What are you? I’m a stupid meat head chef. I’m a stupid meat head. What are you? I’m a stupid meat head. Burnt, starring Bradley Cooper and executive produced by my good friend Gordon Ramsay, is the worst movie that I have ever seen. It is also the movie that I have watched more than any other movie in my entire life, and you might be asking, “Josh, if it is the worst movie, why have you re watched it so many times?” I cannot exactly tell you. Am I stupid? Am I a masochist? Yes to all the above? I think it’s because every single time I re watch it, I find a new detail that is more crazy, more insane, and leaves you wondering, “How the hell did this movie get made?” more than anything else. For instance, when Adam Jones, played by Bradley Cooper, he’s a bad boy chef for the tortured soul and an even more chiseled jawline, is going through his self-inflicted punishment of shucking 1 million oysters for the crime of messing up his cooking career in Paris, he’s got this little notebook that he writes down how many oysters he shucked in each day. You conveniently walk in on the first scene of him just writing down 1 million, which is an exact copy cat of the anchorman scene. Where he’s like “1001, 1002,” which is automatically hilarious but then if you freeze frame it and you look at the actual numbers he’s writing down. For some reason, it goes from 998,000 oysters back down to 996,000 oysters, then back up to 1 million. And I know it is a stupid small detail, but like the way that Van Halen demanded on their writer, that all the brown M&M’s be taken out just to see if people were paying attention, you get the sense that people were not paying attention to making this movie and that is especially clear when you see executive producer, Gordon Ramsay, come on screen right after that scene. And of course it has nothing to do with my actual problem with the movie, which is that there are so many big name food people attached to this, and it get so much wrong about food and celebrates the absolute worst parts of cooking in restaurant culture. Stigging. I feel like, I didn’t say let’s. I feel like I just said stiggin. Stiggin. You know, Michael Stiggin, consulting producer. You don’t know Michael Stiggin? Ight so Adam Jones is hot shot, young cook, who was mentored by a brutal old school chef at a three Michelin star restaurant. And while this is not exactly an autobiography of Gordon Ramsay, you do see the similarities with Ramsay’s relationship with a person named Marco Pierre White. Who was nicknamed the devil in the kitchen and just known for his absolutely abusive tirades. And we don’t even need to get into all the crap that we’ve seen with the Gordon Ramsay documentary boiling point, and also his, you know, general demeanor on Hell’s Kitchen. It’s not normal to just smash bread on someone’s face and call him an idiot sandwich. We took that one for granted. That’s a weird thing to do, right? Like that’s weird, like that’s how we grew with like a weird emotionally abusive thing. Like that’s not normal. Could you imagine me, like going up to Nicole, just smashing a hot dog bun on her face and making her yell. I’m a weiner. Jesus Christ. I would fire my, I would put myself into exile. He got a multi-million dollar empire out of doing that. My God! And the entire plot of the movie involves Adam trying to redeem himself from throwing his cooking career away in Paris and going for his third Michelin star. You know he’s going for his third Michelin star because no fewer than 15 characters sounds this entire movie go. I heard he was going for his third star. I’m going after my third star. Once you told me you’re going for the third star. I heard an idiotic rumor. You’re going for third star. And we’re going to get the third star. To get you one Michelin star, you have to be like Luke Skywalker. But if you manage to get three, you’re Yoda What if he’s Darth Vader? Which is not a thing. Michelin stars just flat out do not work that way. You don’t like have to, you don’t rack them up like gold or XP points in a video game. Like restaurants are just analyzed individually. Like it doesn’t make sense, but I understand that they need to sort of like dumb down the system to make it a palatable drama to people. But then you get into the actual food that they show, which is just reprehensible. One of the first scenes in the kitchen that we really get to see is during this Ocean’s 11 montage of compiling, this ragtag diverse ish group of people for Bradley Cooper to just abuse throughout 140, no, that’s too many minutes throw a 100 minutes of runtime. So he goes to this restaurant and he takes one bite of Cacio e Pepe pasta, and just goes. I need to see who made this. And then he