The one sheet poster for Bitter Feast seems pretty standard. There's a sullen-looking man sitting at dining table in a blood-stained shirt. It looks to be yet another schlocky torture-porn horror film. But watch the trailer and you find out there's more than a few extra ingredients.
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First, there's Mario Batali, who is in the movie playing (what else) a restaurateur. Second, the plot line reveals itself to be this: a chef kidnaps and tortures a food blogger, forcing him to do a series of cooking challenges and punishing him when he fails, all as revenge for ruining his career with a bad review.
The film premiered last week at the Los Angeles Film Festival. The filmmaker, Joe Maggio, was actually inspired to make it after reading an unfavorable Frank Bruni review of a Gordon Ramsay restaurant. He extrapolated from there. “Then I started thinking what I would do to Frank Bruni if I were Gordon Ramsay”, Maggio said in an interview with Eater.com.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.