Directed with verve by David Kaplan from Aasif Mandvi and Jonathan Bines’ exceptional screenplay, “Today’s Special” stars Mandvi as a sous-chef at a Manhattan restaurant whose plans to head to Paris for further culinary study are derailed after his father suffers a heart attack and he must take over the family restaurant in Queens.

Imaginative, warm and witty, the film, inspired by Mandvi’s prize-winning play “Sakina’s Restaurant,” is an irresistible delight, its theatrical roots vanishing amid a gracefully cinematic evocation of life in Jackson Heights, a venerable Queens neighborhood with an inviting human scale and grand rooftop vistas of the New York skyline. It is alive with a screen full of captivating characters, all written with affection and exquisitely played by a raft of fine actors.

Mandvi’s Samir is a man in his 30s in need of unleashing his creativity — and of finding romance as well. The son of Indian immigrant parents (played by Harish Patel and Madhur Jaffrey), he is constantly harangued by his bombastic tyrant of a father who never tires of comparing Samir unfavorably to his dead brother.

When the long-suffering son enters the shabby, failing storefront Tandoori Palace having no idea of how to make masala or any other Indian dish, help arrives in the form a colorful cabbie (Naseeruddin Shah) who swears he has cooked for Indira Gandhi. Shah’s Akbar is a free spirit of much cosmopolitan sophistication, boundless charm and beguiling storytelling abilities — his tales might not be entirely credible, but you want them to be.

As the story unfolds, Samir’s chance encounter with a lovely former co-worker (Jess Weixler) could develop into something stronger than a rekindled friendship. Moving toward its not entirely surprising conclusion, this endearing film proceeds with the most delicate of nuances, all of them acutely observed and beautifully expressed.

“Today’s Special” is a gem of wide appeal, richly deserving of finding an audience.

Its makers know we know where it’s headed, but they make the journey a joy to behold.

Depending on which neighborhood I’m in,” says Aasif Mandvi, looking around the packed Sunday-brunch crowd at the venerable and fragrant Jackson Diner in Queens, “I’m more likely to be recognized for something different.” In the Village or Chelsea, it’d be for The Daily Show, where he plays “Middle East Correspondent,” “Foreign-Looking Correspondent,” and sometimes even “Brown Correspondent” (and for whom he worked the crowd at the rally in D.C.). On the Upper West Side (where he lives), it’s often for a mainstream romantic comedy like The Proposal, in which his character was fired by Sandra Bullock. As for here, in Jackson Heights? “They’re more likely to have seen me in some Indian-American film,” like 2001’s American Chai. “But I’ve always had a foot in different worlds. That’s the way my career’s always been.”

He was born in Mumbai, and his Indian Muslim family moved when he was a year old to Bradford, in the north of England, where his father owned a newspaper shop. “It had a heavy Indian and Pakistani population, but I went to a very white boarding school. I always thought of myself as this white, middle-class kid.” When he was 16, the family moved to Tampa. His first job after graduating from the University of South Florida was in an improv group called Streetmosphere at Disney-MGM Studios.

In 1991, Mandvi moved to New York, and discovered Jackson Heights. “Suddenly it was like coming home to Bradford. I’d come here and eat Indian food and just hang out. And it was a powerful experience, because I’d spent much of my life rejecting that part of myself.” He embraced his ethnic identity in his work, too. In his 1998 one-man Off Broadway play Sakina’s Restaurant, he portrayed a variety of characters wrestling with their identities. He’s also played the doctor who diagnoses Robert De Niro in Analyze This; Peter Parker’s pizza-store boss in Spider-Man 2; the title character in Merchant Ivory’s The Mystic Masseur; a Taliban mullah in Homebody/Kabul.

Mandvi was initially hesitant about the The Daily Show’s casting call in 2006. “I was worried they’d have me flying around on a magic carpet or something,” he says. But he got the part, for a segment skewering Condoleezza Rice’s comments about the violence in Iraq and Lebanon representing “the birth pangs of a new Middle East.” (“It’s not every day that an entire region is given this kind of chance,” he said drolly.)

Not all of Mandvi’s segments have been related to the Middle East (He once crashed a health-insurance conference to commiserate with executives who claimed to be suffering under the weight of runaway profits.) But many are. In August, he headed to Tennessee to interview Laurie Cardoza-Moore, an activist protesting the building of a local Islamic community center. When Cardoza-Moore claimed that there were 35 terrorist training camps across the U.S., Mandvi breathlessly pretended to call a friend: “Ahmed … She knows!” “It’s probably the only time I’ve ever gotten in an off-camera argument with a subject,” he says. “To her credit, she said, ‘Look, I don’t mean to offend you, I know you’re Muslim.’ And all I could say was, ‘I appreciate that, and I know you think you have all these facts and figures, but you’re just wrong.’ ”

He wrote the film Today’s Special, which is out this month, with Jonathan Bines, a former Daily Show writer. In it, Mandvi plays a Manhattan chef named Samir, who has to take over his family’s restaurant in Queens after his father becomes ill. “The father and the mother basically are my parents,” he says, noting that, like his dad, “in the film, [Samir’s] father really wanted to be a doctor. He got top grades, but his father couldn’t afford medical school.”

