SERVICE

i love kitchens the way some people love libraries — the heat, the timing, the small emergencies, the strange choreography of people feeding people. so when the end of the world came to this film, it came to a hotel kitchen, where six cooks from six corners of the earth and the people they love stay behind to make one last dinner for a guest nobody has met. twelve chairs under the apple trees. they cook what they ate as children, the thing they'd want to taste one more time, and the kitchen becomes a small ark without anyone saying so. i spent two weeks learning how martin rolls his sleeves, which hand lucas holds an oyster in, how a five-year-old makes a rice ball badly and proudly — and i came out of it believing, the way a year on the road has taught me to believe, that a good dinner can sometimes save a life.