Successful real-life chefs are a blend of idealism and savvy: committed to quality, yet able to juggle budgets, media appearances, and dozens of workers. Restaurants are systems, not just the product of a genius chef alone at the stove. Never is this more clear than in one amazing scene in Ang Lee's Taiwanese family drama, Eat Drink Man Woman, when Chu, a senior chef, arrives in his restaurant's palatial lobby and then passes into its labyrinth of kitchens filled with an army of gophers, prep cooks, line cooks, and chefs in action. Movie food can seem static, but Lee seduces us with food in motion—stir fries seethe, stews burp on the stove. Every week, chef Chu offers up jaw-dropping meals to his daughters (even though he himself has lost the ability to taste). But though he is the master of his working life, deftly diffusing crises, he cannot communicate with his family—a movie-chef paradigm that carries over into this East-West production.