In 2022, The Bear burst onto our screens and showed us a frantic, pressure-packed, curse-filled vision of what a working restaurant kitchen looks like. But, the year before, a British film called Boiling Point also took place in a frantic restaurant kitchen, with Stephen Graham starring as a stressed out, hard-drinking, cocaine-snorting chef-owner who ends the film on the floor of his kitchen after suffering a heart attack. In 2023, the BBC commissioned a series follow-up to the film, with Graham as one of the creators. He still has an acting role in the series, but now his former sous chef is the one with her feet to the fire.
BOILING POINT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Carly (Vinette Robinson), head chef and co-owner of the London restaurant Point North, walks into the kitchen with manager Dean (Gary Lamont) alongside, telling her that he sat some of the investors that her business partner Liam (Joel MacCormack) is wooing, and that a lot of walk-ins mean that they’re already going to be “rammed.”
The Gist: Carly opened Point North, which serves elevated rustic cuisine from the northern part of the UK, after Andy Jones (Stephen Graham), the co-owner of her previous restaurant, Jones & Sons, had a heart attack.
Not only is this a critical night for the fledgling restaurant, but they also have a new chef de partie starting that night. Johnny (Stephen Odubola) comes in and is immediately thrown into the chaos; Carly tells him to start making a new batch of hollandaise sauce. One problem: Johnny has no idea how to make hollandaise from scratch, and he secretly looks it up on his phone.
As Johnny fumbles around, being helped out by pasty chef Emily (Hannah Walters) and Camille (Izuka Hoyle), at the starters-and-garnish station, the pace of the kitchen starts to pick up, trying the tempers of Freeman (Ray Panthaki), the sous chef and Bolton (Shaun Fagan), in charge of meats and sauces.
Liam takes Carly aside and tells her that the investors are going to want to talk directly to her when the main dishes come out, given that it’s her food that is going to be the selling point. She hates to have to leave the kitchen but agrees to it, but she keeps getting sidelined by calls from her mother Vivian (Cathy Tyson) about some vague weakness she feels.
Just as the investors are settling in, asking waitress Robyn (Áine Rose Daly) obnoxious questions about the rustic menu, Carly gets a call from her mother’s emergency call app. When she can’t get in touch with her mom, she makes the tough decision to leave to see if she’s OK, putting Freeman in charge.
Hell mostly breaks loose after that, especially when Liam has Freeman sit with the investors to talk about the menu because Carly isn’t there. The kitchen is so shorthanded that chocolate sauce goes out with the investors’ steak dishes instead of the intended au jus. Once Carly gets back (her mom was OK; she hit the emergency button to make sure it worked), the finger pointing starts.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Boiling Point is a follow-up series to the 2021 BAFTA-nominated film of the same name; Graham, who starred in the film, is one of the series’ creators, along with Philip Barantini and James Cummings. Of course, as the headline on this review indicates, it is very much a British cousin of The Bear, though the original film came out the year before the FX/Hulu hit dramedy debuted.
Our Take: Like The Bear, Boling Point is fully about the pulse-pounding environment in the kitchen of a busy restaurant. The main difference is that The Bear started its existence in a classic Chicago Italian beef joint, whereas Boiling Point already shows life in a high-end restaurant. Still, things are basically the same: Lots of pressure, lots of high-strung personalities, and lots of continuous takes that show just how chaotic things are behind those swinging doors and how disturbs the rhythms of the “show” that goes on in the front of the house.
We’re dropped into Carly’s kitchen without getting to know anyone, and in this case that’s fine. We didn’t see the original film, and there were references to what went on in it that went slightly over our heads, but if you’re like us, you’ll be too wrapped up in the chaos of the kitchen to care that much about the connections to the film. How do we know? There is a moment when Johnny makes a fundamental mistake that almost gets him hurt, and we yelled when we saw it. We haven’t been so engaged with a first episode of a show since, well, since the first episode of The Bear.
As this five-episode season goes along, and the restaurant deals with different calamities, we’ll get to know various characters a bit more. We know Freeman has a temper that gets him into trouble, and Bolton is basically a 24/7 git. Johnny and his wife have infant twins, so he’s desperate to make it in this new CDP job. And it’ll be intriguing to see Graham, whose character is on the mend from heart surgery and depressed that he lost his restaurant and can’t get back into a kitchen for the foreseeable future, affects things. What we do know is if the episodes can be as intense as the first one, we’ll be fully on board.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Carly sits at the computer in the office, pinching her sinuses and wondering where in the hell she is going to get the money to keep the restaurant afloat.
Sleeper Star: We didn’t mention much about the front-of-house cast — Dean, Robyn, new bartender Musa (Ahmed Malek), Billy (Taz Skylar) and others. We don’t know how instrumental they’ll be in the rest of the episodes, but of course the front-of-house is just as crucial to a restaurant’s success as the back-of-house, so it’ll be interesting to see how they fit in storylines.
Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing we could find.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Yes, Boiling Point will give you very strong Bear vibes, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a carbon copy. It’s just as pulse-pounding to watch, and you’ll find yourself more involved in what’s going on than you might have expected.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Boiling Point’ On Netflix, A Pulse-Pounding Restaurant Drama That’s A British Cousin Of ‘The Bear’ appeared first on Decider.
