Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Love Charlie’ on VOD, A Documentary About The Legendary Chicago Chef Who Elevated American Cuisine

Love, Charlie, now available on VOD streaming services like Amazon Prime Video, is director Rebecca Halperin’s story of the life of an iconic chef and proprietor of Charlie Trotter’s, a groundbreaking Chicago restaurant. Sadly, today we remember Charlie Trotter not just as a great chef, but as another casualty of the incredibly stressful business of running a critically acclaimed restaurant. Halperin tells this story in compelling fashion, braiding together archival materials and reflections from some of his peers, including Emeril Lagasse and Grant Achatz.

LOVE CHARLIE: THE RISE AND FALL OF CHEF CHARLIE TROTTER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In 1987, Charlie Trotter opened the best restaurant in Chicago. In 2013, Charlie Trotter’s son found his father’s body in the chef’s Chicago townhouse. In between, Charlie Trotter opened and closed three other restaurants, authored or co-authored almost a dozen books on cooking and leadership, established a reputation as a talented tyrant, and garnered a cameo in 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding, where his one line is “I will kill your whole family if you don’t get this right! I need this perfect!” Towards the end of his flagship restaurant’s run, Trotter faced multiple lawsuits concerning his labor practices.

Love, Charlie follows a familiar rise-and-fall trajectory, and is focused more on the person than the chef, and more on the chef than the restaurant. Trotter is a compelling figure and Halperin tells a compelling story, though there are viewers like me who would have liked to know more about the food. (This reviewer spent five years in Chicago during Trotter’s heyday as a broke grad student who could not dream of eating at his restaurant.) For food nerds, some of the most engaging parts of the film come in interviews with some of his peers, including Emeril Lagasse and Wolfgang Puck, and most especially Grant Achatz, a Trotter pupil who eclipsed his teacher with Alinea, the Chicago bastion of molecular gastronomy. Back in 2012, I wrote about how an NY Times article suggested to me that Trotter was a man out of his time in the early 2010s, where the buzz for restaurants was either for gonzo disciples of the so-called Lardcore movement, or the avant-garde sculptures of chefs who were adherents of what Nathan Myhrvold insists on calling “modernist cuisine.”

Beyond the story of the restaurant, the documentary traces Trotter from his youth, and includes interviews with friends who knew him as Chuck, before he pivoted to Charlie for the name of his restaurant. His first wife, Lisa Ehrlich, participates in this documentary very generously, as does close friend and fellow chef Carrie Nahabedian. Some of the most memorable reflections come from Ray Harris, a New York investment banker who ate at Trotter’s approximately 400 times, and as Trotter was fond of pointing out, never had the same dish twice.

The biggest takeaway from these recollections is the incredible intensity of the energy he carried with him throughout his life. One index of that are film’s use of shots of the hundreds of postcards and letters he wrote to friends during his young life. If you are old enough to remember life before social media, you may feel a pang of nostalgia for a reminder of how we used to keep in touch with our friends.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: If you are jonesing for another season of The Bear, Love Charlie has chefs yelling in a Chicago kitchen, and more than a little of the toxic masculinity that drives that show. And honestly, some of Charlie Trotter, the person’s forays beyond Charlie Trotter’s, the restaurant, will remind you of some of the interplay of chef egos in Pixar’s 2007 Ratatouille.

Performance Worth Watching: Fine dining nerds will enjoy seeing how the somber occasion of remembering their friend Charlie knocks some of the bluster out of Emeril, and some of the pretense out of Achatz. Emeril and Trotter were friends, while Achatz and Trotter had a more complex A Star Is Born type relationship, but both chefs are more about their reflections than their brands, which is refreshing.

Memorable Dialogue: “I will kill your whole family if you don’t get this right! I need this perfect!” The first time we see Trotter say this phrase, it’s not clear that he is playing a parody of himself in a Julia Roberts movie. It says a lot that this moment is entirely plausible as something Actual Charlie Trotter would say in his Actual Restaurant.

Sex and Skin: Nada.

Our Call: STREAM IT! If you were lucky enough to eat at Trotter’s, or if you wish you had, put this movie on your holiday watchlist.

Jonathan Beecher Field was born in New England, educated in the Midwest, and teaches in the South. He Tweets professionally as @ThatJBF, and unprofessionally as @TheGurglingCod. He also sometimes writes for Avidly and Common-Place.