Hot Off the Grill, Steak and a Movie

LOS ANGELES - The grill on the balcony was hot, the steaks had been rubbed with coarse salt and pepper, and the berries were soaking in Grand Marnier. The only thing needed was a cook.

Jon Favreau was that cook. A little over a week ago, Mr. Favreau was in his office in Venice Beach here in the midst of rolling out ' Chef,' a very personal film he wrote, directed and starred in that was to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival, including April 27, before opening commercially next month. There undoubtedly were marketing matters to attend to, promotion to do, travel arrangements to make.

But first there was lunch.

And not just lunch as in something you eat in the middle of the day to make it to dinner. No, this would be a lunch that would be worried over, caressed and coaxed into excellence. Prepared properly, a meal can be a physical manifestation of all the good things that live inside the person making it. That care and feeding of those around you is not a metaphor in 'Chef'; it's the whole point.

The film tells a sweet, instructive story of a hotshot Los Angeles chef (Mr. Favreau) undone by a lacerating review of his food and his own diminished gusto for his work. He ends up in the spanking machine of social media, quits his prestige gig and eventually partners with a son he has neglected and a loyal line cook to open a food truck and hit the road. As you might expect, he rediscovers his passion not just for food, but also for life.

If that sounds a little, well, uplifting, what's the point of picking up a sauté pan unless you are going to go for it?

Mr. Favreau may have been finished with his role as a chef, but he was still acting like one, going dewy over the little white radish garnish and talking about the fat content of the meat. Whether as producer, director or actor, he helped build the 'Iron Man' franchise into a phenomenon that grossed $2.4 billion worldwide over the course of three films, but right now he is dealing with another outsize challenge. Before us rest two leviathans: 1.5-pound rib-eyes.

He is wearing a 'Bronx Science' T-shirt, which points to his heritage on the East Coast, where he never managed to finish his degree at Queens College. He did comedy in Chicago and landed a few small roles in movies and television before he wrote ' Swingers ' for himself and Vince Vaughn. Things have gone mighty well since.

But his kitchen skills are of a more recent vintage. He knows he can cook a steak for a reporter; the same goes for the macerated berries with whipped cream and Grand Marnier; and he put together the remarkable salsa verde at home. But he also knows that if he screws up - leaving the steak 30 seconds too long on a very hot grill - this will be a story about a guy who made a movie called 'Chef' but can't cook.

Spoiler alert: Lunch was delicious.

An indifferent cook when he began 'Chef,' he received six weeks of formal training, worked in a few restaurants run by the Los Angeles chef Roy Choi to learn how to stay out of the way and pitch in, and then hopped inside one of Mr. Choi's Kogi BBQ trucks. As host and producer of the old IFC series 'Dinner for Five,' Mr. Favreau is more than comfortable talking over food, but he is now increasingly confident getting it on the table as well.

'He did a good job of populating our whole world, which is a promise he made me when he decided to do this movie and ask for my help,' Mr. Choi said by phone, noting that Mr. Favreau can chop chives as fast as anyone in a New York kitchen. 'He got everything right, including all the little O.C.D. tics that chefs have.'

We step outside to look at the Big Green Egg, a fancy ceramic grill that can do everything but decide when to take your food on and off it. That's where Mr. Favreau comes in. We do the dude thing where we examine and discuss all of its features - 'I can bury the thermometer at 800 degrees' - and then he gets to work, leaving the rib-eyes on a searing grill for one minute, then rotating them 45 degrees.

'Grill marks: You want the crisscross,' he murmurs. I nod.

The balcony is decorated with a paddleboard branded with the name of his 2011 film 'Cowboys & Aliens,' 'a flavor of ice cream people were not interested in,' he points out, without a whiff of bitterness.

'For a movie, any movie, to work, all the bread has to fall jelly side up, everything has to go right,' he said. 'You have to hit the zeitgeist. Here, I can control the temperature, how long I leave it on and how long I let it rest.'

Mr. Favreau has lived large as a director of big movies - 'Iron Man' and ' Elf' - and he has also been clobbered for the same. 'Cowboys & Aliens' took in $174 million at the worldwide box office, but with a reported budget of more than $160 million and poor reviews, it was deemed a disappointment. Then again, he's also done many stints as an actor or director with smaller movies like ' Made' and 'Very Bad Things.' Given all this, it's not a long walk to the conceit of 'Chef,' which suggests that small can be not only beautiful, but also better for the soul.

