In 2022, Bear burst onto our screens and showed us a frenetic, pressure-filled, curse-filled vision of what a working restaurant kitchen is like. But the year before, a british film called Boiling point It also took place in a frenetic restaurant kitchen, with Stephen Graham playing a stressed-out, drinking, cocaine-snorting chef-owner who ends the film on his kitchen floor after suffering a heart attack. In 2023, the BBC commissioned a follow-up series to the film, with Graham as one of the creators. He still has an acting role in the series, but now his former sous chef is the one with her feet to the fire.
BOILING POINT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Initial shot: Carly (Vinette Robinson), head chef and co-owner of London restaurant Point North, enters the kitchen accompanied by manager Dean (Gary Lamont) and tells him that she has sat down with some of the investors that her business partner Liam (Joel MacCormack) is courting, and that too many walk-ins means they are already going to be “raided.”
The essence: Carly opened Point North, serving elevated rustic cuisine from the northern part of the United Kingdom, after Andy Jones (Stephen Graham), co-owner of her previous restaurant, Jones & Sons, suffered a heart attack.
Not only is this a critical night for the fledgling restaurant, but they also have a new party chef starting that night. Johnny (Stephen Odubola) walks in and is immediately thrown into chaos; Carly tells him to start making a new batch of hollandaise sauce. One problem: Johnny has no idea how to make hollandaise sauce from scratch and secretly looks it up on his phone.
As Johnny fumbles, helped by chef Emily (Hannah Walters) and Camille (Izuka Hoyle), at the starter and side dish station, the pace of the kitchen begins to quicken, testing Freeman’s (Ray Panthaki) spirits. ). ), the sous chef and Bolton (Shaun Fagan), in charge of the meats and sauces.
Liam takes Carly aside and tells her that the investors will want to talk to her directly when the main courses come out, since her food will be the selling point. She hates having to leave the kitchen, but she agrees, but she continues to be sidelined by her mother Vivian’s (Cathy Tyson) calls about some vague weakness she feels.
Just as the investors are settling in and asking waitress Robyn (Áine Rose Daly) unpleasant questions about the rustic menu, Carly receives a call from her mother’s emergency calling app. When she is unable to contact her mother, she makes the difficult decision to leave to see if she is okay and puts Freeman in charge of her.
All hell breaks loose after that, especially when Liam makes Freeman sit down with the investors to talk about the menu because Carly isn’t there. The kitchen is so understaffed that chocolate sauce is served with investors’ meat dishes instead of the planned au jus. Once Carly returns (her mom was fine; she pressed the emergency button to make sure it worked), they start pointing fingers.
What shows will it remind you of? Boiling point is a follow-up series to the 2021 BAFTA-nominated film of the same name; Graham, who starred in the film, is one of the series’ creators, along with Philip Barantini and James Cummings. Of course, as the headline of this review indicates, he is very much a British cousin of Bearalthough the original film came out a year before the hit FX/Hulu comedy-drama debuted.
Our opinion: As Bear, Boling Point is entirely about the fast-paced atmosphere in the kitchen of a busy restaurant. The main difference is that Bear began its existence in a classic Chicago Italian steakhouse, while Boiling point It already shows life in a high-end restaurant. Still, things are basically the same: a lot of pressure, a lot of high-strung personalities, and a lot of continuous shots that show how chaotic things are behind those swinging doors and how disturbed are the rhythms of the “show” that takes place in the place. the front of the house.
We’re dropped into Carly’s kitchen without knowing anyone, and in this case it’s okay. We didn’t see the original movie and there were references to what happened in it that crossed our minds a little, but if you’re like us, you’ll be too engrossed in the chaos of the kitchen to care. A lot about the connections to the movie. As we know? There’s a moment where Johnny makes a crucial mistake that almost hurts him, and we screamed when we saw it. We haven’t been this invested in the first episode of a show since, well, since the first episode of Bear.
As this five-episode season progresses and the restaurant faces different calamities, we will get to know a little more about various characters. We know Freeman has a temper that gets him into trouble, and Bolton is basically a 24/7 jerk. Johnny and his wife have twins, so he is desperate to succeed in this new job at CDP. And it will be intriguing to see Graham, whose character is recovering from heart surgery and is depressed because he lost his restaurant and can’t get back into the kitchen for the foreseeable future, affect things. What we do know is that if the episodes can be as intense as the first, we’ll be all for it.
Sex and skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Carly sits at the computer in the office, pinching her sinuses and wondering where the hell she’s going to get the money to keep the restaurant afloat.
Sleeping star: We didn’t mention much about the main cast: Dean, Robyn, new bartender Musa (Ahmed Malek), Billy (Taz Skylar), and others. We don’t know how instrumental they will be in the rest of the episodes, but of course, the front of the house is just as crucial to the success of a restaurant as the back-of-house, so it will be interesting to see how they fit into the stories. .
Most pilot line: Nothing we could find.
Our call: TRANSMIT IT. Yeah, Boiling point it will hit you very hard Bear vibrations, but that doesn’t mean it’s a carbon copy. Watching it is just as exciting and you’ll find yourself more involved in what’s happening than you expected.
Joel Keller@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and technology, but make no mistake: he’s a couch potato. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.comFast Company and other places.
