By Bethany Banks, Second Year English
Amid a trend of anxiety-inducing kitchen dramas like The Bear and Boiling Point, La Cocina’s band of chefs are motivated not by achieving the perfect dish, but by the pursuit of their dreams and freedom from a grinding system that renders them cogs in a chaotic, overheating machine.
Watershed have again kindly invited us to a pre-screening, this time it's La Cocina, a 2025 drama written and directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios, adapted from Arnold Wesker’s play The Kitchen (1957). It follows the lives of the unsung workers in bustling Times Square restaurant ‘The Grill’, as chefs and waitresses tirelessly aim to serve a seemingly endless stream of tourists at breakneck speed, and escape the watchful eye of the tyrannical restaurant owner Rashid – an eye that turns suspicious and cut-throat when $800 goes missing from the restaurant till.
The plot focuses on Pedro (Raúl Briones Carmona), a loud, charming, and hot-headed Mexican chef whose presence is quickly mystified in the film's opening. We begin with Estela (Anna Diaz), a young woman new to New York, and we follow her as she makes her way to the restaurant in the hope of getting a job with the claim that she ‘knows Pedro’. We are introduced to the rest of the staff as they grasp for details of the fight Pedro got into the previous night with fellow chef Max (James Waterston). Pedro’s infamous reputation and legendary status as a ticking time bomb is made immediately clear, and all fingers seem to point to him as the thief of the missing money.
Managing to score a position as a chef, Estela, and the audience, are thrown in at the deep end. The sweltering, claustrophobic heat of the kitchen is an atmosphere conducive to a meltdown. The chefs, a group made up primarily of Latin American and Arab immigrants, fight and swear in a multicultural cacophony of different languages - yet the only serious tensions lie between Pedro and Max, a white chef with a hateful opinion of Pedro’s boisterous, cocky nature and loud joking with the other chefs.
There is this underlying sense that Max’s anger is motivated by an undercurrent of racial hostility, which is soon made clear as his volatile outburst ends with him demanding that Pedro and the other chefs speak English. Ruizpalacios handles such tensions with a delicate understanding, his extensive, one-take shots exacerbating the exhausting strain of the kitchen, forcing the audience to feel the weight of the stress of the staff in the restaurant.
As La Cocina goes on and the pressure becomes overwhelming, we learn more about why the chefs continue to toil in the ‘The Grill’ and its inhospitably demanding conditions. In a standout, poignant scene, Ruizpalacios takes a needed break from the kitchen and switches to the icily peaceful back of the restaurant where Pedro and a few other chefs are on a break between shifts.
Conversation turns to hopes, dreams and ambitions for leaving the restaurant – one chef is motivated by money and the generosity it can bring, another aims to have his own house to create and fix, another wants to provide for her girlfriend. This touching exchange reveals the overarching desire between the chefs to make better lives for themselves and their families, and fulfil the elusive ‘American Dream’ that inspires the hope to keep them going, however far or unlikely it may seem in the gruelling reality of their day-to-day lives.
Pedro himself had previously revealed his own idea of the ‘American dream’, an intimate, secret desire to move back to Mexico with his girlfriend, a waitress at ‘The Grill’ named Julia (Rooney Mara), to be with their unborn child. However, Julia herself wants an abortion and this complicates things. Mara delivers a standout performance as Julia, she becomes this thoughtful, hardworking woman dealing with her own pressures of motherhood and expectation. Mara’s calming, grounded performance is a much needed counterpart to the borderline clown-like physicality of Raúl Briones Carmona’s explosive depiction of Pedro.
This performance reaches its most eruptive peak in a cataclysmic breakdown at the end of the film, the shared anguish of the workers, realisation of false promises and combustive heat of the kitchen stress bringing Pedro, the restaurant, and the film, to a sweltering, shell-shocked halt. With the tensions high and performances heated, La Cocina is a must-see!
La Cocina is at Watershed from 28th March until at least the 3rd April. You can grab your tickets here, with £5 tickets for anyone 24 and under!
