect encapsulation of late capitalism. My wife also reminded me that the film we saw that night was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which Rooney is in, so it’s nice to have come full circle.

Elissa Suh is a writer and editor based in New York. She publishes the Moviepudding newsletter, dedicated to exploring the intersections of food and film.