With a title like Haute Cuisine, one can expect a high degree of gastronomic titillation. On that score, the film delivers.

"Haute Cuisine" has no grand conflict or important message or really anything much that you'll remember past dinnertime, but it has abundant charm and it leaves you hungry, which is all we ask of a food movie.

Haute Cuisine is an epicurean dream where the dishes conjured up by the characters are as essential to the experience as the characters themselves.

In attempting to avoid anything too political (Mitterand's policymaking) or personal (Hortense's background), Haute Cuisine comes across as blander than its overly-respectful makers may have intended.