Nimrod (Guri Alfi) keeps his counsel, and when social convention demands that he go along to get along, he doesn’t. When his heart is open to those he is drawn to, it’s a different story. In other words, he embodies the bundle of contradictions that we don’t often see on stage or screen. Why? Because Nimrod is not a vehicle for telling a story. He is the story of human virtue and limitation, cheek by jowl.
After a job interview in which he fails to deliver cued answers, and a minor scrape at his part-time job parking cars, Nimroad falls into an entry-level kitchen job at Sofia, a high-end Tel Aviv restaurant captained by Chef Dori (Gal Toren.) Dori’s every day life is dominated by his bloated ego, a struggle to maintain a competitive edge over a rival restaurateur, and sorting business upsets that arrive like inclement weather. He notices who the new kitchen helper is—as the novice Nimrod commits an obscene violation, plunging the point of a prized chef’s knife into the cardboard housing of a parmigiano delivery. Later, he notices in Nimrod’s silences, while parsing each detail, he weighs the drudgery against the intriguing opportunity to master a sacred kitchen practicum. Both characters find themselves tested on matters they never before assigned importance to, but on which much depends. In Nimrod, Dori sees a soupçon of how he wishes he could approach the obligations and epiphanies that suffuse his life.
Against the coarse or freighted exchanges between Nimrod and Dori, come the female characters, sauced with an appetizing self-knowledge and confidence that go missing in the men. As second in command, the restaurant’s manager (Karen Berger) anticipates, vets, weighs wisely, and most importantly, solves critical problems that result from inattention (except to decry them) on Dori’s part. Sunny (Dana Frider), a talented pastry chef, comes to Dori with a business proposition, an offer he shouldn’t refuse, but after the manager’s encouragragement to green-light it, and then losing a battle with himself to do the right thing, he issues Sunny a tone-deaf ultimatum. Sunny is the woman a man like Dori detests: She’s cocky, and hasn’t gotten the memo on how to approach a man whose ego obscures his vision of the big picture. Sara, a returnee from Ottolenghi in London, joins the team, and adroitly steps up, with Nimrod’s unobtrusive help, as a charming counterpoint to Sunny.
These are the women and men of today’s Israel. Their personalities and character are forged in the David vs. Goliath crucible harboring the polarities of a nation serving as a refuge from the worldwide antisemitism that was the midwife to the birth of social classes. Israel invented its social contract by interpolating varying Jewish-inflected and other national cultures, sealed by influences from afar. Some believe its continuity rests on proffering ancient traditions and classless platitudes to disarm sharpening class conflicts. Others think outside the ark that swaddles the sacrosanct Torah. Sophia, Dori’s restaurant, could symbolize Israel’s fragile survival as a refuge, challenged from without and within. Thanks to the women, who are not feminist so much as enriched by their fortitude in commanding attention, if not recognition for the inventiveness, optimism, and what-have-we-got-to-lose? chutzpah that they exemplify.
Flawless direction, pace, nuance, and patient photographic probing, fold into what the cast and crew craft to titillate our sensibilities. The Chef allows us to deeply see who populates a country that has been cast as the tragic scapegoat for all that’s wrong in a larger swaggering system on the brink of collapse. The workers in this kitchen stir our hearts. They season their reasoning with hope and cooperative solutions. They are guided by an instinct for what to do next, borne of hard thinking, softened hearts, and a sweat-beaded determination, tempered by the heat in the kitchen.
Toba Singer