One of the film’s most touching moments occurs when Samir and his father pray together. “I wanted to show just two ordinary Muslims praying the namaz, and not have it be something menacing or alien, and not have all this music or whatever. It comes from a place of love and bonding, which is what it was in my family growing up.” It certainly doesn’t make him a fundamentalist. “I’m Muslim the way many of my Jewish friends are Jewish: I avoid pork, and I take the big holidays off.”

By Bilge Ebiri

Link to article http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/encounter/69476/

The connection between food and passion finds its way into all kinds of movies:

A Chaotic Cornucopia of Culinary Cinema

* Robert Morley, George Segal, and Jacqueline Bisset starred in 1978′s wicked farce entitled Who Is Killing The Great Chefs of Europe?
* In 1985′s Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, Wayne Wang used Cantonese cuisine as a metaphor for love.
* In 1992′s Like Water For Chocolate, the passions felt by a cook were transmitted to the people who ate her food.
* In 1996′s Big Night, Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub appeared as two brothers making a desperate effort to save their small Italian restaurant in New Jersey from closing.
* In 2003′s Pieces of April, a young woman (Katie Holmes) tried to cook a Thanksgiving dinner after the stove in her tiny walk-up apartment broke down.
* In 2004′s Dumplings (a Hong Kong horror film), a cook chopped up unborn fetuses from an abortion clinic for a special kind of dumpling that could help women look younger.
* In 2005′s The Mistress of Spices, an Indian woman living in Oakland used her culinary skills to achieve surprisingly romantic results.
* In 2007′s Waitress, Jenna (Keri Russell) hoped that winning first prize in a local contest for her pie recipe could be her ticket to freedom.
* In 2008′s Apron Strings, the owner of a bakery in Auckland, New Zealand discovered that her loser son loathed her traditional (but bland and unimaginative) English style of cooking and preferred to eat Indian food.
* In 2009′s Julie and Julia, Meryl Streep gave a bravura performance as Julia Child.

Using ethnic cuisine as an anchor for a romantic comedy, family melodrama, or fierce farce is not as easy as it sounds. The characters must be believable and the script still has to have good writing.

When I moved to San Francisco in 1972, one of my roommates was a major sex hound who asked me: “Why do you always talk about food the way most people talk about sex?” If he had lived long enough to see Today’s Special there’s a chance he might have finally understood.

Written by and starring Aasif Mandvi (who is familiar to most people from his appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart), this is what I like to call a triple-threat film. Part romantic comedy, part family drama, partly devoted to ethnic cuisine and multiculturalism, it succeeds primarily because of its intelligent writing, complex characters, and dramatic honesty. Mandvi’s script grew out of his one-man show entitled Sakina’s Restaurant. In the following clip from news coverage of the Mumbai International Film Festival, he explains the basic setup of the plot:

What one has to see the film to appreciate, however, is the elegance of Mandvi’s writing, the slyness with which certain gags are set up, and way he captures the sensuality with which some chefs approach their work. The plot basically revolves around:

* Samir (Aasif Mandvi), a sous chef at a fashionable restaurant in New York. Samir has been eagerly looking forward to being promoted to head chef when his boss opens a new restaurant.
* Steve (Dean Winters), Samir’s boss and owner of the Pacific East restaurant. Steve likes having Samir on the line but does not see his sous chef as having a “front of the house” personality.

Samir (Aasif Mandvi) at work in the kitchen at Pacific East

* Stanton (Kevin Corrigan), one of Samir’s co-workers at Pacific East.
* Carrie (Jess Wexler), a smart new hire at Pacific East.
* Akbar (Naseeruddin Shah), a mysterious Indian taxi driver who drives Samir home from work one night.
* Farrida (Madhur Jaffrey), Samir’s meddling mother who keeps setting him up on blind dates with Indian-American women whose profiles she has found on the Internet.

