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      ‘Breaking Bread’ Review: Peace Meals

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      This documentary follows the preparations for a food festival at which chefs from Arab and Jewish backgrounds team up to create dishes together.“Breaking Bread” opens with a quote from Anthony Bourdain, who said that “food may not be the answer to world peace, but it’s a start.” The premise underlying this documentary, directed by Beth Elise Hawk, is that all cultures can unite over the spectacle of mouthwatering food on camera.The movie follows preparations for the 2017 A-Sham Festival in Haifa, Israel, an event that celebrates the cuisine of a region where geopolitical boundaries are more defined than culinary ones. At the film’s start, the festival’s founder, Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, identifies herself as a Muslim, an Arab, an Israeli, a Palestinian, a woman, a scientist and a cook (she won the Israeli version of “MasterChef” a few years ago). She says in the film that borders “mean nothing to hummus.”The contestants live in Israel but come from diverse backgrounds. At the festival they are generally paired with someone whose origins differ from their own to create an assigned dish. For example, Ali Khattib, from an Alawite village in the Golan Heights, and Shlomi Meir, who runs an Eastern European restaurant in Haifa, work together to make a traditionally Syrian soup with a base of bulgur wheat soaked in yogurt.A lot of the observations in “Breaking Bread” — the repeatedly offered notions that food is a common language or that politics has no place in the kitchen — seem trite and perhaps overly optimistic. The movie would ideally be shown with an accompanying tasting menu.Breaking BreadNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Jonathan Reynolds, Playwright and Food Columnist, Dies at 79