'Yeah, there's a little of that, but I never felt betrayed or caught off-guard by that part of my career,' he said. 'There is no free lunch, so if you're playing with the big train set - on big movies - it's a lot of money they're entrusting you with, and you have to get that money back for them. I don't take that responsibility lightly.'

We go inside, talking while the meat rests.

'But on this movie, I really wanted to do something where I didn't have to check what color the hat should be or what city has the biggest rebate or what actors test the highest,' he said.

Soon enough, Mr. Favreau will go to work on another giant movie, 'The Jungle Book' for Disney, and he will end up in a 'dark cave' with computers, green screens and editing machines. He's proven to be very good at managing the business of big movies, but Mr. Favreau clearly loved making a tidy parable of food and family.

'It was fun to learn from chefs I admire, to go to cities that I love, and to work with actors who I admire so much,' he said. He had plenty of talent around him.

'Who wouldn't want to do something with him?' John Leguizamo, who plays the trusty grill cook and wingman, said by phone. 'Jon made 'Swingers,' which is the kind of movie we all hope to be in. And the script he wrote is a classic journey that we all take, from narcissism and self-involvement to relinquishing all that,' then finding 'what you wanted to be in the first place.'

'Chef' goes deep into the chopped and sautéed glories of life in the back of the restaurant, with an opening that makes reference to ' Eat Drink Man Woman.' Mr. Favreau said he could live with any review of 'Chef' as long as people who work in restaurants think he got kitchen life right.

'You have these people who are essentially living on the deck of a pirate ship, but they're nerding out over the ramps and the flavor profile of a shallot,' he said, slicing the steak and allowing me to inspect whether it was done to my taste. 'It's like a pirate ship that puts on a musical. I love how seemingly incongruous the two aspects of life are.'

While the verisimilitude of a working kitchen fills every corner of the film, it comes off as a bit of a fantasia, even more so because the regular-looking chef's two love interests are played by Sofia Vergara and Scarlett Johansson.

The little movie includes a lot of other big names, like Mr. Favreau's 'Iron Man' star Robert Downey Jr. and Dustin Hoffman. Mr. Hoffman plays the bean-counting restaurant owner who pushes his chef into banal crowd-pleasing, a choice that elicits the bad review. In a pivotal moment, the chef confronts the tweeting critic and the video of the conversation goes extremely viral. The value and perils of criticism, now supercharged by social media, are very much a featured part of the 'Chef' menu.

Mr. Favreau skipped a common Hollywood feint and admitted, as he turned to dessert: 'I like reading reviews. If they're clearly hating on you, I try not to read that deeply. But if they really are trying to understand, it's interesting.'

He added, 'A thoughtful piece of criticism by somebody who understands the context of what you are doing is a tremendous gift and honor to read, even if they don't completely embrace your work.'

He spooned whipped cream, sprinkled with some kind of sugary fairy dust, onto the berries and pointed out that there was often an inverse relationship between reviews and economic rewards.

'I leave it on the field and I don't really look back,' he said. 'It makes me sad if people don't appreciate it as much, but it doesn't make me upset.'

In the film, the chef has to come to grips with not just the one acute critic, but the flying monkeys the episode releases on Twitter. It falls to his 11-year-old son to explain the folkways of social media. In real life, Mr. Favreau, who has 1.7 million followers on Twitter, knows all about that.

'In the past, there were all sorts of mean things being said about you, but you had no idea,' he said, dishing up seconds of dessert for us both. 'Now it's like a bathroom wall that everyone can see.'

But social media can also turn a movie, or a food truck, into a hit.

'The irony is that this faceless thing can lead to great outcomes in the real world,' he said, piling the dishes into the sink. 'It can create a nurturing environment for something no one would have known about otherwise.'

I suggested that his cooking training showed through nicely today, thanking him for the excellent food and the conversation that went with it. He smiled.

'If you didn't like what we cooked here, I wouldn't have been angry,' he said. 'But it would have ruined my day.'