walks into the kitchen and he finds Sienna Miller, who becomes a huge part of the movie. and the first thing you see her do is she just takes two fingers and just dips them into a soft spot. Cooking at a restaurant, just goes and you think that Bradley Cooper, he’s this Michelin star chef. You know, they’re bad boys, but they run a tight ship over there. Then Bradley Cooper’s goes in with his fingers and just dunks him in the soft spot and just eats. Adam has just said, your Cacio is one of the best tasting outside of Rome. Anyone who actually watches this, I know gross things happen in the kitchen all the time. I am certainly no stranger to it, but I don’t run a restaurant. If you’re a Michelin star chef, you got tasting spoons. That was a weird decision to show right off the bat. And then he’s like, you should have toasted the pepper to remove the moisture to bla bla bla and add some chopped sage next time. I was like, who has chopped sage to cacio e pepe? Like it’s that he was also talking to the classic Roman implications of the dish and like why. Anyways, and then you get into the actual food that Bradley Cooper himself is cooking to exhibit that, you know, he is a three Michelin star chef that he is someone who deserves all of the accolades that the viewer is supposed to pour onto him. And the food point of this movie looks really good off the bat until, and this is true. Anytime I talk about this movie with somebody and they go, “Man, the food looks so good. I want to eat all of it.” And I go name a single dish he made. And they’re like, ah, there was, uh, the butter. It was like, yeah, exactly. If you watch a movie like chef, you can name so many dishes. There’s the agliolio olio that he makes. There’s the grilled cheese that he makes. There’s the medianoche, there’s the lechon. There’s all these dishes, even the beignets that he eats. And in Burnt, he never names a single dish that he cooks. All of the food porn shots are just broth being poured over an edible flower, garnish on top of some piece of meat or butter being spooned over something. And that is absolutely it. The only indication you get that Bradley Cooper is a competent chef in this movie. Is that any time they show somebody take a bite of his food they just go “mm” and that’s it. They’re never even like, oh my God, the squad is so good. They just go, “mm, oh.” Like it’s an herbal essences commercial from 2003. If someone just showering like “ah!” understanding, that it’s a good shampoo. But now with the food movie for crying out loud, my favorite scene, that exhibits this is Uma Thurman, who has just maybe the saddest three-minute cameo of any movie that I’ve ever seen, uh, including the first scene where she meets Bradley Cooper. She’s supposed to be a high profile food critic, right? And Bradley Cooper comes up and they exchange knowing glances and I’m like, I’ve seen this movie a lot, but I can’t remember, did Uma Thurman sleep with him? And then she goes, Simone you’re a lesbian. Why did you sleep with Adam Jones? She just says it out loud. Wow, great storytelling showing not telling there, you a-hole. Anyway, she plays a high-profile food critic. She comes in to review Adam’s cooking, even though we didn’t even work at the restaurant, he just comes in and bullies his way into a kitchen. And then he serves up two dishes. Again, cannot tell you what they were. One might have been a bird, the other might have been a fish. And then Uma Thurman goes to this dish. She takes a single bite of potato that is less than the size of a dime. This is a plain potato that you can see on the dish. And she puts her in her mouth and just goes, “mm”. It was a potato. What could he have done to a potato that nobody else could have? And you could have told from a dime size bite. And then of course she writes the review and that sets the tone for Adam opening up this restaurant. That scene, let me have last time I watched. I watched that scene like 15 times last night where I was like, this is the potato, Uma, the potato! And then they reuse that same shot later in the movie to show his like evolution as a chef, when he serves another dining room, full of people, more food that you cannot name and they’ll go, “mm, mm, oh!” and I just love to think about the actor whose big break this was, that gets to put that on a reel. It goes like, yeah, I was a Burnt “mm” extra number three. And I’m like, oh my God, you should be in an Olive Garden Commercial. Can I be in an Olive Garden Commercial? I am. I do- I do love their Zupa Toscana. Oh my God, it’s so good. That gives me the “Oh” face that Uma Thurman gives in this movie. Also, I’ve talked about this before Nicole and I on our podcast, A Hot Dog is a