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      His plays tended to parody American institutions. His food writing tended to be full of humor.Jonathan Reynolds, who in a wide-ranging career wrote successful plays, helped write a famously bad movie, turned out lively articles on how to cook the perfect turkey and all manner of other food-related subjects, and combined his love of food and his way with words in an unusual stage show, died on Oct. 27 in Englewood, N.J. He was 79.His family said in a statement that the cause of death, at the Actors Fund Home, was organ failure.After Mr. Reynolds tried — but disliked — acting (“I had less influence than the stage manager and most of the stagehands,” he once complained), he turned to playwriting and had quick success. A pair of his one-act comedies — “Rubbers,” satirizing the New York State legislative process, and “Yanks 3, Detroit 0, Top of the Seventh,” about an over-the-hill pitcher — ran for months in 1975 when they were staged at the American Place Theater in New York, directed by Alan Arkin.Demand was high enough that the theater, a subscription-only house, opened sales up to single-ticket buyers for the first time in its 11-year history.Mr. Reynolds’s plays tended to lampoon American institutions, whether government or the national pastime or, as in “Tunnel Fever” in 1979, academia.“I don’t think of my plays as comedies,” he told The New York Times when that play was about to open at American Place. “I think about what characters would do in a situation, and I don’t try to make it funny. It just comes out that way.”His biggest success as a playwright may have been “Geniuses,” a satire on the movie business that was staged at Playwrights Horizons in 1982. It was inspired by the three months he spent on location in the Philippines with the director Francis Ford Coppola while Mr. Coppola was shooting “Apocalypse Now.” Mr. Reynolds was there taking notes for a possible book about the making of the movie, and possibly to contribute to the script. The book never came about, and his contribution to the script ended up being a single line of dialogue. But the play, riding rave reviews, was a hit.“The author speaks with an authority to match his acerbity,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review in The New York Times, comparing him to the humorist S.J. Perelman.“Among other things,” Mr. Gussow added, “‘Geniuses’ is an insidious act of movie criticism. Make no mistake: Beneath the japery, there is a warning: Movies can be injurious to your health; keep them out of the reach of children-directors.”Mr. Reynolds would soon have his first film credit, for writing “Micki + Maude,” a 1984 comedy directed by Blake Edwards and starring Dudley Moore as a man with two wives, played by Amy Irving and Ann Reinking. Vincent Canby, reviewing the film in The Times, said that it was “never less than a delight” and that Mr. Reynolds “has an ear for ultra-high-frequency lunacies that escape the rest of us.”His next Hollywood experience, though, was not received so warmly. He was the screenwriter who adapted a story by Bill Cosby into a secret-agent comedy called “Leonard Part 6.” The movie, which starred Mr. Cosby and was released in 1987, came out so poorly that Mr. Cosby himself denounced it. In The Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel called it “the year’s worst film involving a major star.” Others have put it on lists of the worst movies ever made.His screenplay for the comedy “Switching Channels” (1988) also drew less-than-rave reviews. But Mr. Reynolds, who would earn only two more writing credits for movies (“My Stepmother Is an Alien” in 1988 and “The Distinguished Gentleman” in 1992), shrugged off the criticism, considering himself more playwright than screenwriter anyway.