If you’ve seen the TV show The Bear then you’ve seen a good chunk of La Cocina, a hothouse drama set in a fast-paced New York restaurant kitchen. New York makes a difference – more illegal workers. And La Cocina is more explicit than The Bear about its racialised pecking order, though it’s a very uneasy order and prone to break down when the orders pile up.
Estela (Anna Díaz) is our introduction to this semi-familiar world, a wetback from Mexico wandering lost around New York until she finds what she’s looking for: The Grill in Times Square, the sort of high-volume eatery that knocks out fish and chips, pizza, pasta, burgers, plus the odd lobster for the high-rolling tourist. She connects up with line chef Pedro, a vague relative or friend of a relative from back home, and is soon working alongside him, breading chicken and knocking out plates of food ready to be whisked front of house.
At this point Estela drops almost entirely out of the picture, which seems strange, since one thing we know about her is that she has experience working in a Michelin-starred place and there’s clearly a story to tell of a young woman too qualified for her job in a strange city. Perhaps that arc – pile-em-high to top end – has already been too well covered by The Bear.
Instead the focus shifts to Pedro, a semi-cliched macho hothead Mexican who has knocked up one of the few white girls on the waiting staff. Julia is played by Rooney Mara and it’s this parenthood-or-abortion storyline that the film is most interested in, spiked with a slight whodunit subplot about whether one of them has been raiding the restaurant’s tills to pay for the termination.
Sorry to keep harping on about The Bear, but the film is at its best in the set pieces where the kitchen is at full stretch, energy is condensing on the walls, and hordes of servers with loaded trays are whizzing through the kitchen, tempers rising, small disagreements boiling over, and “Yes, chef!” echoing off the stainless steel.
Like many another in the kitchen, Pedro has come to America to make a new life and now finds himself effectively a prisoner in a low-wage job. But a job’s a job and he gets fed, so it could be worse… though a lot better. He’s been there for years.
Alonso Ruizpalacios directs, and gives it the same look as he did his 2014 film Güeros. The DP (Juan Pablo Ramírez) is different but Ruizpalacios clearly likes his black and white and a 4:3 (ish) aspect, which in 2014 looked hip. Now, I’m not so sure. Also on board is Yibran Asuad, whose editing skills come to the fore in the chaotic service scenes.
It is a superb movie about a busy restaurant as seen from behind the swinging door – the heat, the camaraderie, the rivalry, the feudal hierarchy, long hours, hard work and appalling treatment, and then there’s difficult customers and malfunctioning equipment on top as if everything else weren’t enough.
Pedro and Julia, though, do not come off quite as well. Nothing wrong with Raúl Briones, who is excellent as the brooding Pedro, incendiary here and there in fact. Or Rooney Mara as Julia, though her role is underwritten and there’s not quite enough for her to work with. But their story does not feel organically part of the rest of it, and sometimes the focus is on those two at the expense of other potentially fascinating characters. The already-mentioned Estela (Anna Díaz), for instance, or Max (Spenser Granese), who has a beef with Pedro that might be fuelled by white supremacism. Or might not. It would have been nice to find out.
Maybe it was a different movie at the conceptual stage and then The Bear came along and stole its lunch. Or maybe it’s been retrofitted to be a bit more like the TV show. Anyone know?
La Cocina – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
