[Sca-cooks] Food Movies Revisited

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Christine Seelye-King:
>Ok, here is the list, just titles with no comments.  Many of these are
>remarkable for a particular scene instead of being an entire movie that is
>devoted to food, although some are.
>Feel free to add on from here,

Immediately following "The God of Cookery" should be "The Chinese 
Feast": it's another Hong-Kong-produced chef-fu extravaganza, 
concerning an old restaurateur gambling to save his restaurant, the 
great bet being to see which chef (the evil, superhuman organized 
crime chef, or the recently-rehabilitated-alcoholic-failure genius 
chef -- think Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou as a chef) can do a better 
recreation of a legendary Imperial Feast menu from the Qing Dynasty.

I remember there was a short-lived TV series in the late 80's, I 
think, made by a lot of the same people responsible for "Hill Street 
Blues", and I recall it was excellent: Steven Collins owned a 
somewhat beleaguered but elegant New York City restaurant, and it 
was, like HSB, sort of a semi-comic soap opera with an ensemble cast, 
which included great work by Jerry Stiller as a maitre d', and Mary 
Beth Hurt as an obvious spoof of real-life Seattle chef Cathy Casey 
(is she still around, BTW? She used to put small, inedible plastic 
confetti on dishes as a garnish, among other peculiarities, on the 
grounds that although inedible, they would pass harmlessly through 
the digestive tract and were "fun" -- it did not go over well, and 
she vanished from the New York scene as suddenly as she had arrived.) 
When we first had this discussion here on the Cooks' List, I couldn't 
remember the name of the series. It was called "Tattinger's".

Adamantius