“It hurt for about a day,” he told Newsday in 1988. “And then I thought, ‘Well, I’m not really part of it so it doesn’t really bother me.’”Mr. Reynolds in 1997 at the American Place Theater on the set of his play “Stonewall Jackson’s House,” which took on the liberal biases of the theater world.James Estrin/The New York TimesMr. Reynolds continued to write plays, several of which, like “Stonewall Jackson’s House” (1997) and “Girls in Trouble” (2010), took on the liberal biases of the theater world and much of the theater audience. But at one point he tried something completely different: He began writing a column on food for The New York Times Magazine.His column first appeared in 2000, and he continued to write it for about five years. It was a job that, as he put it, just “fell from the sky” (aided by a recommendation from his friend Frank Rich, the newspaper’s drama critic at the time).“I didn’t go to any cooking school,” he told The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2002, “and I didn’t spend time with a great chef in his kitchen for years in France.”But he did enjoy cooking, and for years he had been making diary entries about meals he had prepared or eaten and menus he had perused. He filled his columns not just with recipes and cooking tips but with anecdotes and humor. For instance, in March 2000 he offered a solution of sorts to the age-old problem with turkeys: that cooking the bird’s drumsticks and thighs thoroughly enough tended to leave the white meat dry.“For those with successful Nasdaq portfolios,” he wrote, “it’s simple: Buy two turkeys and cook one for the white meat and the other for the dark, then discard the overcooked white of one and the undercooked dark of the other.”For everyone else, he offered a solution that involved basting and assorted dos and don’ts. In 2006 he collected his cooking observations in a book, “Wrestling With Gravy: A Life, With Food.”Jonathan Randolph Reynolds was born on Feb. 13, 1942, in Fort Smith, Ark., to Donald Worthington Reynolds, founder of the Donrey Media Group, and Edith (Remick) Reynolds.He earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at Denison University in Ohio in 1965 and studied for a time at the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art. Back in New York, he was the understudy for the Rosencrantz role in the Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in 1967 before embarking on his writing career. Before his 1975 playwriting breakthrough, he was on the staffs of David Frost’s and Dick Cavett’s television shows.At his death Mr. Reynolds lived in Manhattan and in Garrison, N.Y.His marriage in 1978 to Charlotte Kirk ended in divorce in 1998. In 2004 he married the Tony Award-winning set designer Heidi Ettinger, who survives him, along with two sons from his marriage to Ms. Kirk, Edward and Frank Reynolds; three stepsons, North, Nash and Dodge Landesman; and two grandchildren.In 2003 Ms. Ettinger had the challenge of creating the set for a one-man show that marked Mr. Reynolds’s return to acting after a long layoff. It was called “Dinner With Demons,” and in it Mr. Reynolds cooked a full dinner, including deep-frying a turkey, while relating assorted anecdotes. That required putting a functioning kitchen onstage at the Second Stage Theater in Midtown.Legal restrictions meant the audience did not get to eat the meal; the backstage crew was the beneficiary. Mr. Reynolds told The Times that the hardest part of executing the show was making sure the dialogue and the cooking ended at the same time.“It was a lot of trial and error,” he said. “In rehearsals, the apple pancake got burned every other time.” More

