The Sauce of Love aka Cooking with Love (2021)

(On TV, November 2021) I’ve seen a lot of food-based romantic comedies lately — they’re comfort films in more ways than one, and the best of them can almost be called delicious. Unfortunately, that’s not going to be the case for Cooking with Love — even by the relaxed standards of the subgenre, it feels obvious and lazy to such a degree that it barely justifies its own plot. Even from the get-go — as a talented cook gets fired for being a bit too ambitious in a presentation to the Big Boss — it never quite feels organically plotted. It does things because it needs to do them to satisfy the narrative, and doesn’t lay down the groundwork to make it work. The love interest ends up (predictably) being the Big Boss — rich but not evil (as per his establishing scene, clearly showing his kindness to dogs), good-looking and inexplicably interested in the protagonist despite having no really good reason to be so. (Meanwhile, a much better romantic suspect is introduced, but quickly dismissed as being interested in the protagonist’s best friend. He’s not wrong — Kathryn Davis is more charming than Rachel Bles in look and character — but it’s a dismissal emblematic of the script’s lazy instincts.)  To supplement the obvious romantic arc, the food-based drama has to do with our protagonist inventing a terrific (and healthy!) BBQ sauce and going on to compete in a food truck contest while her old company goes about trying to steal her sauce. But the execution constantly undermines even the limp premise: subplots are lazily advanced, the characters run on stereotypical inertia, nothing is really convincing and the threads are wrapped up even before they become too interesting. Even the food aspect of Cooking with Love (I’m sorry, I can’t call it The Sauce of Love without cracking up) isn’t particularly well-developed, short-changing another sure-fire draw.