Sandwich. Go find it wherever you get your podcasts, Or I swear to God, sorry. I got all abusive from watching this movie. Maybe leave that out. And I’ve talked about this before, especially the split between a movie like Chef from John Favreau in Burnt executive produced by Gordon Ramsey. Talked about this on the podcast with Nicole and Andrew from Binging With Babish. The main thing that you get from the movie Burnt, is that they absolutely hate food. And Bradley Cooper even says as much, there’s this really bizarre scene where he’s talking to Sienna Miller and he’s like, “What’s the point of cooking?” And she’s like, “It’s an expression of love. You get to-” She’s Irish, that’s and Irish accent. “It’s an expression of love at the very least. It’s sustaining someone, showing them love.”, and Bradley Cooper hits her with “People eat because they’re hungry. I want to make food that makes people stop eating.” What does- what does that mean? That’s something that was deep when you were 14, like you listened to Papa Roaches scars, and you heard the line “Cut my heart open just to feel.” And you’re like, oh my God. I feel that because my girlfriend broke up with me in a yogurt land, parking lot. I just want to feel something it’s like, no, that was deep when you were 14. It means absolutely nothing now, but it does show what everyone in this movie kind of thinks about food. Kind of just throwing aside the idea that food is at all about sustenance or love. Not that you need to believe in those ideals, but to then counter that with just ultimate edge, Lord sad boy owned “I want make food so good. It makes people stop eating forever.” Come on, get the heck outta here. There’s a lot of surface level pretty shots of food, but you never actually know what any of the food is. You never get any sense that Bradley Cooper is passionate about food at all. And then there’s this weird relationship with sufi cookery. So they try and set up this whole rivalry between like Bradley Cooper’s old school chef-iness against this like new school modernity stuff. And so Bradley Cooper insist that he does not know what a Sous Vide machine is. This movie was made in 2015, Bradley Cooper is supposed to be away for three years, shucking 1 million oysters, which if he had do the math, it’s something like 998 oysters a day, which makes sense. But then if you look at the actual notebook, he was doing about 2,500 oysters a day. So you got to wonder what his work schedule was like. Anyways, point is. Say Bradley Cooper’s working at multiple Michelin star restaurant in 2012 in Paris. He’s gonna know what a Sous Vide machine is. Sous Vide machines or immersion circulators, if you will. They’ve been used in French kitchens since I think 1974 was the first use. They were really big in the eighties, continued to be big, became huge in America in 2001, became available for the home chef in 2012. Sous Vide has been around forever and is not this like hallmark of molecular gastronomy cooking. If you don’t know what a Sous Vide machine is, and you’re a Michelin starred chef, you would have had to have suffered some like amnesia events, because it absolutely makes no sense. Like there’s this scene where Bradley Cooper shows up to his rivals three Michelin starred restaurant in London and is played by Matthew Reis from The Americans. And it kind of just looks like he’s in a bad American in disguise which is funny because I like to believe that the chef is just like a Russian double agent. Should I go down my top 10 sex scenes in The Americans again? So my favorite, well then hold on. So my favorite scene, so he shows up to this guy’s restaurant just to crap all over his food. And then he goes back into the kitchen and this kitchen is like, looks more like a laboratory than an actual kitchen, which sometimes isn’t super far off from a lot of these modern restaurants. However, he could have gone to like the Rotavap, the rotary evaporator machine that’s used to like reduce water from things without the addition of heat and blah, blah, blah. And it’s an actually pretty cool scientific piece of equipment. But instead of doing that, he goes to the Sous Vide machine and he goes- You don’t cook your warm food up in condoms. And if you thought that was the only time Bradley Cooper was going to say that Sous Vide is cooking and condoms. Nope, because that happens later when Sienna Miller, who Bradley Cooper just abused for the last 40 minutes, comes in the kitchen trying to save the restaurant. And she goes, “Oh, you have a plan to save kitchen.” “I have a plan to save the kitchen. Mr. Bradley Cooper, it’s called, Sous Vide” And then she gives like a two-minute explainer of what Sous Vide cooking is which I get