L'amour à la carte

Cute movie focusing on the heir to the Tortilla Hut franchise looking for their next big dish. On his culinary tour he comes across a fiery local chef that cooks with love. He gets stranded and learns way more than he bargained for. Will he be banned from her restaurant and her heart by duplicitous dealings from his sister? Cute premise and actors. Lovely movie for the whole family.

It's a shame that HBO hired a lousy screenplay writer and made a supposedly good concept gone so bad. The scenes in this film all looked staged, contrite, and pretentious. Maria Conchita Alonso used to be a pretty good actor, but she ruined her face with terrible plastic surgery, so her face now looked so weird and out of a place in a 840+ small village in New Mexico, and played a quite unimportant and unnecessary role as the mother of the leading female character, Javiera Torres, played by Dania Ramirez, an actor with limited talent but nonetheless was also further ruined by the horrible screenplay, the dialog made her confusing, pretentious and weak. Andrew Carter who played the goofy and sneaky boy friend of Javiera Torres, was a very weird cast; a white guy existed in a 99% small Latino village, hooking up with a local single mother with a cute and smart young daughter, was such a highly unlikely ridiculous figure in this film, and his acting in this film was just terrible and fake. Santino Fontana, who played the leading character, Joel Flanagan, was trying so hard to act and look like the co-heir of his family business, but didn't look and feel like a convincing enough figure. Then, again, all the other supporting actors, playing touring retirees or other vague characters, acted terrible and awkward, also further ruined by the lousy screenplay and bad directing. Those local villagers acted so unnaturally.

Beautiful locality cinematography, nice little Latino village(town?), some macro shots of the fascinating Mexican dishes. The romance? Forget about it, man. We've seen many films about the food, cuisines, family biz...but this "Off the Menu" is the weakest and the worst one.

Like the Milagro Beanfield War, the scenery steals the show. .

Since reading and seeing the film "Like Water for Chocolate", this film ranks high for me in the food film genre. The character, Javiera oozes with love and passion for unadulterated food from her hands in a presentation worthy of an art masterpiece. The town of Villanueva and the community inspires one to want to visit New Mexico. The scenery is breathtaking. I enjoyed both Dania Ramirez and Maria Conchita Alonso as strong women leads. True, the film is predictable, but in a good way.

Off The Menu is smartly told story of two people falling love. The somewhat irresistible chef is overcome by the charms of the outsider, but he falls under her spell as well. Off The Menu isn't perfect, but it plays on the basic human themes of emotion and love. A very nicely told story that couples will enjoy.