Chef!

Lenny Henry has put together an excellent series about an ill-tempered, sarcastic chef in the English countryside. Seasons 1 and 2 are absolutely fantastic with a drop-off in season 3. The only real problem was that the show was plagued with heavy actor turnover making continuity difficult through the three seasons.

Excellent show by Lenny Henry. Good thing show only lasted three seasons so he didn't have to kill Everton! :) Seriously, Lenny Henry was perfect as the sarcastic, egotistical, but excellent Chef! who has to deal with blundering fools, drunken assistants, and of course a wife who makes Sybil Fawlty look like Mother Teresa. And those are on the good days!

You have to say that Lenny Henry CBE was always worth watching in this series about egotistical British chef of Jamaican descent who is the head chef at Château Anglais which is translated into Château England. The cast of supporting characters don't really hold up to Gareth Blackstock. Henry just steals the show from under them. Anyway his wife is played by a great actress. I loved Lola played by Elizabeth Bennett as the hungry hostess who devours food as well as comments on Blackstock's genius. This show is well written, acted, and directed with an inviting group of supporting players. Blackstock gets his jollies by being cruel, critical, and sometimes mean to his staff long before there was Simon Cowell, Gordon Ramsay, or anybody else. Blackstock seeks utter perfection in creating the finest cuisine to be matched by those listed in Michelin and Cuisine magazines. Sometimes being a genius can make others weary of your presence as if God entered the room. But in Blackstock's kitchen, he's the Godlike presence, demanding, and critical.

I think Chef! is one of the best BBC shows I have seen. It will make you laugh like crazy. Chef is cranky but very lovable. His wife is something else. His staff consists of several younger cooks all hoping to learn his secrets. His method of cursing out his staff is hilarious, not using traditional curse words, but thing you would never think of. If you know and love someone that is temperamental and boisterous, you will probably enjoy this even more. I own the first two VHS tapes of this series and we watch them periodically and laugh again. Chef is very entertaining and I can't wait for the full season DVD's to be released in August.

When you get down to it, a Chef is an artist. They take ordinary ingredients and make extraordinary tasting dishes out of them. And like all artists they can be temperamental, demanding and demand nothing less than perfection from those around them. And if you've worked in a restaurant or kitchen at any point in your life you've run across such a person. Lenny Henry delivers this in "Chef!".

The plot is rather simple. Lenny Henry plays Gareth Blackstock, the head chef at the celebrated Chateau Anglais. It's a very exclusive, and expensive, restaurant. Gareth treats his staff like dirt, demands the very best from them and doesn't accept anything less than perfection. But that's only because he doesn't accept anything less than perfection from himself. Gareth is scathing in his critiques, quick-witted in his comebacks and not one to suffer fools gladly. Surrounding him are colorful characters that you find in all sitcoms, chief of which is Everton played by Roger Griffith. He's an aspiring chef with talent but he's a bit of a bumbler and often times is the source of Gareth's ire.

There's three seasons and I find the third to be the weakest of the lot. See it if you're a completionist or just stick to the first two if you want to laugh.