it. It’s exposition for the movie, you need to do that. But Bradley Cooper instead of being like, “Yeah, I know.” He’s just like, “oh”. and she’s like, “It seals all the flavor in any marinade. You want any sauce? You want any vegetable in the Sous Vide?” And then that turns Bradley Cooper’s entire restaurant around Sous Vide cooking. Which if you are the Sous Vide lobby, my God, how happy do you have to be about this movie? Maybe not that it’s juxtaposed against Bradley Cooper effectively beating the crap out of people for two hours. But like, You know, product placement. It’s a condom. Dude can we get $140,000 RotaVap? I want to put In and Out spread in there, see what happens. And if you think that was the wildest scene involving Bradley Cooper in the Sous Vide machine, you are sorely mistaken because when he is at his lowest of lows, classic hero’s journey and stuff, he tries to kill himself with a Sous Vide bag by putting it over his head and suffocating himself inside, uh, his rivals restaurant, which of his movie did any work to establish any sort of emotional connection with any of these characters, it might be a moving scene but otherwise it is just the heaviest handed metaphor, which at first I was going to blame the writers for, and then I found out that Bradley Cooper improvised the entire scene. He did not tell anybody that he was about to shove a vacuum seal bag over his head, then make poor Matthew Reis wrestle him out of it. And then he just did it on set and you can physically see it’s cutting off his airways like Bradley Cooper, low key almost died, but all that just kind of shows the lack of reality in this cartoon world of food that they lived in which to me, is like disrespectful to the viewer. Not everything has to cater to like the elite foodie class who understands everything, but it’s like if you’re a sports fan, you can watch a sports movie and tell who actually put in the work to understand the sport and get good footage. Did it with Bernie. You can tell who actually made the effort to understand cooking and who just put in flashy shots. But now we get to the much more serious issue, which is just the abuse that takes place over an hour and 40 minutes. We all know that Gordon Ramsey grew up cooking in abusive kitchens and that he ran some abusive kitchens himself and still sort of exhibits that on air, uh, constantly all the time. And I’m not in the business of like scolding art, right? I’m not saying that art should only show perfect human relationships and show how to model things for society. I think there’s a fair amount of value in art showing that life is messy showing that relationships are messy, but it can’t just like celebrate it. Right? That to me is something where you draw a line and say, when you outright celebrate just straight workplace abuse, especially in an industry that we’ve seen, especially during COVID the workforce just completely dropped because of how terrible the conditions are. This movie comes out and just says like, “Hey, okay, it’ll all work out.” There’s the classic plate, throwing montages. I feel like Gordon Ramsey actually coached Bradley Cooper on the plate throwing technique, which is like really sad in my mind. And then there’s just classic tantrums where he just screams the F-word and emotionally humiliates his staff, making everyone uncomfortable. And then it gets even more serious where he just straight physically assaults a member of his staff. He puts his hands on Sienna Miller and he shoves her. And no one does anything about it. Again, art doesn’t need to show perfect human relationships, but there needs to be some sort of reckoning for him. The movie, he never actually has to deal with it because less than an hour later in the movie after he like makes her daughter a birthday cake, Sienna Miller just falls in love with him and starts making out with him outside of like a fish market. Also as a side note, every single character in this movie wants to have sex with Bradley Cooper. He got Alicia Vikander wants to have sex with Bradley Cooper. Daniel Bruhl wants to have sex with Bradley Cooper, Uma Thurman, the self-identifying lesbian, wants to have sex with Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller wants to have sex with Bradley Cooper. And the only way that Bradley Cooper seems to communicate anything about food is through just the most grotesque sexual metaphors. Its- Just like sex is like, you’re always headed to the same place, but you got to find new and dangerous way of getting there. We should be dealing in culinary orgasms. When’s the last time you had an orgasm That was interesting. Mhm. Nope, Mhm no I hard pass. To be clear, cooking is not like sex. They are very