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      in Music

      Packing Your Purse (or Pockets) for a Night at the Opera

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      When I was in graduate school in Manhattan, my friend Bernard and I went to the opera without eating supper.Bernard and I had met at a fancy food market in SoHo where we both had part-time jobs behind the bread station. I was going to be a famous writer and he a famous set designer. But in the meantime, we spent our bread wages on the cheapest Family Circle tickets at the Metropolitan Opera, then hummed the arias from “Eugene Onegin” and “La Bohème” while we sliced seven grains and stacked up the baguettes.Our shift lasted past dinnertime, and the sandwiches and flutes of Champagne at the intermission bars were beyond our students’ budget. So we always came packing snacks — hearty, filling bites that could sustain us through “Götterdämmerung” but were small enough to stash inside my vintage beaded purse.Ready for intermission with, from left, brownie shortbread bars, almond-stuffed dates and hand pies. Don’t forget the napkin.Winnie Au for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jade ZimmermanIn nice weather, we munched egg salad sandwiches and homemade chocolate truffles perched at the edge of the fountain in Damrosch Park adjacent to Lincoln Center. When it was stormy, we would eat leaning against the rails of the balcony, watching fancy patrons savor their intermission baked alaskas at the Grand Tier restaurant below, assuming that one day in the distant future, that would be us.That distant future has arrived, and I’m still toting intermission nibbles to the Met in the same vintage purse. I plan to continue this season as well (the Met reopens Monday). But these days, I’m accompanied by my husband, Daniel, whose essential contribution is a (possibly illicit) flask full of bourbon or pre-mixed Manhattans tucked into his pocket.By now we could spring for sandwiches and Champagne at the bar, or even the Grand Tier, but we rarely do. My picnics, which are made to order — and, I think, a much more fun way to pass the 30 to 40 minutes of an average Met intermission — have become part of the opera ritual. And this year, picnicking offers another advantage: pulling your mask down to eat outside at Damrosch Park can be a Delta variant-savvy way to go.Ms. Clark with the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. Before his days of starring as Akhnaten at the opera, he picnicked on a bench, too.Winnie Au for The New York TimesOver the years of Falstaffs and Salomes, I’ve learned a few best practices when it comes to packing these petite opera tidbits.The first and foremost is to minimize the mess by avoiding sloppy, saucy morsels. I like to think of opera snacks in the same way that I’d choose hors d’oeuvres for a party. Neat, self-contained finger foods that can be nibbled in one hand while you hold a drink in the other work best, preferably things that taste good at room temperature.I’m partial to small tea sandwiches stacked with onion, cucumbers or smoked salmon for the first intermission, followed by some kind of sweet bite — say, almond-stuffed dates or homemade brownie shortbread bars, for a sugar jolt — to get me through that final act. Phyllo pastries filled with anything from ground lamb and feta to butternut squash and mint, or all manner of sweet or savory hand pies, could also work well.Then there are maki rolls, as long they’re filled with vegetables or something cooked. You don’t want raw fish sitting under your seat for the entire 100 minutes of the first two acts of “Don Carlos.”At top: savory options, including hand pies, kimbap and tea sandwiches. Below, the sweet: truffles, stuffed dates and brownie shortbread bars. On the side, a tin of sea salt and a flask, for washing it all down.Winnie Au for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jade ZimmermanThe countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who is reprising his star turn as Akhnaten in the 2021-22 season, used to bring homemade kimbap or avocado-cucumber maki to eat on a bench in the park back when he was a student, and these are an excellent option that you can either make or buy.“I certainly picnicked a lot when I used to attend the opera as a youth,” he said. “As a performer, backstage picnicking is a whole other level of intrigue with meals that will make you sing well but not look zaftig in your costume.” (Perhaps particularly because Mr. Costanzo spends part of Akhnaten with almost no costume at all.)Once you’ve decided which snacks to bring, you should consider the packing vessel (you’ll want something that can fit in a small purse or bag). That old plastic yogurt container may work just fine, but a cute and colorful bento box or metal tiffin container is a lot snazzier to set atop your lap. And a thin linen napkin can save your opera finery from splashes and drips.One thing you must avoid is ever going to the opera hungry. The mid-20th century writer Joseph Wechsberg describes the consequences at the Viennese opera house in his epicurean memoir, “Blue Trout and Black Truffles.”Egg salad sandwiches have the protein to sustain you.Winnie Au for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jade ZimmermanMr. Costanzo has to snack smartly backstage, given his revealing costume.Winnie Au for The New York Times“Sometimes my stomach would start to make rumbling noises just as the tenor sang a pianissimo, and everybody looked at me. Some well-fed people made ‘shsh-t!’ It was very embarrassing,” Mr. Wechsberg wrote.His response was to bring raw bacon sandwiches sprinkled with paprika to munch during the first act of “Die Walküre.”“While Siegmund and Sieglinde sang their beautiful duet about sweet Love and Spring, the sweet scent of paprika seemed to descend, like light fog, all over the fourth gallery.”It’s best to bring the sort of finger foods that can be nibbled in one hand while you hold your drink (or your food stash) in the other.Winnie Au for The New York TimesOf course, eating in the auditorium during the opera at the Met is always forbidden, and especially now. But eat paprika-sprinkled sandwiches at the second interval, and the sweet scent will carry you most of the way through Act III.Bernard and I once made one of Mr. Wechsberg’s opera sandwiches, though I admit that after much deliberation, we cooked the bacon before showering on the paprika, and stuffed it all in between slices of sourdough, courtesy of the fancy food shop where we worked.We were still wrapped in our light fog of paprika as Brünnhilde fell to dreaming in her magic ring of fire, our bellies content, all our senses alert, our hearts full.If only my past self could see what a culinary gift was passing down to future me. And an entire tier of opera patrons has been saved from indiscreet rumblings during the pianissimos. More

