Loving Madhur Jaffrey

"Today's Special" is a pretty ordinary movie about an Indian-American man named Samir and how he finds his roots. It has a few really fun things going for it, including very good actors and wonderful images of food. When it was new in 2010, famous film critic Roger Ebert summed up one of the best elements of the production:

"The movie's in joke is that Samir's mother is played by Madhur Jaffrey. She is not only a considerable actress, but a world-famous chef... . Here she plays a typical Indian mother, despairing of her Westernized son and her impossible husband. It's like having Julia Child play the chef's matriarch."

Although the plot and characters are unfortunately very predictable, sometimes painfully so, the movie is carried by the great food and kitchen scenes in the restaurants where Samir, the main character works. (Samir is played by Aasif Mandvi, who also co-wrote the script.)

At the beginning, Samir is the sous chef in a very pretentious, high-pressure kitchen in a French restaurant in Manhattan, but he quits when the owner tells him he has no imagination for cooking. Though he wants to go to Paris to apprentice with a famous chef, circumstances prevent this. Instead, he takes over Tandoori Palace, his family's very ordinary Indian restaurant that his father has allowed to slide into something less than mediocracy. Of course he finds a way to turn this failing dive into a great success, relying on a taxi driver who can cook and also who dispenses tons of wisdom. And falls in love, obtains the approval of his parents, embraces his ethnic identity, walks the streets of New York and takes the subway, and generally goes through all the plot elements that you could expect, but it's still fun to watch!

Here are a few screen shots to illustrate what I liked in this movie:

Mixing Indian spices.

Beautiful food served in the newly wonderful Tandoori Palace.

More beautiful food.

Madhur Jaffrey

The kitchen of Tandoori Palace

Plating food at the upscale New York restaurant at the beginning of the movie.
Maybe by now some of the styling is a little dated.

I am grateful to one of my blogger friends, who mentioned this movie. Unfortunately I don't remember who it was.