Kitchen in Paris

A Kitchen in Paris / Кухня в Париже

Published: July 13, 2016

A Kitchen in Paris (Кухня в Париже) is a 2014 Russian comedy. It is a sequel to the third season of the popular Russian television series Kitchen (Кухня), which played from 2012 to 2015 on STS.

The TV series told the story of a French restaurant, the Claude Monet (and then known as Victor, starting in the fifth season), in Moscow. In the film, the restaurant hosts a meeting between the French and Russian presidents, but it’s a fiasco and the workers must all leave to find new jobs. They end up in Paris, among them the film’s central couple, Viktoria, the restaurant’s art director, and Maksim, a cook. The chefs and workers all face challenges in Paris—Maksim when the handsome Parisian Nikolya enters the scene, and head chef Viktor when his own family turns up and starts causing trouble.

The TV series continued after the release of the film, and a second film, A Kitchen in Shanghai (Кухня в Шанхае), will appear in 2016.

The film’s ratings were decent overall—better than those of most Russian romantic comedies. Film.ru called the film simply a longer version of one of the TV show’s episodes, which worked well—the series is beloved, and the film did very well at the box office. The film’s director, Dmitri Dyachenko, said in an interview with Film.ru that the TV series was designed so that each episode resembled a mini film, so the expanded format suited the director and production team.

 

Find Kitchen in Paris on Amazon

Director: Dmitri D’yachenko
Stars: Dmitri Nazarov, Mark Bogatiryov, Yelena Podkaminskaya, Dmitri Nagiev, Oleg Tabakov, Vincent Pérez
Production company: Yellow, Black and White

Official trailer:

 

Kitchen in Paris

About the author

Julie Hersh

Julie studied Russian as a Second Language in Irkutsk and before that, Bishkek, with SRAS's Home and Abroad Scholarship program, with the goal of someday having some sort of Russia/Eurasia-related career. She recently got her master’s degree from the University of Glasgow and the University of Tartu, where she studied women’s dissent in Soviet Russia. She also has a bachelor’s degree in literature from Yale. Some of her favorite Russian authors are Sorokin, Shishkin, Il’f and Petrov, and Akhmatova. In her spare time Julie cautiously practices martial arts, reads feminist websites, and taste-tests instant coffee for her blog.

Program attended: Home and Abroad Scholar

View all posts by: Julie Hersh