Project Management Concepts In The Movie Chef

The movie “CHEF” is centered on a chef Carl Casper who works in a restaurant in California. Carl is a father of a boy named Percy who lives with his mom and ex-wife of Car, Inez. While Inez lives a very luxurious lifestyle and while Carl although not poor by any means but lives a very simple life but his passion for food and cooking is evident throughout the film. Carl is known for his good cooking skills and people visiting his restaurant are quite fond of his cooking.

One day a top food critic and an online food blogger Ramsey Michel visit’s his restaurant. Now this is no ordinary food critic and Carl believes that his review about the food of his restaurant can make or break his reputation. In order to impress the food critic Carl decides to create a whole new food menu for the food critic and impress him through his cooking skills. Now when Riva learns about this who is the owner of the restaurant where Carl works as the head chef, he immediately tells Carl to go with the same old menu that he serves to the customers and that there is no need for him to try new and fancy things. Carl disheartened by this agrees to this and does follow’s Riva’s orders and serves the same old menu to the food critic. The critic writes his review about the food that was served by Carl and it did not have any good things to say about the food at Carl’s restaurant. Carl learns that the critic has published his review through a tweet and it has been read by thousands of people. This makes Carl very angry and asks his son Percy to make him a Twitter account. Carl then tweets the critic that his description of his food was not based on reality and challenges him to come to his restaurant again to try his food believing that he’s going to impress him this time but little did Carl realize that the message sent to the critic was seen by people all around Twitter but Carl thought that he sent him a private message, clearly Carl did not get a hang of Twitter at the start.

This creates an online feud between the two and the critic accepts Carl’s challenge and Carl starts working on a new menu to serve to the critic but Riva again learns about this and tells Carl that you cannot do this which makes Carl furious and he leaves the restaurant but his two assistant chefs Martin and Tony decide to stay there and are assigned to the task of serving the same food to the critic. The critic again starts to see the same food coming and immediately tweets that chef Carl is a no show. Carl sees the tweet and comes barging in to the restaurant yelling at the critic and people start making videos of him and it starts going viral instantly which damages Chef Carl’s reputation and credibility.

Carl’s ex-wife Inez tells Carl that she was worried about him and suggests that she, Carl and their son can go to Miami to visit Inez’s father and get a break from things, Inez says that this way Carl can also spend more time with his son who looks up to him very highly. Carl agrees to it and in Miami Inez’s ex-husband tries to lend a hand to Carl and offers to give him a food truck since Carl was out of a job he can start his own business in a food truck. He agrees and immediately informs Martin about the food truck. Martin glad to hear this and jumps on a plane to Miami and join hands with Carl as his assistant chef. Carl, Percy and Martin hit the road in different cities in the United States and start people serving great and unique food. People tweeted good things about their food truck online and they become instantly recognizable wherever they go.

In the end the critic who criticized Carl so badly learns that Carl’s food truck business was doing very well and visits him. He tells Carl that he wants to invest in his new business and give him the required financial backing to make it into a great restaurant. Carl excited by this agrees and the movie ends happily with Carl overcoming his dream to inspire and impress the greatest food critic.

One thing I like about this movie is that it shows you that whatever you are interested in you should be passionate about it and that is what counts on being successful in any event in your life. This thing is evident in one scene where Carl’s son Percy tries to serve a burned sandwich to a construction worker who was not paying for the meal but Carl told Percy that whatever good things he has seen in his life is due to the passion and dedication with cooking and that it was not right to serve a customer with spoiled food. This scene shows Carl’s love with being a Chef and enjoying every moment of it.

The film is very well put together and I believe that the cast selected for this film was exceptional. This was a family oriented movie it had everything from comedy to adventure to thrill and even a little bit of food action going on. The film depicts a true picture of why your family and the people who support you are so important because they can get you out of a rut in even the most difficult of times. Carl was in heaps of trouble but by believing in his ex-wife, his son and Martin forced his enemies to say good things about him.

I believe that the film has also a lot to do with hard work and dedication. It shows that if you believe in yourself and your work then there is no such thing in this world that can stop you. Carl even after being close to broke and leaving Riva’s restaurant believed in himself and his dream and eventually fulfilled it through hard work and dedication.

The pace and speed of the movie in my opinion was spot on, not too long and not too short. Oftentimes what happens is that a movie seems to go forward very slow or it starts and then finishes before you know it but that was not the case in this movie and the directors were very good in setting the pace of the plot.

In my opinion one little correction that the movie could have made was to add a little bit of more emotions into Carl’s character, especially in the scenes where he was hard at work trying to prepare the best food that he could make in order to impress the critic. No disrespect to Jon Favreau, I believe that he played Casper’s character really well but I still think that a little bit of the emotions were missing which could have been the icing on the cake for me.

Relating the Movie with Project Management Concepts

When Chef Casper was trying to create a new menu in order to impress the food critic he was basically doing a Project and by project we mean that he was undertaking a temporary endeavor to create a unique product, service or result and that unique product was the food that he prepared, also in addition to that Chef Casper’s project had a beginning and finish time and it had to be completed within that time frame. I mean it wouldn’t make sense to serve the food after the critic left the restaurant but rather to serve the food to him in the time frame when he was present at the restaurant.

Secondly I noticed that as Chef Casper was trying to please the blogger or the food critic he did not have good Stakeholder Communication and by stakeholder communication we mean that Chef Casper did not take into consideration the advice of the restaurant’s owner before he tried to serve the new food menu. When Riva the restaurant’s owner learned about this he did not allow Chef Casper to go ahead with his ideas resulting in a big blow for Chef Casper’s project of serving the new menu. This shows that good communication with your stakeholders is very important for your project to be a success.

When Chef Casper started his own food truck business, it was a very good example of a Program in which there were different projects like for example Chef Casper’s son was in charge of checking whether the sandwiches were properly cooked or not, Martin was in charge of prepping the food before making and Chef Casper was in charge of both cooking meals and serving the customers. So the whole food truck was a program with different projects.

Chef Casper applied the 5 groups of Project Management which are Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring & Controlling and Closing. Chef Casper initiated the idea that he wants to impress the food critic after he criticized him, then he starts planning on it and says that he will do this by opening up a food truck business; he executes the idea by getting the food truck and driving across many cities across the United States, Chef Casper regularly monitors and controls the food preparation activities such as when he tells his son not to serve a burned sandwich and finally the food truck project comes to an end and closes when the project objectives are met and he impresses the food critic who hires him as his head chef in his restaurant.