Samir (Aasif Mandvi) and Farrida (Madhur Jaffrey)

* Hakim (Harish Patel), Samir’s father who wants out of the restaurant business and plans to sell the family business to a friend who wants to open a fast food franchise. Following the death of Samir’s younger brother in an automobile accident, Hakim has never really been able to give his blessing to anything Samir has ever attempted.
* Munnamia (Ajay Naidu), the sullen cook in Hakim’s restaurant, a man whose despicable kitchen habits could easily lead to several health code violations.
* Rasool (Sean T. Krishnan), one of Hakim’s kitchen workers who can barely speak English.

As directed by David Kaplan (who did such an nice job with 2008′s Year of the Fish), Today’s Special takes the softer approach to setting up jokes and conflicts rather than the slam-bang technique favored by larger studio films. Because Samir and his family must walk on coals in order to finally connect with each other’s emotions, Kaplan’s film feels much more genuine than many others. It captures a deeper level of humanity in each character with which any member of the audience can sympathize.

Naseeruddin Shah as Akbar

Today’s Special is a refreshingly honest and intelligent film that (particularly in a post-9/11 environment) humanizes a Muslim-American family’s challenges in such a way that Samir and his restaurant in Jackson Heights become one more set of immigrant spices added to New York’s melting pot. Kaplan is helped tremendously by the Indian actors who play Samir’s parents, kitchen staff, and Akbar (the crazy taxi driver who once cooked for important diplomats and who puts a sign in the restaurant’s front window that says “Today’s Special: Trust Me”). Here’s the trailer:

* * * * * * * * *

Turning on an oven will only get you good results if you know what you’re doing. Trust is a major issue in What’s Cooking? (2000), a film by Gurinder Chadha set in a residential area of Los Angeles over Thanksgiving weekend. The homes which sit at the four corners of an intersection are populated by Asian American, African American, Hispanic, and Jewish families.

As the four families prepare their Thanksgiving dinners (with ethnic enhancements to the traditional menu), the tasting, criticism of people’s cooking, and hunger never abate. Tensions around family crises involving sex, children, guns, gangs, sperm donors, and ex-husbands may rear their ugly heads but no one stops eating. As the old saying goes, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen!”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Perhaps you might prefer the droolingly delicious Lezioni di Cioccolato (Lessons in Chocolate). I call it “droolingly delicious” because it’s so easy to drool over the male lead, Luca Argentero. Rest assured, there’s a lot of chocolate as well.

Argentero plays Mattia, an arrogant Italian stud who, as a building contractor, is always trying to shortchange clients on the materials he uses, skirt safety regulations, and underpay undocumented laborers. He’s a total bastard. A totally gorgeous bastard who undergoes enough of a redemptive transformation that, by the end of the film, he describes himself as “a lying asshole who at least wants to change.”

As a result of Mattia’s stubborn refusal to erect protective scaffolding at a jobsite, one of his best workers falls from the roof and is severely injured. Invoking an Egyptian superstition, the worker refuses to talk to the police for four days.

Kamal (the delightfully bug-eyed Hassani Shapi) was once an accomplished pastry chef in Cairo. Prior to the accident, he had enrolled to take a course in the art of chocolate making — a course offered once every hundred years by the renowned Perugina chocolate company. Now, thanks to Mattia’s cost-cutting shenanigans, he’s stuck in a body cast and there is no way that he can physically take the course. Unless, of course, something can be worked out.

A wily Egyptian who knows how to milk lots of entertainment from making his boss suffer, Kamal insists that Mattia take the course using Kamal’s name and teach Kamal how to make chocolate on the side. If he doesn’t, Kamal will report Mattia to the police. Kamal also insists that Mattia cannot bribe someone else to do the work for him, but must take the course himself.

Kamal, however, is not about to stop there. In order to make the gorgeous, studly contractor look more like a poor undocumented immigrant worker, he strips Mattia of his expensive clothes and pretenses and proceeds to drive him to distraction with one crazy Egyptian tradition after another. Meanwhile, Mattia keeps trying to maintain his business contacts on the golf course.

Needless to say, Mattia screws everything up. Although he is rescued by Cecelia (Violante Placido), the prettiest woman in the chocolate making class, he quickly discovers that Cecelia — who has a bad habit of falling for men who are pathological liars — has enough emotional baggage to sink the entire Italian navy.

As Mattia soon learns: in order to make great chocolate — and create “tiny moments of ecstasy” — one cannot skimp on quality. Every trick Mattia has used to succeed in business in the past now works against him. Once Kamal and Cecelia knock the wind out of his sails, Mattia determines that he might as well try to win the contest for creating a new chocolate treat the hard way: by doing it honestly.

Written by Fabio Bonifacci and directed with a great sense of mischief and élan by Claudio Cupellini, Lessons in Chocolate is a fickle farce that moves at a frantic pace. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll want more chocolate. It’s all great fun, aided and abetted by a superior cast of clowns.

