How Anthony Bourdain Really Felt About Pixar's Ratatouille

In 2007, Pixar came out with quite possibly one of the best animated films of all time: "Ratatouille." The film centered around a rat named Remy (portrayed by Patton Oswalt), who had aspirations of being a chef in Paris. There, in the city of love, he meets Linguini (yes, like the pasta), a garbage boy who can hardly chop vegetables correctly. Together, the two team up — with Remy hidden under Linguini's chef's hat, he is a rodent after all — to become one of the most talented chefs in the kitchen, catapulting the restaurant to extreme success. The goal? To win over Anton Ego, Paris' esteemed food critic; however, all Linguine really cares about is wooing over his co-worker, Colette.

At the time, we all knew how great of a cinematic masterpiece "Ratatouille" was — and apparently, so did Anthony Bourdain. "It's a measure of how deficient Hollywood has been in making an accurate restaurant-food based film that far and away the best was about an animated rat," he told Entertainment Weekly in 2011. He went on to gush about how much the film got right about the restaurant industry, all the down from the food, to the reactions to the food, and the minuscule details in the kitchen. "I really thought it captured a passionate love of food in a way that very few other films have," he said.

According to Anthony Bourdain, "Ratatouille" is "quite simply the best food movie ever made" (via BroBible). He credited this to the fine details laced throughout the film, such as the pink burns on the cooks' arms, which highlighted what it's really like to work in the restaurant industry. In essence, what Bourdain tried to tell us was that the film is authentic in every form.

In a Reddit thread uncovered by BroBible, Bourdain went on to praise the movie's "astonishing" attention to detail. For example, the producers gave the cooks small bios that were relevant to the storyline, the cooking burns, the time and energy spent creating the dishes, and Bourdain's personal favorite, the uptight, snotty food critic, Anton Ego. "The Anton Ego ratatouille epiphany hit me like a punch in the chest — literally breathtaking," he said.

Bourdain further declared that "Ratatouille" captured what movie making once was and ran with it, resulting in the best food and chef movie ever. Unlike a majority of movies in Hollywood, he said they got this one "right." "I am hugely and disproportionately proud that my minuscule contribution (if any) early, early in the project's development led to a 'thank you' in the credits," the celebrity chef wrote.