Dig in! 20 of the most unforgettable food scenes in movies

For those who enjoy watching the cooking process from beginning to end, the opening sequence from Ang Lee’s follows a retired master chef preparing a traditional Taiwanese meal for his three daughters, from the selection of a live fish and chicken to the final plating. Each movement is precise and performed with care as he chops, boils, steams, fills, and fries. The scene took a week to film and involved an entire team of chefs and assistants standing in for the actor to make it look like the work of one man. It was worth it, not just as an ode to the concept of food as an expression of love (which it is), but as a master class in the art of traditional meal preparation.

Preparing food as an expression of love also comes up in the 2016 Oscar winner . It follows a boy named Chiron (played at different stages of his life by Alex Hibbert, Trevante Rhodes, and Ashton Sanders) as he struggles with his sexual identity, emotional abuse, and bullying while growing up in a rough Miami neighborhood. Near the end of the film, Chiron returns to his hometown as an adult and reconnects with his childhood friend Kevin, who works in a diner. Kevin cooks him pollo a la plancha, a Cuban dish of grilled chicken, rice, and beans. The considerate, healing gesture itself is almost more important than the food, but the meal looks pretty good too.

After years of working on blockbuster franchises in Hollywood, Jon Favreau returned to his indie roots by writing, directing and starring in this sweet foodie drama. As the title implies, he plays a chef who gets fed up with making generic meals for the masses and nitpicking critics and leaves the restaurant world behind to cook on his own terms (the parallel isn’t hard to see). In this scene, Favreau’s character Carl and his friend Martin (John Leguizamo), show Carl’s son Percy (Emjay Anthony) how to make Cuban sandwiches inside their food truck. It’s a nice bonding experience for father and son that will leave you craving a perfectly pressed Cubano.

Food and family, fathers and sons—these concepts are inseparable in the documentary . It’s a dreamy portrait of master sushi chef Jiro Ono (who was 85 at the time it was filmed and is 97 now). As the film explains, his tiny restaurant inside a Tokyo train station earned critical acclaim and three Michelin stars (a rating it lost when it had to stop taking reservations from the public after the film catapulted it to worldwide fame). Also central to the film is Ono’s towering legacy and how his two sons, also sushi chefs, have contended with living in their father’s long shadow. Watching Ono prepare and serve his signature bites with delicate precision might convince even those who aren’t sushi lovers to give it a try.

Each day in Mumbai an estimated 200,000 lunch boxes are delivered from homes and restaurants to workplaces without fail by messengers called dabbawalas. This 130-year-old system is widely known as a marvel of efficiency. In , however, a rare error in delivery causes two men to receive each other’s lunches by mistake, eventually leading to a touching connection between two strangers—Saajan, a lonely man on the verge of retirement, and Ila (Nimrat Kaur), a married woman hoping to revitalize her dull marriage by sending love notes along with her food. Ila’s lunches all look delicious, but the meal in this early scene featuring rice and paneer is a standout.

Italian director Luca Guadagnino, who happens to have a new movie coming out called (it’s kind of a food film, from a twisted point of view), showcased the impact of an exquisite meal in a scene from his 2009 film . Tilda Swinton plays a Russian immigrant who married into a wealthy Italian family and has an affair with her son’s business partner, a talented chef. Before it starts, though, she visits his restaurant and is served a dish of “prawns with ratatouille and sweet-and-sour sauce, mixed fish, and crunchy vegetables.” As she savors each bite, the lighting changes to highlight her and the plate, symbolically dimming the rest of the world. It’s such an erotic scene Swinton herself called it “prawnography.” And who are we to argue?

The ratatouille dish in Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love is a direct reference to , which the director has cited as one of his inspirations. This story about a rat named Remy who dreams of being a chef has inspired many viewers over the years with its encouraging message that greatness can come from anywhere. In the film’s climactic scene, Remy makes an elevated version of the “peasant dish” for infamously harsh food critic Anton Ego. One bite and Ego is instantly transported back to his childhood and fond memories of his own mother’s cooking. You may not have the same associations with ratatouille, but this scene sure makes you want to try it.

Whatever your feelings are now about the Harry Potter franchise and its creator, there’s no erasing the initial impression this scene from made the first time we saw it. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) has just arrived at Hogwarts and is still adjusting to a world full of magic when he sits down with his new housemates in Gryffindor to enjoy a welcome feast in the Great Hall. As soon as Dumbledore (Richard Harris) utters the words “let the feast begin” a bounty of delights magically appear on all the tables. It’s more food than most of them (and most of us) have ever seen in one place at one time. Just don’t think about where it all came from.

Bradley Cooper plays a talented chef working his way back after a downfall in this food-centered 2015 drama. features a lot of interesting cooking scenes and innovative dishes, but as our list is winding down, we’ve picked out one in which he’s tasked with baking a cake for his toughest critic yet—the daughter of the hotel manager (Daniel Brühl) who oversees the restaurant where he works. It’s a beautiful cake, and although she says she’s “had better” we just want to sit down with them and taste it ourselves.

We’ll finish out this list like every good meal, with a special dessert. This one comes courtesy of The Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) in . When Neo (Keanu Reeves) visits him at a restaurant inside the Matrix, the elder program gives him a demonstration of his power and the concept of causality by serving a woman a slice of chocolate cake he programmed himself. He describes the coding as “poetry” and narrates the sensations the woman is feeling in a way that sounds overtly sexual (strange coming from a program, but hey, it’s the Matrix). The animation is even more explicit in that regard. He’s trying to show Neo that control is an illusion, but it’s hard to focus on anything other than how good that cake looks. Bon appétit!