Although these video clips lack subtitles, you’ll get the drift easily enough. The trailer, which focuses on the movie’s many pratfalls, doesn’t really let potential audiences in on the true sweetness of the film’s story and the redemptive powers of chocolate.

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Who’s your favorite New Yorker, living or dead, real or fictional?
Mr. Yin, the nighttime manager of the former Korean deli on 72nd and Broadway.

What’s the best meal you’ve eaten in New York?
A nine-course chef’s-table menu at the London.

In one sentence, what do you actually do all day in your job?
I try to add my voice to the vast cacophony of sound, hoping that in some small way, I can make a difference or have an impact on the world … Or I just check my e-mails.

What was your first job in New York?
Busboy at Michael’s on West 55th Street.

What’s the last thing you saw on Broadway?
Time Stands Still.

Do you give money to panhandlers?
Yes, but I expect a lap dance.

What’s your drink?
Coffee.

How often do you prepare your own meals?
People prepare their own meals?

What’s your favorite medication?
Tequila.

What’s hanging above your sofa?
Uh-huh … sure. A simple questionnaire, huh? And then bam! Suddenly it’s gotcha journalism. I know my rights.

How much is too much to spend on a haircut?
Eighty-three thousand dollars.

When’s bedtime?
You tell me

Which do you prefer, the old Times Square or the new Times Square?
I liked the old Times Square. The new Times Square is sleazy and morally bankrupt.

What do you think of Donald Trump?
Whenever you think of Donald Trump, most people’s first image is of his hair and what’s the deal with his hair, etc., but for me he is so much more than that. I mean, he is an incredibly accomplished … Oh, fuck it! When I think of Donald Trump, I think of a frozen hair tsunami that’s about to drown a man’s face.

What do you hate most about living in New York?
The lack of country music.

Who is your mortal enemy?
Skeletor.

When’s the last time you drove a car?
… You mean on purpose?

How has the Wall Street crash affected you?
The comedy business is booming!

Times, Post, or Daily News?
Whatever I find left in the men’s room at the Daily Show.

Where do you go to be alone?
A place with no other people.

What makes someone a New Yorker?
They think five grand for a studio apartment is a bargain

Writer/star Aasif Mandvi , a sometime playwright but best known to TV audiences as a “Daily Show” personality, now conquers indie film (he already did studio time co-starring in Paramount’s The Last Airbender) with this vehicle inspired by his Obie-winning play. WhileToday’s Special hews closely to formula with its predictability, the film is an expertly crafted and delicious masala blend of comedy, romance and drama, worthy of being on a cinematic culinary menu along with Big Night, Babette’s Feast or Mostly Martha.

Simmering nicely in both the familiar New York and outer borough immigrant Indian cultures, the film should satisfy the more refined appetites of art-house customers. But like the modest restaurant at the film’s core, lines will form only after reviews and word of mouth kick in.

Mandvi plays the ambitious sous-chef Samir, who toils under Chef Steve (Dean Winters) while having a light flirtation with co-worker Carrie (Jess Weixler) at a fancy Manhattan restaurant. But when Samir, faulted for losing his “magic,” is overlooked for a promotion to his boss’ new hot spot, he leaves in a huff, telling Carrie he’s off to Paris to apprentice to a master.

With no such plans, Samir finds himself back at his parents’ modest home in Queens’ “Little India,” where he must do battle with high-strung father Hakim (Harish Patel), still forever disapproving of anything Samir does and mourning the untimely death of Samir’s favored older brother. Nor does fussbudget mother Farrida (legendary cookbook author and actor Madhur Jaffrey), insistent upon finding a proper Indian wife for Samir, provide comfort.
When Hakim suffers a heart attack and can no longer care for Tandoori Palace, the family business he has neglected and is eager to sell, Samir has no choice but to step in. The Tandoori isn’t quite Iraq, but, sad, forlorn and struggling, it looks it. There’s the indifferent robotic host, the clueless kitchen staff comprising a hostile, red-bearded weirdo as inept chef and his wimpy assistant whose only command of English is the word “yes,” and three Indian old-timers (Ranjit Chowdhry, Kumar Pallana, Ostaro) who settle in every day to schmooze at their favorite table but fail to order food.

Samir must bring the place back to life, except that he can’t cook Indian food. On the way to what most filmgoers will rightly guess is victory, he has the good luck of not having lost the calling card of colorful, eccentric, charismatic Indian cab driver Akbar (Indian cinema star Naseeruddin Shah), who gave Samir his fateful ride from abandoned Manhattan to the daunting new challenges in Queens.

