La Cocina (2024)

CinemaSerf

6.0

Mar 29, 2025

If you saw “Boiling Point” (2021) then you’ll get the gist of this drama set in an hectic New York restaurant kitchen. “The Grill” might look peaceful to the customers, but it’s kitchen is a multi-cultural, multi-lingual and attitudinal melting pot of cooks, waitresses and cleaners under the guidance of a no-nonsense chef (Lee Sellars) and a slimy manager “Luis” (Eduardo Olmos). It’s this latter man who finds there’s a problem one morning when his boss reports that $800-odd is missing from one of the cash registers and the owner “Rashid” (Oded Fehr) is seeing red. Using the investigation as a…

La Cocina: Society in a Pressure Cooker Not every film needs to be an Aesop's fable, and "La Cocina" understands this perfectly. Alonso Ruizpalacios has crafted an impressive slice-of-life film that elevates the genre by compressing time, making everything that can happen in a restaurant kitchen visible within 139 minutes. That alone is worth the price of admission. What makes the film remarkable is how successfully it offers a bird's eye view of society itself. The kitchen becomes a perfect microcosm of its setting, complete with all the warts: racism, class discrimination, dishonesty,…