‘La Cocina’ is the Mouthwatering New Kitchen Drama Tackling Exploitation
Spicy and perfectly prepared, ‘La Cocina’ has a red-hot message — if this were a dish, it’d earn a Michelin star.
Frantic and relentless deadlines. Boiling liquids and clashing egos. Sweat. Steam. Hissing hotplates (and hissing waitstaff). Is it any wonder restaurant kitchens are the perfect setting for dramatic storytelling? From addictive smash hits like to acclaimed dramas like and subversive satire à la , cooks have stepped into the spotlight in a big way lately (is it a whole new genre? We could call it Whisky Business!). Enter (“The Kitchen”): a piping-hot, peppery main course on the menu of fine dining films.
Directed by award-winning Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios, it’s a beautiful slice of life film (shot in smoky black & white), but don’t expect the mouthwatering vibes of . The film is less concerned with how to plate the perfect roux or jus, and more about the lives of the anonymous and undervalued chefs, kitchenhands and waitstaff who slave away to satisfy our salivating maws. What are their backgrounds? What of their futures? And how are those shaped by what’s right here, in between?
The cast are predominantly Mexican and Latin American characters, who’ve made their way to New York to chase “The American DreamTM”. Naturally, Ruizpalacios punctures that dream, giving a glimpse of the issues faced by immigrant workers; pressures that go far beyond churning out a gluggy risotto. For undocumented workers, hired illegally, there’s the constant stress of being caught and deported. And even for those with papers, there’s relentless racial labelling — and the daunting task of surviving in one of the world’s most expensive cities.
It’s meaty stuff, and covers a lot of ground, but it’s interesting that a movie set in a kitchen opens with steely grey shots of the sea. It’s where we meet Estela (Anna Díaz), on the ferry into New York City. Wide-eyed and lacking English, she still somehow navigates her way to The Grill, the Times Square tourist-trap restaurant where she kinda-sorta knows one of the chefs from her childhood. She’s even brought Mexican ingredients for him to cook with, and $50 to get a fake social security number, because the head of hiring “knows a guy”.
So Estela is our entry into this environment — our eyes and ears — and Ruizpalacios throws us straight into the boiling pot like a squeaking crustacean. In one unbroken take, we enter the lunch rush in this kitchen: the order printer chattering endlessly, hoarse shouts and clanging cookware, a chaotic dance as the camera dives through hissing steam and whirls past trays of glassware smashing to the floor. The look on Estela’s face says it all. The intensity here feels the same as her arrival in the busiest city she’d ever seen. Can she actually survive this?
Estela’s arrival dovetails with a memo from the owners: $823 has gone missing, adding stakes and doubt to the world she’s stepped into. Then, we meet Pedro (Raúl Briones): unpredictable, hotheaded, at constant loggerheads with staff — particularly the white American ones. He’s got that “main character” energy; a charm you can’t deny, an ego as fiery as his gas burners. He’s in a situationship with Julia (), who wants to terminate their pregnancy — which costs about $800. And with that, The Grill’s steamy kitchen becomes a hotbed of accusations, and a juicy metaphor for America’s modern-day cultural fireworks.
What does La Cocina have to say about exploitation and immigration?
La Cocina is very keen to examine the immigrant experience, and with the sounded by Trump’s second term, it couldn’t be more timely. That fear hangs over most of the waitresses and kitchen staff — step out of line, and you’ll be sent packing. When you’ve sacrificed everything just to get a shot in the US, that’s a genuine threat.
It’s why the ‘stolen money’ storyline works so well, bubbling in the background. One by one, the managers interrogate the staff, where one Latino cook explains the stakes to his (white) superior: If you stole it, the worst thing that happens is you get fired. If it’s us, we get fired and we get taken back home. There’s dark humour too: one of the Black chefs makes the crack, Is there a colour gradient to the interviews, darkest to whitest? The fact that jokes are the default reaction shows just how prevalent casual racism is in their daily lives.
