"Love is the number one ingredient in any dish."
Hello everyone!
I promise, I do have some other movies lined up! But the thing is, Hallmark has somehow reorganised their channel so that they literally have something for every season at this point, and out of those, I generally watch about half their movies. Not always and definitely not all of them, but certainly a lot!
Still, this blog post is a last huzzah, in a way, for movies for the next little while.
Because starting next Tuesday, April 16th, I'll be doing weekly Game of Thrones reviews, for the very last time.
That's right, the final season is almost here, guys!!!
So before we strap on our swords and grab the dragonglass we need to fight off the White Walkers and the Night King, let's try something tasty on for size first as a sort of goodbye, shall we?
Love on the Menu is exactly right for that.
Links to some of my previous Hallmark movie blogs from this spring can be found down at the botom of this page. Now, Love on the Menu wasn't part of any specific theme of Hallmark's, but that being said, I was pretty much sold on it when I saw the movie's leading man.
There's just something about Kavan Smith that makes me smile, as I'm sure it's the same with lots of other people around the globe.
A Hallmark and fan favourite from his role in When Calls the Heart and several other Hallmark channel movies, it's a no-brainer that whatever he's in will be good. He can save pretty much any scene and any disaster, in my opinion, which this movie certainly was not. Starring opposite him is Autumn Reeser, another Hallmark favourite, and someone forgot to tell Barbara Niven to leave her Ice Queen costume at home. But dayum, she nailed it!
The movie tells the story of two complete opposites when it comes to food - Maggie, who works for a company that freezes ready-made meals and is slightly OCD about everything (I mean, she has a freezer that's alphabetized and the green juices are sorted by weekday), and then we have Hank, who runs an Italian restaurant and is pretty much MasterChef on two legs.
He also has a teenage daughter, Hannah, who can't decide if she wants to be vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, and all the other fun -arians around the globe, which makes for HILARIOUS good morning scenes when her dad attempts to make her breakfast but she's always something else.
Equally, however, the two share a deep, loving bond, forged in the aftermath of Hank's wife and Hannah's mother passing, leaving the two of them on their own. Hank threw himself into the restaurant and into making life worth living for his daughter, and his brother-in-law Bern took over managing the restaurant.
Unfortunately, with no new items on the menu (Italian is CLASSIC, says Hank and doesn't want to budge), the restaurant is on the verge of losing it's one Michelin Star, which actually happens when the food critic comes to pay them a visit.
That's also the same time that Maggie finds herself at the restaurant, here to scope out the food and see if her company could approach Hank for a line of gourmet frozen meals.
You can probably see what'll happen next.
In the confusion Hank thinks MAGGIE is the critic and overlooks the actual one while trying to please her, and then learns the truth after both losing his star and getting a visit from Maggie and her boss.
At this time, however, he prety much has no choice left: the restaurant is heavily in debt, and Maggie promises that she'll manage the place and get it back on its feet in exchange for Hank coming up with recipes for them to flash-freeze (and they'll help pay). Bern is SO up for this because his sister used to manage the restaurant, but he isn't really good with numbers, so things have started to slip and slide.
Maggie soon uncovers various and sundry things she could improve, kicks to the curb the barman who was stealing whole casks of wine but nobody noticed because inventory was shot, and in general endears herself to the personnel at the restaurant.
She even grows on Hank, although they butt heads to begin with but Kavan Smith can't play an antagonist for long and caves to Reeser's charm, and the two of them embark on this journey together.
She drags him to the lab where he's disgusted over their attempts at frozen paella, and he does in fact work with them to come up with recipes that will actually be edible after the freezing process (and coming from someone who had a couple of those meals last week because of circumstances, I can honestly say Hank's expertise is SORELY needed). He also shows Maggie that life isn't all about straight rows and numbers, that there's more hiding beneath the surface, and that if one heel breaks off a shoe, you should break off the other one to make sure they match.
Well. That's Hank's theory, anyway. Maggie wants to wallop him over the head with the shoes, but, you know.
Maggie also grows close with Hannah, whom she enlists to redesign the restaurant's website (which the kid actually put up to begin with, and there's a funny scene where she gets in trouble for hacking into the school computers, to which dad Hank just says to let him know next time BEFORE she does something like it again), and the two of them share a purely feminine moment over how to braid your hair, and Maggie also takes the teenager shopping as payment for the website, since Hannah doesn't want to actually be paid.
So the magic is beginning to work and Hank and Maggie actually share a cute little post-dinner kiss, with Hannah walking in on them, naturally, but their romance is just starting to blossom and the restaurant is on the up again (with a recipe including short ribs, out of all things) when it's time for Hallmark to bring down the hammer.
Side note: when Kavan and Autumn kissed twenty minutes before the ending, I almost fell out of my chair. Traditional Hallmark movies don't normally give us a smooch until the very last minute of run time!
Maggie's boss learns that, with Hank's help, the recipes are coming along nicely and the lab has developed some of their own, so in her mind it's time to cut Hank off and move on. She got what she needed from him, after all.
Of course, Maggie's the one who needs to tell Hank this, and naturally he's upset: not only does it feel like the company is suddenly backing out of their agreement, but he feels used on a lot of counts since he put a lot of effort into the recipes to now just have them yanked from him without even a thank-you, and especially with Maggie, as he's not sure whether he can trust what happened between them.
This is where the movie comes to a screeching disastrous disruption.
Maggie leaves, hurt, after Hank asks her to do so since he expected her to at least fight for something - them, or the restaurant, or the recipes, something, which she didn't do.
And then somehow or other he's the one who ends up apologising.
I mean, sure, yeah, he had a bit of an outburst - but come on, his safety net was just pulled from under him and the woman he thought might mean something sort of left him hanging. But alright, I'll bite and say he needed to grovel and she just had to stand there and do nothing about it. Ummm.
ANYWAY, Maggie hasn't been happy with how things went down, so she decides to quit her job and invest in Hank's restaurant, invite the original food critic over again to see whether or not they can change his mind (they do, with the short ribs), and takes a chance that what she and Hank have might survive beyond this initial honeymoon period. After all, she gets along well with Hannah, too, not to mention Hank's staff - and even Bern, who might have been one of those characters who hated anyone his brother-in-law looked at because of his sister, turns into her staunch supporter on the spot.
All's well that ends well, with the star right back where it needs to be, and Hank and Maggie happily on their way into the sunset!
It's another of those easy-to-love, enjoyable movies that you watch to relax and not worry about a thing, especially with a cast that just shines through the screen, and I bet Kavan Smith's tasting reactions were pretty much live-action because ... come on. No way is that acting! It's too adorkable.
My one quip was that ending, or pre-ending situation, but I mean, I can forgive that. There was a kiss way before the ending, so!
As a final note, the restaurant where all this goes down is called 'Osteria' - which I find hysterical because a very similar word in my language actually means a sort of quaint, family-run restaurant. I'm not sure which came first, the Italian version or ours, but it was a nice, funny little quip!
xx
*images and video not mine
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