The Kitchen Brigade

When chef Cathy-Marie (Audrey Lamy) runs out of patience with her celebrity boss and walks out of her her job at a prestigious restaurant, she expects that she’ll easily be able to walk into another. She’s fairly well known and has published a book on her her art – but, alas, she has misjudged the situation. There simply aren’t many opportunities around. When offered a job as a canteen cook at a migrant centre, she’s contemptuous, but her friend Fatou (Fatou Kaba) persuades her that as it provides accommodation alongside a wage, she should stick it out for a few months and use the opportunity to save up so that she can do what she has always wanted: open her own restaurant. At this point you will be able to guess most of what happens next, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth watching.

As might be expected, the cooking facilities at the centre are grim. Though spacious, the kitchen has only simply equipment, and all she finds in its larder is tinned ravioli. Apparently the migrants are happy to eat it so nobody has bothered to give them anything else. They are all teenage boys whom an old friend of hers, Lorenzo (François Cluzet), has found living secretively on the margins of society. His hope is that he can get them into education, without which they’ll be deported when they turn 18, but they are unruly as boys that age tend to be, especially given the difficult backgrounds many of them have come from, and they’re disinclined to stick at anything but football.

Despite this general tendency, Cathy-Marie finds one kid whom she clicks with right away – the youngest and smallest, starry-eyed GusGus (Yannick Kolombo), whom the others treat like a pet. His enthusiasm tempers her fiery spirit a little, persuading her to give the job a chance despite clashes with some others, such as Djibril (Mamadou Koita), who, when invited to try out some cooking techniques, makes it clear that he doesn’t like taking orders from women.

Being a chef, Cathy-Marie has difficulty managing her belief that everybody should be taking orders from her, but as her search for kitchen helpers gradually morphs into teaching a culinary class, she softens, and also develops a friendship with the establishment’s sole teacher, Sabine (Chantal Neuwirth). Her discovery that using the language of football can help the boys connect with how a kitchen works is transformative, but naturally there are other challenges to come, not least when state officials decide to x-ray the boys’ bones in order to find out if any f them have lied about their age to escape deportation. This is a technique with weak scientific foundations, and the case against it doesn’t really get its due here, but there is a wider sense of injustice at how the migrants are treated. Perhaps inevitably, Cathy-Marie will end up throwing her weight behind their cause.

There is inevitably a bit of a white saviour aspect to this, but that is perhaps inevitable if writer/director Louis-Julien Petit hopes to connect with the primarily white audience that is resistant to immigration in France. it’s also complicated by the fact that Cathy-Marie herself turns out to have grown up in a children’s home, and her journey – not to mention her behaviour – is so similar to the boys’ that in many ways she feels like one of them, just older. Some of the boys show more emotional intelligence than she does and their achievements feel like a collective effort.

Warm-hearted and humorous without losing sight of the manifold injustices many migrants face, Kitchen Brigade will appeal to lovers of the culinary art and many more besides.

Reviewed on: 03 Oct 2025