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      in Television

      Paris Hilton Launches New Netflix Cooking Show

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      “Cooking With Paris,” on Netflix, is just the latest in a food TV genre starring celebrities who lack professional kitchen experience, and even revel in it.In a twinkling black dress with feathery sleeves and high heels, Paris Hilton is in the kitchen making a steak dinner with her mother and sister. Before they arrive, she digs a spoon into a tin of caviar and gives a bite to her dog. Flakes of 23-karat gold stick on her fingers as she adds it to homemade truffle butter. More

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      Bourdain Documentary’s Use of A.I. to Mimic Voice Draws Questions

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      The documentary “Roadrunner” by Morgan Neville uses 45 seconds of a voice that sounds like Bourdain, generated with artificial intelligence. Is it ethical?The new documentary about Anthony Bourdain’s life, “Roadrunner,” is one hour and 58 minutes long — much of which is filled with footage of the star throughout the decades of his career as a celebrity chef, journalist and television personality.But on the film’s opening weekend, 45 seconds of it is drawing much of the public’s attention.The focus is on a few sentences of what an unknowing audience member would believe to be recorded audio of Bourdain, who died by suicide in 2018. In reality, the voice is generated by artificial intelligence: Bourdain’s own words, turned into speech by a software company who had been given several hours of audio that could teach a machine how to mimic his tone, cadence and inflection.One of the machine-generated quotes is from an email Bourdain wrote to a friend, David Choe.“You are successful, and I am successful,” Bourdain’s voice says, “and I’m wondering: Are you happy?”The film’s director, Morgan Neville, explained the technique in an interview with The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner, who asked how the filmmakers could possibly have obtained a recording of Bourdain reading an email he sent to a friend. Neville said the technology is so convincing that audience members likely won’t recognize which of the other quotes are artificial, adding, “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”The time for such a panel appears to be now. Social media has erupted with opinions on the issue — some find it creepy and distasteful, others are unbothered.And documentary experts who frequently consider ethical questions in nonfiction films are sharply divided. Some filmmakers and academics see the use of the audio without disclosing it to the audience as a violation of trust and as a slippery slope when it comes to the use of so-called deepfake videos, which include digitally manipulated material that appears to be authentic footage.The director Morgan Neville said in a statement on Friday about the use of A.I. that “it was a modern storytelling technique that I used in a few places where I thought it was important to make Tony’s words come alive.”Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival“It wasn’t necessary,” said Thelma Vickroy, chair of the Department of Cinema and Television Arts at Columbia College Chicago. “How does the audience benefit? They’re inferring that this is something he said when he was alive.”Others don’t see it as problematic, considering that the audio pulls from Bourdain’s words, as well as an inevitable use of evolving technology to give voice to someone who is no longer around.“Of all the ethical concerns one can have about a documentary, this seems rather trivial,” said Gordon Quinn, a longtime documentarian known for executive producing titles like “Hoop Dreams” and “Minding the Gap.” “It’s 2021, and these technologies are out there.”Using archival footage and interviews with Bourdain’s closest friends and colleagues, Neville looks at how Bourdain became a worldwide figure and explores his devastating death at the age of 61. The film, “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” has received positive reviews: A film critic for The New York Times wrote, “With immense perceptiveness, Neville shows us both the empath and the narcissist” in Bourdain.In a statement about the use of A.I., Neville said on Friday that the filmmaking team received permission from Bourdain’s estate and literary agent.“There were a few sentences that Tony wrote that he never spoke aloud,” Neville said in the statement. “It was a modern storytelling technique that I used in a few places where I thought it was important to make Tony’s words come alive.”Ottavia Busia, the chef’s second wife, with whom he shared a daughter, appeared to criticize the decision in a Twitter post, writing that she would not have given the filmmakers permission to use the A.I. version of his voice.A spokeswoman for the film did not immediately respond to a request for comment on who gave the filmmakers permission.Experts point to historical re-enactments and voice-over actors reading documents as examples of documentary filmmaking techniques that are widely used to provide a more emotional experience for audience members.For example, the documentarian Ken Burns hires actors to voice long-dead historical figures. And the 1988 documentary “The Thin Blue Line,” by Errol Morris, generated controversy among film critics when it re-enacted the events surrounding the murder of a Texas police officer; the film received numerous awards but was left out of Oscar nominations.But in those cases, it was clear to the audience that what they were seeing and hearing was not authentic. Some experts said they thought Neville would be ethically in the clear if he had somehow disclosed the use of artificial intelligence in the film.“If viewers begin doubting the veracity of what they’ve heard, then they’ll question everything about the film they’re viewing,” said Mark Jonathan Harris, an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker.Quinn compared the technique to one that the director Steve James used in a 2014 documentary about the Chicago film critic Roger Ebert, who, when the film was made, could not speak after losing part of his jaw in cancer surgery. In some cases, the filmmakers used an actor to communicate Ebert’s own words from his memoir, or they relied on a computer that spoke for him when he typed his thoughts into it. But unlike in “Roadrunner,” it was clear in the context of the film that it was not Ebert’s real voice.To some, part of the discomfort about the use of artificial intelligence is the fear that deepfake videos may become increasingly pervasive. Right now, viewers tend to automatically believe in the veracity of audio and video, but if audiences begin to have good reason to question that, it could give people plausible deniability to disavow authentic footage, said Hilke Schellmann, a filmmaker and assistant professor of journalism at New York University who is writing a book on A.I.Three years after Bourdain’s death, the film seeks to help viewers understand both his virtues and vulnerabilities, and, as Neville puts it, “reconcile these two sides of Tony.”To Andrea Swift, chair of the filmmaking department at the New York Film Academy, the use of A.I. in these few snippets of footage has overtaken a deeper appreciation of the film and Bourdain’s life.“I wish it hadn’t been done,” she said, “because then we could focus on Bourdain.”Christina Morales contributed reporting. More

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      Anthony Bourdain Documentary ‘Roadrunner’ Seeks to Understand His Death, Career and Struggles

