Love's Kitchen

Like an episode of ‘Midsomer Murders’ without a body, this English country pub romance dishes up a helping of soapy, teatime-TV harmlessness. Dougray Scott stars as a once-promising chef banging out microwave meals in a ropey London pub, grief-stricken over the death of his wife. Enter Gordon Ramsay playing a concerned pal, in a cameo that hits the spot like a motorway service station lunch. The lines of his granite forehead furrow into Mount Rushmore creases as he emotes, rock-like, ‘This has got to stop!’

Still, it does the trick and Scott opens up a pub in a village whose residents run the gamut of rural stereotypes – from yokels with funny accents to a beastly land-owning toff and a food-critic love-interest (Claire Forlani). Simon Callow camps it up as a boozy windbag critic, whose review will make or break the restaurant. ‘It’s gourmet bloody everything these days,’ bemoans one old duffer. He’s right – food is becoming a national obsession and there has to be a decent film to be made of it. This nursery-comfort trifle of a movie is not it.