That mentioned, perfection is a part of what these characters try for. For Eugénie, Tran mentioned, “if it’s on the table, it means that you did it right at every moment.”

Some meals motion pictures have inevitably resorted to compromises. In an interview, Campbell Scott recalled that in the course of the making of “Big Night” (1996), which he directed with Stanley Tucci, quite a lot of the meals tasted blander than it regarded. “We were low-budget — not a lot of time and long days,” he mentioned. “You want it filmable eight hours later or 12 hours later. Part of what I remember about that is that for what was shown and not eaten, you couldn’t season it, because seasoning actually makes it break down a little faster.”

There was a humorous dialogue throughout manufacturing, he mentioned: “Are we trying to make something delicious for the actors to eat, or are we just going to make this kind of unseasoned stuff so that it looks amazing, and then we all have to act? And of course we settled on ‘we all have to act.’”

Still, the restaurant set in “Big Night,” constructed on a stage at Chelsea Piers, had a working kitchen, one thing that was additionally essential on “The Taste of Things.” Being in a position to prepare dinner additional dishes is important not simply due to the potential for errors, Spungen mentioned, however as a result of movie crews must shoot many scenes from a number of angles. Matching photographs of meals later, within the enhancing course of, might be tough. (She mentioned she noticed a refined change in the kind of greens used atop the vol-au-vent in “The Taste of Things,” for example.)

The strategy is totally different from that of cooking exhibits or documentaries, though these share a vital component with their fictional counterparts: time. Tran is a fan of the opposite massive meals film of 2023, Frederick Wiseman’s “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” which runs 4 hours.

“People say that it’s too long, but not for me, because it’s very interesting to see it long,” Tran mentioned, including, “You have time to see how they doubt about what they decide.”