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      “Roadrunner” takes an intimate look at Mr. Bourdain’s career and his struggles, using archival footage and interviews from members of his inner circle.In 2016, Anthony Bourdain sat back in a leather coach to talk to a therapist in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was the first time he had gone to a session since his parents sent him to one after catching him with drugs as a teenager. He put on his reading glasses, and went through a list he called “all of my ailments and problems.” More

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      ‘Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain’ Review: Salt, Sugar and No Fat

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      Morgan Neville’s sharp and vividly compelling documentary tries to pin down a brilliant, troubled man.There’s scarcely a dry eye in the frame at the conclusion of Morgan Neville’s vivid, jam-packed documentary, “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” but this isn’t a hagiography. Bourdain, who died almost exactly three years ago at the age of 61, was many things — chef, sensualist, addict, world traveler — any one of which could have served as the movie’s lodestar. Yet it was as a writer that he found renown, and it is around his words that “Roadrunner” constructs its ominous, uneasy shape.Those words, punchy and aromatic, spill from Bourdain’s books, his television shows and multiple public appearances as Neville wrangles a personality, and archive footage, that’s almost too much for one film to corral. Having attained in midlife a fame he distrusted and a title — celebrity chef — he despised, Bourdain wavered between euphoric family man and fretful workaholic. Though free of heroin and cocaine since the late 1980s, he was also without the punishing restaurant routines he had relied on to stave off his demons.With immense perceptiveness, Neville shows us both the empath and the narcissist: The man who refused to turn the suffering he saw in war zones into a bland televisual package, and the one who would betray longtime colleagues to please a new lover.“You know, something was missing in me, some part of me wanted to be a dope fiend,” he confesses in one clip. That dark awareness looms over interviews crammed with frisky anecdotes and fond remembrances, helping explain a death that seemed to many inexplicable. The once miserable, angry child had grown into a brilliant man who suspected his talent and his pain were inextricably linked. “Roadrunner” recognizes that he was probably right.Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony BourdainRated R for raw profanity. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Wolfgang’ Review: Light as a Soufflé, and About as Substantial

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      David Gelb’s biographical documentary says much about what Wolfgang Puck has done, and very little about who he is“I don’t like to think about the past too much,” Wolfgang Puck confesses early in the Disney+ documentary “Wolfgang,” a red flag that we’re not going to encounter much in the way of intense self-scrutiny in the scant 78 minutes that follow. A fairly vapid and shallow affair, even by the low standards of the celebrity bio-doc subgenre, “Wolfgang” provides copious archival montages of “the first celebrity chef” (Julia Child apparently didn’t count), but precious little understanding of what actually makes him tick.Puck’s early years are skimmed, aside from an extended anecdote about losing his first kitchen job, told in great detail and illustrated with re-enactment footage, so we fully understand this as The Story That Defines Him. The real juice here is Chef Wolfgang’s rise to fame, and much of that material is fascinating: how the open kitchen design of his Spago restaurant elevated the chef from a “blue-collar job” to a celebrity, how his staff read Hollywood trade papers to best assess who got the premium tables, how instrumental he was to the development of fusion cooking.Some much-needed tension is provided by Patrick Terrail, the owner of Ma Maison (Puck’s first kitchen of note), as he and his chef maintain conflicting accounts of how much credit Puck deserved for that restaurant’s success. But most of the picture hums along with the singularity of purpose of an infomercial, and even its coverage of Puck’s flaws — he spread himself too thin, he was an absentee father and husband — have the ring of a job applicant’s description of their biggest flaw: that they just work too hard, and care too much.“Wolfgang” is directed by David Gelb, who all but defined the celebrity chef documentary with “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” He hits many of the same notes; the food photography is delectable, and Puck is full of bite-size wisdom like “We have to have focus in life” and “If you believe in something, you have to follow your dreams.” But “Wolfgang” ultimately plays like exactly what it is: “Jiro” Disney-fied, and thus drained of its nuance, complexity and interrogation.WolfgangNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More