Watch for the admission from the manager, Luis (Eduardo Olmos) when he interviews Julia — she’s one of the few waitresses who doesn’t have legal status to worry about, because she’s white. But a pregnancy with Pedro? It’s as though she’s throwing that advantage away. Guys like him are always looking for a way in, he tells her. You don’t want to be his baby mama so he can become legal. I know these guys! My Dad was one of them. It’s pretty telling that he’s the product of a “greencard” pregnancy, and he’s still urging Julia not to go down that road.
What’s La Cocina’s take on corporate capitalism?
By showing the role of desperation and inequality in the workplace, La Cocina is making a comment on corporate America, and how its profits are often driven by less-than-ethical labour. One of the clearest ways Ruizpalacios makes that point is with promises from the wealthy restaurant owner, Rashid (Oded Fehr) to his staff. He takes Pedro aside in one scene to ask: You’ve been working here 2, 3 years, yes? We’ll get you the papers sometime soon, get you legal. It’s a dangling carrot, a huge motivator to Pedro — which is exactly why it works. But you can sense the emptiness of the words.
isn’t saying all restaurant owners — or the owners of any business — are wealthy elites. But it all hints at the massive disconnect between “the 1%” and the working class. If you only truly care about profits, not people, of course you’d say anything to keep morale up. And if your employees revolt, so what? There’s a long queue of wannabe “new Americans” waiting to replace them. Rashid quizzes his shift manager: I give them work, I pay them well, they eat — what more do they want? What more is there!? It’s a rhetorical question that director Alonso Ruizpalacios is also asking us, the audience: isn’t there more to life than this? Aren’t we worth more than just our productivity?
How does La Cocina show the tension between our labour and our humanity?
Here’s where the heart of lies, and Ruizpalacios has a beautiful touch with his performers, making sure we feel the bond between characters both big and small. Their daily routine feels very “lived-in” — it feels real. Like when, early on, the waitresses chatter in the changing room before opening (and gang up to shoo away a peeping Tom). Later, the chefs smoke in the alley after the rush, and Pedro asks them what their life’s dream looks like. The answers aren’t fame or fortune: it’s the little house, the holiday back home. One says I dream about disappearing.
The point is that against the of their working lives, the heart of these workers breaks through, like cracks of sunlight peeping through a shuttered window. Pay attention to the scene where Pedro makes a phone call home to Mexico, and his mother talks about his Dad’s failing health and upcoming birthday. What’s unspoken is that Pedro is missing his father’s final years, maybe even months. It all speaks to the pressure of an impossible choice. Pedro came to the USA for a new life, a new hope — but in doing so, he’s been ruptured from the deepest parts of himself: his family, his culture and his home.
That’s why it’s notable when Estela arrives with “Hoja Santa” herbs from Pedro’s mother back home — big, fragrant leaves carefully wrapped in a handkerchief, “the holiest in all of Puebla”. It’s a direct connection to home, and an ingredient that Pedro simply can’t access in New York City. When he starts cooking with the herbs, it’s like the true Mexican chef in him comes alive. And the meal he makes doesn’t get served to hungry tourists — he delivers it straight to Julia, his amor, to eat on her break. It’s not just a plate of food, it’s an act of love.
So, is La Cocina romantic?
It’s this push-pull love story between Pedro and Julia that propels La Cocina’s second act. There’s the tension between them about Julia’s decision to have an abortion — she’s very clear that she doesn’t want a baby, while Pedro keeps urging her just to think about it. Check out how Ruizpalacios shoots the scene where Pedro gives Julia the money for the procedure — they’re on either side of the restaurant’s lobster tank. She’s got instant doubts about where he got the money (remember the missing $800?), and the thick glass and water between them is a great visual match for their lack of emotional transparency.
She’s guarded, while he’s hot-blooded; prone to romantic flights of fancy. I should bring you home to meet my mother, he mumbles when they kiss in the walk-in freezer. Pedro pleads with Julia to run away with him to Mexico — he knows a place so beautiful he can’t even describe it. Let’s leave all this, he urges. The writing in this scene is so good: Pedro daydreams aloud about their future, saying they can cook for dumb tourists while their kids run around on the sand, the sun shining on the water and their dribbly little grins. It’s a gorgeous image, and like Pedro, we can see it — but a cut to Julia’s face tells us that a “vision” is probably all it will be. A dream that just doesn’t match their reality.
