Spinning Plates (Joseph Levy, 2012):USA

Reviewed by: Alexander Berg Viewed at: The Lobero, Santa Barbara

This is a story about different food cultures as well as it is about the people that surround them. This is a beautiful documentary exploring three widely different restaurants, the different problems they have gone through and are facing.

At first we get to follow the owner of what is considered to be the seventh best restaurant in the world, where they consider a good meal to be enjoyed not only with your tongue but also with your eyes as they use art to form the food. At the same time we follow the man in charge and the obstacles he has faced not only because of his restaurant but also through his life threatening decease.  We come along as he is showing us the rot of his inspiration and what makes him the extraordinary man he is. The second restaurant follow is a 150-year old restaurant that serve traditional food to the small community of their town. It is owned and run by a family that tell us about the restaurants tragic history and how they depend on the community around them to run the restaurant. At last we follow a Mexican restaurant driven by a couple. Serving only food made from their family recipes they serve traditional mexican food. We follow their struggle with keeping the restaurant in business and at the same time taking care of their daughter.

These three stories are woven together nicely teaching us about family values as well as believing in your dreams. Joseph Levy did an excellent job in putting this piece of art together. The story tells us about the industry from three different aspects showing us all sides of it from a simple mexican restaurant to one of the best in the world. We start off exploring the restaurants and what they offer but as the documentary moves on we are getting deeper and deeper into the lives of the owners and by the end this truly is a film about people. The film has many moments of drama which was way more than I expected when I decided to watch a documentary film about restaurants and food. We learn how much the food and the restaurants mean to these people and by the end you find yourself having a great deal of respect for people working in the restaurant industry.

The story structure in this film is a common three act structure starting with the introduction and there after getting to know the characters deeper. We are constantly moving between these three restaurants throughout the movie keeping everything relevant to the different stories. The cinematography in this film is also really nice, they really managed to get all the shots necessary and in a beautiful way. This really looks like it is a well produced high budgeted documentary.

I really appreciated this film and would recommend it to anyone, this is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen. I wasn’t that interested in the restaurant industry at all before but looking through the eyes of these people and their restaurants it made me see a completely different side to it, a side that I really like. This is a documentary film that will go down in the history, I am convinced this isn’t the last I hear of it.