<p>I can’t let this thread pass without saying that I think Tampopo is really head and shoulders the best food movie ever, especially since EVERYTHING in it relates to food. Everyone should see it.</p>
<p>I’ll also note that my current pop music crush, the Puerto Rican hip-hop group Calle 13, is also a feast for the foodie imagination. For whatever reason, its lyricist (who goes by the name “Residente”) is inordinately fond of food metaphors, and of food in general. All of the normal hip-hop topics – sex, the speaker’s superiority to all other MC’s, the speaker’s great lifestyle – are related to food. And sometimes, it’s just about great food that he’s thinking about making, or remembering. It’s very inventive (if you can understand Spanish), and hilarious.</p>
<p>Your story reminds us about the friends who hired a Chinese couple to take care of their child. We would get regular bulletins about the amazing food the minders were serving the kid. I was so jealous! After the kid went to school, the Chinese couple opened a restaurant.</p>
<p>Besides cooking food for the boys, they took them shopping and eating in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Every so often, the boys would come back with a Chinatown haircut. </p>
<p>She grew up in a Shanghai household that took up a city block. Big walls all around it, Gurkha guards at the door. She went to an english missionary school in the late 20s. She has rubies the size of walnuts–that were once woven into her grandfather’s cloak. Her grandfather was a judge of some sort. I think she took up nannying to experience babies and children. Looking back, I don’t know how I held my own as a young mother. Whenever I piped up with some yuppy opinion, she snorted. “You’re arguing with 5000 years of culture? You? With your baby culture that is only 200 years old?” Then she would give me the wave of the hand and that was that.</p>
<p>Her husband walked across China fleeing the Japanese. With Mao? I never could work it out. He didn’t speak English when he first arrived. He had been living in Hong Kong for most of the year but retired when my youngest son was born. That’s when he started coming with her every day.</p>
<p>When we visit, we go for dim sum on Sunday. This last time H actually left a $100 bill with the hostess as a deposit on our right to pay the bill. Didn’t matter. At the end of the meal, three or four staff members came over to solemnly explain why they had to return the money. “In Chinese culture, the grandparents MUST pay.” (We are not Asian and they are obviously not the boy’s grandparents).</p>
<p>We took them with us to the midwest but they were too isolated. They retired, spending half their time in the brand new retirement apartment in Queens and half between her sister’s massive Upper East Side apartment overlooking the East River and her mansion in New Jersey.</p>
<p>Not sure if this movie belongs in the foodies category but Helen Miren was in this movie and she is my favorite actress, the movie is “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”. I know there were a lot of scenes in the movie that was in a restaurant.</p>
<p>The Scent of Green Papaya
My sister was telling me about the movie as whe was cutting some papayas we bought. I missed seeing it when it was on the big screen. Now I will have to rent it.</p>
<p>EEEWWW!!!
Eating Raoul!!
Ratatouille (sp?) I can’t get past a bunch of rats running around a restaurant at night. It brought back some bad memories.</p>
<p>What was the movie (a Christopher Guest movie, I think) where, at the end, one of the characters owns a movie-themed boutique, complete with “My Dinner With Andre” action figures??</p>
<p>I also just rented Tampopo after being inspired by this thread- I never did get a chance to see it in the theatre & have prepared by making noodles for dinner!</p>
<p>Enjoy! Luckily, your Ds are grown up young ladies. My Ss watched it when young and practiced slurping their noodles to try to make them whistle. But they were not successful, although they consumed a lot of spaghetti :)</p>