The best chefs in movies and TV

Julia Child is still one of the all-time beloved chefs. Her friendly, idiosyncratic demeanor helped turn her into a massive food celebrity. Julie and Julia is half of a biopic about Child and half of a biopic about some woman played by Amy Adams, who isn’t as interesting. She’s played with aplomb by Meryl Streep.

Jon Favreau wrote and directed a starring vehicle for himself where his love interests were Sofia Vergara and Scarlett Johansson. Nevertheless, a lot of people enjoyed this movie. It also got some love for its veracity. Perhaps that owes to the fact that this movie is about a chef who opens a food truck and has famed food truck impresario Roy Choi as a consultant.

What do you do if you are a rat who wants to be a great chef? You could pull some dude’s hair to control him like a puppet. That’s what happens in Ratatouille. In a Pixar movie, you can get away with that. It turned out quite well, winning Best Animated Feature at the Oscars.

Burnt doesn’t entirely work. In fits and starts, it hits, though. Bradley Cooper is fairly in the pocket in the lead role as a chef, trying to build himself back up from the bottom. It won’t be the only time we mention Cooper on this list.

Many consider Big Night to be an all-time food movie. Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub star as Italian immigrant brothers who run a struggling restaurant. So much love and care go into shooting the food and explaining the cooking process. If you love food, this is a movie to check out.

Early in his career, Ang Lee made this film about family and food. The family patriarch is an aging, semi-retired chef, and the movie revolves around him and his three daughters. One of them wants to be a chef, though her father disapproves.

Tiana spends a lot of this Disney movie as a frog because that’s how fairytales go sometimes. When the film begins, she’s working as a waitress to make money to open her own restaurant in New Orleans. At the end of the movie, she does. Also, she was only 19 when she started her restaurant. Must be nice.

A lot of people fell for this Netflix romantic comedy. If you haven’t seen it, what you likely know about it is that Keanu Reeves plays himself. However, Ali Wong’s character Sasha is a celebrity chef as well. It’s not as much a food movie, but it is a movie about a chef.

Wes Anderson’s most “Wes Anderson” film is broken into sections, a la an issue of The New Yorker. One of the stories is filed by Roebuck Wright, played by Jeffrey Wright — and it's some of his best work. He’s a food writer who is telling the story of an esteemed piece he wrote involving the chef Nescaffier. There’s much more to it than that, but food plays a huge role.

The Hundred-Foot Journey is a bit of a B-minus film, but that’s not bad. It’s a solid watch — and fun if you want to be awash in beautiful-looking food. The film is about two competing restaurants in a French village. Helen Mirren is in it, so there’s that.

This Netflix movie is not as well known, but you should check it out. The protagonist, Elijah, wants to be a sommelier, but his parents want him to take over the family’s barbecue restaurant. It’s about him balancing his dreams and the pull of the family. That’s not entirely original, but it’s in the execution.

The movie is called Waitress, and a waitress is not a cook. So, why is this movie on this list when we wouldn’t include, say, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore? Because Jenna, the titular waitress, is also a pie baker. Baking and cooking aren’t the same, but they are close enough, and Jenna is a super-talented baker.

This is not so much a movie about food or the life of being a chef, but the word “chef” is right in the title. Based on the title, you can probably guess the plot of this dark, comedic mystery. Great chefs are being murdered, and somebody has to get to the bottom of it.

When you hear about a new Nicolas Cage movie, you may assume it’s bonkers. You see he’s starring in a movie called Pig, and you wonder just how wild it might be. Pig is not that movie, though. It was well received, and Cage’s work as a chef who loses his pet pig was highly regarded.

This Danish film was able to find crossover success in the United States. It’s a food movie through and through but also much more. Babette’s Feast won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, making it a hallmark of ‘80s European cinema.

Bourdain first rose to fame on the back of his no-holds-barred, tell-all memoir, Kitchen Confidential. While Bourdain would end up on TV himself, his book was adapted into a short-lived FOX TV show. The actor who starred as “Jack Bourdain?” That would be a pre-fame Bradley Cooper.

Bob Belcher would likely not call himself a “chef.” He’s a burger-slinger. A diner cook. However, let us not look down upon more casual cuisine. Plus, Bob puts a lot of effort into his specialty burgers. The pun names alone must take him some time!

This is your typical fish-out-of-water comedy. Frank Parrish is a professor in New England who inherits his family's New Orleans restaurant. By the pilot's end (thanks to a voodoo curse), he’s left his old life behind to take over the Chez Louisiane. While it only lasted one season, TV Guide once listed it as No. 3 on their “Cancelled Too Soon” list, and Rolling Stone called it one of the top 100 TV shows of all time in 2021.

We’re back to the world of pies. Hey, you try and be an elite pie baker! This show is mostly a weird fantasy show about a man who can bring things back to life by touching them while helping solve a lot of murders. He’s also a pie maker who owns a restaurant called “The Pie Hole.” He’s a restaurateur, and that counts for something.

Let us praise now the fast food cook. Where would many of us be without them, especially late at night or after a few drinks at a bar? SpongeBob works at the Krusty Krab flipping burgers. He’s helping people get their Krabby Patties. The dude is a cook. SpongeBob is arguably the most popular cook in all of popular culture. How could we not include him?