This was a pretty bad movie, and it wasn't the fault of the cast. Jen Lilly seems quite talented. I was less impressed with Brendan Penny but that may be just me. Peri Gilpin is a talented actress, and when she gets decent writing she can run with it. The screenplay was just bad. I don't necessarily expect great dramatic writing from a Hallmark movie, but the story ought at least to make sense.
So, Lilly, who has great cooking talent, is jobless when Gus closes her diner, and is unable to find any actual cooking job because she doesn't have a culinary school degree despite the fact that (a) this is Chicago, city of ten thousand restaurants! (b) her parents sell food to restaurants, but apparently have no connections! (c) even a diner has Yelp reviews! This is just to put her in a fix.
Penny is the executive chef at Gilpin's restaurant. She was a great chef in her day but now is a candidate for Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, shutting down Penny's every attempt to deviate from her aging bland recipes. (Although apparently she still has a great reputation because in Chicago no food critics ever re-review a restaurant and as mentioned before Yelp doesn't exist in Hallmark Chicago.) She doesn't even taste her cassoulet any more. When I saw this behavior I was sure that it would turn out she had some kind of dementia or neurological issue, which would have made sense, but there is no attempt to make it make sense.
After a meet-cute with Penny, involving both the dumping-coffee-on- him cliché and the cliché where she criticizes his food without knowing who he is, Lilley ends up with an office job in Gilpin's restaurant, although she never does anything office-y with it and it's just a way of getting her locked into the kitchen in the dead of night, where she cooks up something imaginative for herself. Gilpin shows up, tastes Lilley's cooking (more than she ever does for Penny!), and decides to let her cook every night and steal her recipes by video surveillance! So a few minutes ago she was unwilling to change her recipes at all, and now she is willing to create a whole new menu based on just ripping Lilley off! Why doesn't she just start letting her executive chef do his job? There's no sense to this!
The romance develops predictably except for things that appear out of nowhere to make the plot Hallmarky, like when they want Lilley and Penny to have a fight so they invent something incomprehensible about his relationship with his father. This is at the time when they want everything to go badly for Lilley, so Gilpin gets the big food critic (really the only one in Chicago apparently) to print a story about how Lilley stole Gilpin's recipes (without ever asking Lilley about it - Chicago papers care naught for libel laws). Then they turn everything around and it's the end of the movie. Blah.
I suppose there must have been some reason they put in the romance between Lilley's African-American coworkers, Kandyse McClure and Antonio Cayonne, who get just about as much screen time as they have in this review.
Honestly, I have nothing against facile romances, but is it really impossible to give some care to the story?
So, Lilly, who has great cooking talent, is jobless when Gus closes her diner, and is unable to find any actual cooking job because she doesn't have a culinary school degree despite the fact that (a) this is Chicago, city of ten thousand restaurants! (b) her parents sell food to restaurants, but apparently have no connections! (c) even a diner has Yelp reviews! This is just to put her in a fix.
Penny is the executive chef at Gilpin's restaurant. She was a great chef in her day but now is a candidate for Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, shutting down Penny's every attempt to deviate from her aging bland recipes. (Although apparently she still has a great reputation because in Chicago no food critics ever re-review a restaurant and as mentioned before Yelp doesn't exist in Hallmark Chicago.) She doesn't even taste her cassoulet any more. When I saw this behavior I was sure that it would turn out she had some kind of dementia or neurological issue, which would have made sense, but there is no attempt to make it make sense.
After a meet-cute with Penny, involving both the dumping-coffee-on- him cliché and the cliché where she criticizes his food without knowing who he is, Lilley ends up with an office job in Gilpin's restaurant, although she never does anything office-y with it and it's just a way of getting her locked into the kitchen in the dead of night, where she cooks up something imaginative for herself. Gilpin shows up, tastes Lilley's cooking (more than she ever does for Penny!), and decides to let her cook every night and steal her recipes by video surveillance! So a few minutes ago she was unwilling to change her recipes at all, and now she is willing to create a whole new menu based on just ripping Lilley off! Why doesn't she just start letting her executive chef do his job? There's no sense to this!
The romance develops predictably except for things that appear out of nowhere to make the plot Hallmarky, like when they want Lilley and Penny to have a fight so they invent something incomprehensible about his relationship with his father. This is at the time when they want everything to go badly for Lilley, so Gilpin gets the big food critic (really the only one in Chicago apparently) to print a story about how Lilley stole Gilpin's recipes (without ever asking Lilley about it - Chicago papers care naught for libel laws). Then they turn everything around and it's the end of the movie. Blah.
I suppose there must have been some reason they put in the romance between Lilley's African-American coworkers, Kandyse McClure and Antonio Cayonne, who get just about as much screen time as they have in this review.
Honestly, I have nothing against facile romances, but is it really impossible to give some care to the story?