Street-food redemption

A roly-poly Jon Favreau is very much at the center of Chef, which he wrote and directed and for which he plays the title role. There’s much else on his film’s menu, but Favreau is unmistakably the presiding spirit at the heart of this rollicking crowd-pleaser.

Favreau plays Carl Casper, a Florida-based chef and gourmand given to robust tastes and adventurous cuisine. He’s also trying to be more of a father to young Percy (Emjay Anthony), who lives mostly with Carl’s ex-wife, Inez (Sofía Vergara).

Renewed attention to family responsibilities becomes even more complicated when Carl has a falling out with the restaurant owner (Dustin Hoffman) who bankrolls his culinary endeavors. With a little help from a friendly assortment of old pals and former associates, Carl rebounds from these setbacks by setting up business in a refurbished food truck and taking it on the road, heading west from Florida, with Percy and longtime sidekick Martin (John Leguizamo) on board as his crew.

While food and family are the story’s driving forces, Chef gives piquant comic attention to other issues, at least in passing. There’s some semi-satirical comedy pertaining to social media, part of which gives Percy a more integral role in his father’s business ventures.

A single sequence involving a public relations specialist (a calmly daft Amy Sedaris) is a satirical tour de force on the subject of tweaking public images. And a subplot involving an online food critic (a dour Oliver Platt) prods some brief reflections on the tangled relations of artists, critics and financiers.

There’s an amiable sort of predictability to most of this, and it may be only the prevailing spirit of rambunctious camaraderie that holds the story and its characters together. That spirit is especially evident in the road-trip bonding of Carl, Percy and Martin, and it also shows up in the crucial, and perhaps unlikely, ministrations of Inez, who is heroically patient with one ex-husband (Favreau’s Carl) and brilliantly opportunistic with another (Marvin, played by Robert Downey Jr.).