Boiling Point: An English Kitchen Drama with Social Bite

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B+

For anyone hungry for some tasty chaos between seasons of hit culinary drama The Bear, you can check out the lively four-part British series Boiling Point, showing on Super Channel this month. Like The Bear, Boiling Point features vivid performances and whirlwind kitchen activity, but with a more social realist focus on the kitchen work.

If you’re wondering, Boiling Point came first. The series is a spin-off from a critically well-received 2021 film of the same name directed by Philip Barantini and written by James Cummings, which was notable for being shot in a single take, the better to emphasize the tension in close quarters in a busy London restaurant. The feature was based on a short film from 2018.

For the TV series — which was released in England in the fall of 2023 — Barantini returned to the director’s chair, accompanied with Mounia Akl. The core of the movie’s cast members joined him, including Stephen Graham as restaurant owner and chef Andy Jones; Ray Panthaki as hot-tempered head chef Freeman; Vinette Robinson as the ultra-competent chef Carly; and Hannah Walters as Emily, the mother hen of the kitchen and pastry chef.

After an introductory 11-minute single-take flourish, the series reverts to more conventional editing, which allows the camera to leave the restaurant — away from the shouting matches, fires, and mixed-up servings (no, “au jus” does not mean “with chocolate sauce”) — to follow the kitchen workers away from the workplace. Boiling Point is equally interested in the characters’ home lives and how they intersect with their work behaviour.

The series is set six months after the end of the movie, as Andy is still recovering from his cocaine-induced heart attack. The focus is now a new restaurant called Point North, run by Carly, specializing in “northern cuisine,” a kind of elevated comfort food, involving fish, stews, baked goods and meat wrapped in pastry. In the opening episode, the co-owner brings in a group of potential investors who, not surprisingly, say the idea does “not inspire.”

But Carly isn’t able to make her pitch on why this is a cuisine whose time has come because her overbearing hypochondriacal mother Vivian (Cathy Tyson) keeps demanding her attention. Though each of the four episodes gives time to different cast members, it’s Robinson’s stellar turn as Carly who embodies the workplace struggle between success and human decency. She’s the kind of encouraging boss with high standards who makes everyone want to do better, intolerant of bullying, and gentle about failure.

Unlike The Bear, which leavens the suspense with romance and comedy, the focus is on the character’s struggles: holding families together, making enough money to live on or get ahead, addiction, sexual harassment and health crises, both physical and mental.

Boiling Point has a tradition behind it. The kitchen drama has its roots in English theatre, going back to playwright Arnold Wesker’s 1957 widely produced play The Kitchen, which was made into a 1961 film, and revived last year’s in Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios’ La Cocina, set in contemporary New York.

Wexler’s workplace drama was part of what became known as the “kitchen sink” dramas, allied with British new wave of cinema, exposing the social struggles of post-war working-class Britons.

The genre is malleable, with a kinship to emergency room dramas (fresh crisis crashing through the double doors) and backstage dramas about putting on a show for the front of house. But a few ingredients are consistent.

There’s an ensemble cast in a tight space, an emphasis on the rhythms of work and, instead of a clear story arc, a succession of deadlines and crises, with the occasional transporting moment. By its final episode, Boiling Point still leaves plenty of room for more courses on the menu.

Boiling Point. Directed by Philip Barantini and Mounia Akl. Written by James Cummings, Dan Cadan, Alex Tenebaum and Nathaniel Stevens. Starring Vinette Robinson, Stephen Graham, Hannah Walters and Ray Panthaki. Premiering on Super Channel March 13 at 9 pm, with the first two episodes.