Over the last couple of reels the film shakes off its self-conscious inhibitions and displays some healthy unruliness, and just as we're warming to a group of characters whose indulgences have been not only culinary but emotional, it's all over.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard
There's a sinister, even insidious quality to a film that insists upon using incessant food montages not as a source of passion, but fodder for class-based self-congratulation.
The New York Times by Daniel M. Gold
Roger Gual’s half-baked film hopes to split the difference between romantic comedy and foodie delight but fails at both.
The film is so busy attending to all its people that it never manages to adequately serve any of them.
New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme
Pretty and pleasing, but no more. A bon-bon, not a meal.
Bringing together some of the least compelling dinner guests in recent memory at a world-class restaurant that’s about to permanently close its doors, this blandly seriocomic misfire from Spanish co-writer/director Roger Gual is too lazy to rise to the level of farce, too banal and insincere to work as drama.
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
Doesn’t even remotely qualify as flavorful. Among other demerits, this is the rare foodie movie that doesn’t seem to care much about food.
A mushy concoction that's not only unfulfilling, it's gag-worthy.
Los Angeles Times by Sheri Linden
Director Roger Gual presents little in the way of tantalizing culinary visuals, and that leaves the paper-thin characters as the main course.
RogerEbert.com by Susan Wloszczyna
Instead of focusing on gastronomic nirvana, this listless culinary drama feels and looks more like a glossy European travel commercial.