different things. The only similarity is that sometimes Pam nonstick spray is used in both. Okay. Okay. Back to the idea of physical assault in the workplace. There’s this scene where Bradley Cooper, he’s still amassing his team of ragtag chefs. He goes, and he picks one up from prison and he just goes “Assault?” And I thought he was going to be like, “Yeah, I got in a drunken fight.” And then his Sous Chef says that he cut off a coworker’s nose for plating the monk fish upside down. And you get the sense that at this point, that is a really intense thing, right? That’s not like shoving someone, which is, you know, still bad. Don’t put your hands on anyone at work or outside of work, He cuts off somebody’s nose and serves prison time. You get the sense that Bradley, Cooper’s going to be like, “Hey man, that’s messed up. I’m-I’m running a clean operation here” instead, He’s just like, “Hey, that’s my guy. You don’t know how us old school chefs do it.” And then he rides off on a motorcycle that he stole. So, you took, you took matters into your own hands. Yeah. Yes I did. This is just like a weird teenage boy’s fantasy of what it would be like to be a rockstar chef, which is something that like, I think we can all condemn. Even Anthony Bordain, God rest his soul said that he doesn’t like that He perpetuated that stuff earlier in his career. And I can’t stress this enough. I do believe that art can act as a mirror to show us our flaws. And it doesn’t necessarily need to come with a moral warning, but for the love of God, it can not just come with an endorsement of those flaws. And some of my favorite movies, I think do that. I mean, I love the movie Whiplash. That movie gave me more anxiety than literally anything, especially cause I watched it on a plane and I watched snakes on a plane in a drum studio. And as they’re navigating those murky waters between like passion and obsession, you know, miles teller plays one of the greatest drum solos ever. But at the end, you’re left with this idea that there was a cost, right? He gets in the car accident. They feel just emotionally beaten by it. You know, JK Simmons is sort of left, just lonely. The only thing he has in his life is jazz. And it presents things at least in a really complex way that doesn’t outright read as a condemnation, but it certainly, certainly is not an endorsement. And if you think the conduct and Burnt, wasn’t a direct endorsement from someone like executive producer, Gordon Ramsay, check out this quote from Gordon Ramsey, reacting to the film. And that’s exactly what it’s like in my life, in my kitchen on a daily basis. You are looking at that all the time, yeah? And Gordon Ramsey is literally saying this in a promotional YouTube video of Bradley Cooper, just like throwing plates and screaming at people. I know abuse happens in kitchens. I know there’s very intense environment and some of this is their reflection of reality. I’ll be a very hyperbolic and stylized version, but to be clear, that is not the essence of what it is to be a chef today. Maybe back in like 2003 when we’d kind of allowed that type of stuff. But we have gone through so many reckoning moments in the restaurant industry that is insane to me that this movie was made in 2015. And even as you’re watching through all this, you still get the idea that maybe Bradley Cooper will learn the error of his ways. And that may be his character will finally have to deal with consequences and he won’t get everything that he wants. And it almost happens. There’s this great scene where he’s, it’s funny we are talking about great scenes it’s like a really bad scene, but it’s great. There’s a scene that is so bad that it is absolutely fantastic. One of my favorite scenes in movie history, the Michelin inspectors are supposedly in the restaurant and Bradley Cooper finally has the opportunity to get his third Michelin star, but he just got beat up by mob bosses. Whoopsie! Cause that also happens. And his longtime Sous Chef Michelle, whose restaurant in Paris Bradley Cooper let rats loose into to sabotage him. Cause again, there’s a lot going on in this plot. Anyways, they’re sending food out and he asked the Sous Chef, ‘Michelle, did you season this?’ And he goes, “Yes, I did myself. It’s perfect.” And then two seconds later, the maitre d’ comes in who I think Bradley Cooper just forcibly kissed in the scene earlier, which is very strange. And he comes in, he goes, “they sent it back. They said it was too spicy.” And then Sous Chef Michelle holds his hand out. Uh, That’s my that’s my gross hand. Ugh He goes, I put scabs in it like Josh’s hands and Sous Chef Michelle holds out his hand and you see it is stained with cayenne pepper, and he goes, Peppers and then walks out and you’re like, “yes, yes, someone finally gave Bradley Cooper what he deserved.” He realized that he can not just abuse people for years in search of some meaningless form of greatness and actually get away with it and get what he wants. But then you find out that it wasn’t the real Michelin inspectors after all and Bradley Cooper gets another chance and they show up again and maybe even then it still would have worked if he had some real deep reflection. But the only sense that you get is a three-second clip and 20 second montage of him literally going, “we do this together.” We do what we do. We what? We do what we do and we do it together. Yes, Chef. The movie Brink had more of an emotional turnaround when Eric Von Detten said “Soul skaters!” It was literally the same scene. And then they serve the meal and then the music has a kind of little peppy uptick. And then they’re all eating family meal together exchanging knowing glances because they finally got what they wanted, that third Michelin star. Yay. He had five minutes of any sort of emotional growth or reflection on the absolute years of harm and tear that he reaped on himself and a larger community of thousands upon thousands of laborers throughout the world. Good for you, Bradley Cooper. Good for you, Gordon Ramsey, you all did it. You got that fictional third Michelin star and a whopping 41% on rotten tomatoes. And at the end of all this, Bradley Cooper like goes to his rival chefs restaurant who learned something from Bradley Cooper. And he goes in there and he goes. And you’re using butter. Where’d you come up with that idea? Do you think you invented butter Bradley Cooper? Do you think you’re the only chef to use butter? What an insane thing. And after all that, why, why have I watched this movie eight or nine times. Art has many, uh, facets, uh… Maybe I’m watching it to learn what not to do. I think maybe that’s the use of this movie. This is going to go down as a piece of history that we all look back on and collectively cringe at. And I am a sucker for cringe. Anyone who has watched a single mythical kitchen video can sure tell you that. Maybe the fact that burnt even exists is a good thing. It can literally serve a guide for young chefs of what not to do and how to not have a hundred million dollar empire like Gordon Ramsey. God, how does he have so much money? And if you want a good textbook film to watch on how to act as a chef, please for the love of God, go watch Chef by John Favreau. And you can totally tell the influences. They had Roy Choi as an executive producer instead of Gordon Ramsey. And he’s just a really humble dude who tries to run clean kitchens. And that absolutely comes through in the movie. There’s a great scene where the restaurant owner comes into the kitchen and he starts berating John Favreau’s crew and John Favreau pulls him aside and you see him just defending his entire crew. He’s like, “Hey, you don’t speak to them like that. This is my crew. I handle this.” And you can tell that he tries to run a clean ship and that his staff loves him. The movie also shows a really complicated dynamic inside restaurants and it by no means shows a perfect relationship, but you can tell that it tries, it has heart. It loves food. Please don’t give Burnt your money. Even though I am telling you about it now. Be like Carl Kasell from Chef, not like Bradley Cooper from Burnt. And I know that Bradley Cooper is not his character name, but he’s just so Bradley Cooper in the movie that I can’t call him anything but Bradley Cooper. I’m sure he’s a, maybe he’s a nice guy. I don’t know anything about Bradley Cooper. He might be terrible in real life. No. I mean, like not- like there’s an equal chance that Bradley Cooper is good and bad in the sense that everyone exists in this like, Schrodinger’s kind of, you know, like who knows. Like that one guy who ate people, he was bad. And if you’re looking for other chefs to look up to, keep stopping by the Mythical Kitchen channel, we got new videos for you every week. We got new episodes of our podcast, A Hot Dog is a Sandwich every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. Hit us up on Instagram at mythicalkitchen, with pictures of your mythical dishes on your hashtag dreams to come food, see you all next time. Chris, there is one good part to this whole movie. That’s a one hour, 13 minutes and two seconds Bradley Cooper’s cooking up a storm and he goes, and he actually Palm heel strikes garlic. They should have kept the movie that they should have cut after two seconds. The mythical kitchen’s favorite way to obliterate garlic immortalized in T-shirt form. Get the Palm heel strike T now at mythical.com.