Directed by Liz Lachman, when celebrity chef Susan Feniger decides to open her own restaurant without her longtime business partner, Mary Sue Milliken, the task is daunting. With no support from their co-owned restaurant kitchens and staff, Feniger must use her home to test brand new recipes, figure out design and construction, gather the team, and basically start over like a “newbie.” But her dream is to open a new Los Angeles restaurant serving global street food: Susan Feniger’s STREET. Also starring: Kajsa Alger, Bobby Flay, Wolfgang Puck and Barbara Fairchild.
It’s very easy to dive right into Susan Feniger. Forked because it is filled with an atmosphere to match Susan’s personality, it’s enthusiastic and energetic. It’s also extremely wholesome and nostalgic, all things that create an instant charm. It then adds a dash of chaos, as is perfectly matched to the journey of opening a restaurant.
Watching Susan Feniger and Kajsa Alger experiment with recipes, successes and failures is fun but definitely best not done on an empty stomach. They both have a very natural presence which lets the film flow freely. While there may be many moving parts to Susan’s ongoing challenge of opening a restaurant, the film has a nice simplicity to it, food and determination.
However, in other ways that simplicity can be a negative, its style can feel old-fashioned. It leans too far into the feel of the 2000s and give the sense that we’re getting this documentary long after the fact, without anything to strongly connect it to today. There isn’t a great deal of reflection or wider context to round things out, instead acting like a time capsule of home movies.
Susan Feniger. Forked does a great job of capturing the essence of the veteran chef but can feel very simple. It captures an interesting moment in time and the difficulty of trying to open a restaurant, and it has a fun, wholesome vibe. However, it feels slightly stuck in the past, that it combines a host of memories but doesn’t quite curate them or add enough of a bigger context to widen its perspective.
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