How does La Cocina explore class and race?
Maybe Julia’s doubts stem not just from Pedro’s dreams, but his complex persona. An early scene shows Pedro in an ongoing beef with Max (Spenser Granese), one of the restaurant’s few white American chefs — we find out Pedro even pulled a knife on him. It’s smart to leave it up to our imagination what could’ve provoked Pedro that much: his temper, or Max’s bigotry?
Later, they come to blows again over the language used in the kitchen, when Max screams Speak English! You came to America to speak English, so speak it! It’s interesting that Max is the minority in this kitchen, an inverse of the world outside — and like some in the real world, he reacts to his feelings of usurped authority with anger and violence.
There’s plenty of other subtle ways that La Cocina puts us in the shoes of these workers to experience how they’re made to feel lesser-than, either accidentally or by design. Twice, Estela is referred to as “Mexican”, even though she’s clearly explained that she’s Domenican. There’s already a “class” separation between front of house and back of house — but within the Latina staff, there’s even further hierarchies of status, power and value.
What does the lobster represent in La Cocina?
La Cocina does include one little foodie tidbit we never knew. As Pedro explains to Julia at the lobster tank, the gourmet crustaceans used to be so populous and easy to catch, they were called “poor man’s chicken” and fishermen freely gave them away… Until one day some rich asshole decides it’s a delicacy. It’s a potent metaphor for the relationship between dining and social status. Often, this industry is geared more towards feeding egos than hungry bellies.
Watch out for the perfect callback when later, an unemployed man comes to the kitchen door asking for a bowl of soup, but Pedro cooks him lobster tails instead. When the manager finds out, he’s furious (makes sense!), but for Pedro it’s worth the verbal strike. Like cooking the Hoja Santa, he’s making a statement through his food. Why should lobster become a status symbol reserved only for the “elite” — and who gets to decide who that is, anyway?
So — what’s the takeaway from La Cocina?
You might walk away from a great meal groaning and feeling a bit groggy — with La Cocina, it’s the opposite. It’s a clear-eyed and modern story, one that feels super tapped into today’s economic and social fabric. And while it makes some heavy points, it doesn’t drift away from entertaining us. Just look at the scene where the entire kitchen staff jokingly shout racist insults at each other, swapping the rudest gestures they can think of while trying not to burst out laughing. It’s not only funny, it shows the love between these workers who, for 10 hours a day, are their own kind of family.
Director Alonso Ruizpalacios is keen for authenticity, and he’s helped by the camerawork of Juan Pablo Ramírez, who shoots using a squared-off, doco-style frame. This adds to the realism, but doesn’t take away from the artistry: there’s a beautiful texture to the soft black & white (reminiscent of Alfonso Cuarón’s ), and we lost count of the striking angles as the story unfolded — notice how many shots include the concrete kitchen ceiling in the frame, adding to the oppressive and subterranean feel.
It’s this ‘underclass’ metaphor that Ruizpalacios really explores: how a whole class of people can be branded, then exploited to feed a capitalist machine. At the Berlinale Festival (where La Cocina was nominated for the Golden Bear), he explained how he wanted to dig into that notion — how, as a society, we prioritize productivity over the things that make us whole. “The way we’ve built our lives leaves very little room for intimacy, for talking about dreams, the important things in life,” Ruizpalacios told the audience. “We’ve cancelled every other part of the human experience in favour of productivity. That is the factor that brings us to breaking point, a lack of understanding, a lack of empathy — all these emotions that eventually lead to violence.”
Like a gourmet dish, La Cocina is layered with nuanced flavours. It’s rich and fulfilling, with unexpected sweetness and bite. And no matter your walk of life, can’t we all relate to a story about dreams? There’s the dreams that are exploited, the ones that get us up and going every day… and the dreams that run along the sand, shining in the sun, just out of reach.
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