An inspirational bohemian survivor and a low-rent bon vivant, Akbar bragged about preparing meals for Indira Gandhi. But his calling card provides nothing more than a name.

No problem. Samir wisely puts the Tandoori’s three squatter/slackers on the case of finding Akbar. They prove that the city’s huge Indian community, as with many an ethnic group, can actually be small in terms of who knows whom.

Akbar is persuaded to take charge of the restaurant’s kitchen and the “Today’s Special” sign in the window reflects his justified arrogance with the words “Trust me!” he has written right below. Akbar also becomes Samir’s mentor, teaching him the ways of Indian cuisine. He urges his protégé to cook not so much from the brain but from the heart and below. (“The recipe is the template; what counts is the interpretation.”)

It’s not that we know what will happen but, thanks to director David Kaplan and his cast, we want it to happen. We also want and expect cameos from some wonderful Indian dishes and these too we get.

All performers are a pleasure to watch. And Shah, as the film’s answer to a male Indian Auntie Mame, is that proverbial revelation.

Appropriately, the message of Today’s Special is that life is a banquet and no poor sucker who makes an effort should starve to death. Seeing the film is like discovering that delicious and reasonable Indian restaurant you never knew about. Trust us!

For movie details, please click here.

Read more: http://blogcritics.org/video/article/ten-films-i-want-to-see1/#ixzz13Qp7I77U

Though she has used it for over 40 years, the Indian actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey doesn’t love the kitchen in her Greenwich Village apartment. This is to the extent that when scheduling a culinary lesson for a recent fall afternoon, she tried to offer the kitchen at her home in Hillsdale as an alternative.

“I don’t like this kitchen for company,” said the 77-year-old Ms. Jaffrey, who has starred in several Merchant Ivory films and written nearly 30 cookbooks, six of which won the James Beard Award. “It’s a tiny, little New York space. I thought if we went to the country we could have room to move around and lay things out properly. But then again you don’t need a good kitchen to cook. Anybody can cook anywhere.”

Ms. Jaffrey’s new book, “At Home With Madhur Jaffrey,” which will be published this week by Knopf, is her first book to cover Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan food together. She offers up simplified recipes of these cuisines, dishes that she thinks get a bad rap because of their difficulty.

Unlike Soul Kitchen, Today’s Special, an upcoming film starring Aasif Mandvi and Madhur Jaffrey, is not afraid of a little food porn. When I attended a preview screening a few weeks ago, it was right after lunch and I got to the theater with a full belly. But, moments into the credit sequence featuring a lush montage inside an Indian kitchen, I was salivating. Halfway through the film, I decided that there was only one thing that would satisfy me for dinner. You guessed it: Indian.

Today’s Special was co-written by Aasif Mandvi (you know him from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart), and is based on his Obie Award winning play, Sakina’s Restaurant. The film tells the story of Samir, an aspiring chef who can’t seem to find his place in New York City’s restaurant scene. Samir decides to go to Paris to apprentice with the masters, but his plans are derailed when his father suffers a heart attack and he must take over the family business, an Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens. Samir doesn’t know how to cook Indian cuisine so he hires Akbar, a kooky cab driver-chef who’s seemingly lived a thousand lives and has the stories and lessons to prove it. I won’t ruin the rest of the adventure but this is one quietly lovely film and definitely one of my recent favorites.

In addition to Mandvi, Today’s Special stars Dean Winters as Samir’s arrogant boss, Naseeruddin Shah as the worldly cab driver-chef, and Madhur Jaffrey, perfectly cast as Samir’s anxious mother. Jaffrey, in addition to being an award-winning actress, has hosted several BBC cooking shows and written numerous cookbooks, including 1973′s groundbreaking An Invitation to Indian Cooking, the James Beard Award–winning A Taste of the Far East, and the upcoming, At Home with Madhur Jaffrey.

Fans of Mandvi and Jaffrey that live in or near New York City, should come by In the Kitchen with Epicurious on Friday, October 1. This action-packed day features the final cook-off competition for our Ultimate Home Cook Recipe Contest and, along with Dorie Greenspan and Tanya Steel, Mandvi and Jaffrey will be on hand to judge the top three dishes. Plus, Jaffrey will demonstrate recipes from and sign copies of her new cookbook. For more details, see our Epicurious Entertains NYC schedule. (Here’s a direct link to buy tickets.)

Shameless self-promotion over—promise. Today’s Special opens November 19. To get a sneak peak, check out the trailer.

Read More http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/blogs/editor/2010/09/todays-special-a-new-foodie-film-starring-aasif-mandvi-and-madhur-jaffrey.html#ixzz13Cyl4Wfy