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This scruffy slice-of-life comedy from Germany starts with Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos), the owner and cook at a crappy Greek restaurant in Hamburg, having everything go wrong at once.
His girlfriend Nadine (Pheline Roggan) is taking a job in Shanghai, his criminal brother Illias (Moritz Bleibtreu) is begging him to sign a release form so he get out of jail on daytime furlough, his temperamental new cook (Birol Ünel) is driving away the regulars by serving good food, he throws out his back, and a businessman (Wotan Wilke Möhring) is secretly sabotaging the restaurant so he can buy the property cheap.
Director Fatih Akin's specialty is illuminating the multi-cultural bustle of modern Germany (as he did in "In July," "Head-On" and "The Edge of Heaven"), and here he brings a light touch to Zinos' catastrophic efforts to stay above water.
The script (by Akin and Bousdoukos) goes off the rails toward the finale, but the film moves with a pleasantly anarchic spirit.
— Sean P. Means HHH
Soul Kitchen
Opens today at the Broadway Centre Cinemas; not rated, but probably R for nudity, sexuality, mild violence, and language; in German with subtitles; 99 minutes.