The Hundred-Foot Journey

(Image credit: Francois Duhamel)

A tasty little comedy starring Helen Mirren and Om Puri as rival restaurateurs in the south of France

A tasty little comedy starring Helen Mirren and Om Puri as rival restaurateurs in the south of France.

Chocolat director Lasse Hallström serves up the cinematic equivalent of comfort food with a cosy and predictable culture-clashing battle of wills, but it goes down a treat.

The setting is a small, picturesque village where Mirren's snooty, Michelin-starred restaurant gets some unwelcome competition when Puri, newly arrived from India with his family and talented chef son Manish Dayal, opens a much more user-friendly eaterie across the road.

So, will the two competitors learn to love their differences and warm to each other..?

The accents are more than a tad overripe and the plot definitely goes off the boil midway through, but Puri and Mirren's delicious odd-couple chemistry makes the film immensely watchable, as does the sub-plot involving Dayal and Charlotte Le Bon.