Netflix’s 2023 Thai drama-thriller “Hunger” predominantly portrays the story of Aoy, a young woman who works as a chef at her small family restaurant, when she stumbles upon the opportunity to be part of a famous and elusive culinary team. As part of the plot, the film also explores the character of the distinguished chef Paul, a figure quite akin to the skilled but arrogant chef character who is becoming quite popular in movies these days. Through its narrative, “Hunger” also makes a note of the ridiculous habits of the rich and the elitism that is fast becoming a part of culinary practices, all while the masses still struggle to get regular staple meals.
The first characteristics that can be associated with Aoy when she introduces herself are hardworking and sincere with her family. Being the eldest of three children and with an elderly father, Aoy automatically assumed the role of anchor and guardian of the family. She is sometimes tired and burdened by the responsibilities of family and her small restaurant, as Aoy laments to her college friends, who all have office jobs. Obviously, Aoy’s situation seems better for these friends, since she’s doing something on her own, but Aoy has already figured out that there’s nothing grand or ambitious about having to run a small restaurant. She even has to work hard nowadays to save money to support his sister’s nursing education, but it’s not like Aoy has any prejudices to do so. To some extent, he enjoys taking care of his family since his father and his siblings are the only support he has. But Aoy also has a great talent for cooking and inventing dishes, so she is also quite ambitious when she gets the chance to train with chef Paul. When she first visits the Hunger website, she sees the video in which Chef Paul invites people who want to leave their ordinary life and become someone special. It is then that Aoy finds her first calling, since being someone in life seems to be part of her ultimate ambitions.
When Aoy joins Hunger’s team and works very hard to perfect his job as a fry chef, he does so with the determination to prove his place and skill. A very early comment made by Chef Paul, in which he points out that people of Aoy’s social status do not belong on such a prestigious culinary team, remains in Aoy’s mind. This and her determination to prove herself push the woman to keep practicing throughout the night, severely burning the spots on her hands from the hot oil. She is remarkably happy when guests praise her on her first job at her birthday party, but Ella Aoy never places her mentor or her clients on a pedestal of high respect. She is well aware of Chef Paul’s behavior, and in fact, all the other sous chefs are also in the same mindset, which is very different from other similar movies made in the West.
The sous chefs argue among themselves that they can’t really be anyone individually if they keep working with Chef Paul, who, they all agree, doesn’t really value them very much. But during her time working with the man, Aoy realizes his habits are not the best ways to deal with sous chefs and workers. When Aoy has to try something made by a sous-chef at Flame much later, he gets irritated and throws the entire bowl away, instantly remembering the behavior Chef Paul would dispense with. In this process, the woman also gradually distances herself from her family members. While she is mostly with her father when the man has to undergo bypass surgery after suddenly collapsing, Aoy doesn’t actually visit him or his siblings once he is released from the hospital. . Due to her father’s failing health, her younger brother Au must also take over the restaurant. Since Au is not as skilled in the kitchen or as savvy in business as her older sister or her father, the family restaurant struggles to survive and is also about to close.
A similar fate is also met by Tone, who opened his own restaurant after chef Paul was hospitalized and the Hunger team temporarily disbanded. At the time, Aoy had offered Tone the chance to work in his kitchen at Flame, suggesting that Aoy had always remembered Tone’s role in his life. After all, he was the one who found Aoy’s restaurant and later encouraged her to work with Chef Paul. During their time working on Hunger’s team, the two even became close and intimate, although a romantic relationship never worked out for them. Despite this, Ella Tone remained Aoy’s closest colleague at Hunger, and it was out of this gratitude and professional admiration of hers that she offered him a position at Flame. However, Tone turns down the opportunity, saying that he is not willing to work with Aoy in the kitchen space, which would have happened since she had been made head chef. It is a decision that hurts Tone, since she fails to give stability to her business, and she finally joins Tos. Tone also appears to remain loyally by Aoy’s side, as she unveils the crucial video that incriminates Chef Paul, thereby creating a space for Aoy to become the country’s next illustrious chef.
The Chef Paul character is presented with his extremely tough and tough exterior, with a slight hint of a more positive trait hidden underneath. However, the man is terribly rude and openly insulting in his behavior and attitude towards almost everyone around him. Ultimately, his character doesn’t really receive the positive arc that initially seemed possible, and instead suffers a serious fall from grace. Although Chef Paul originally started out as a mentor and role model, in a sense, to Aoy, in the end, he turns out to be a stark example of what not to be for women. When the man talks about his childhood, it is revealed that Chef Paul actually had humble beginnings, as his mother used to work as a maid. As he was natural to a child, he was always mesmerized and attracted by the jars of caviar that he saw in the rich house and had finally tried to taste it. While things didn’t go as planned, what followed made the vanity of the rich even more apparent to the young man. After this experience, and perhaps others like it later in his life, Chef Paul was determined to get back at the rich by ridiculing them. His entire plan had been to create a brand that would be associated with an elite lifestyle and social class. His insistence on serving good food was merely a facade, at least to a degree, since he obviously had to maintain a certain standard.
This is perhaps made quite clear by the fact that Chef Paul actually uses ready-made powdered mixes to make soup in times of emergency, without concern for its meticulous quality at the time. Although the reason for this is that the girl is allergic to shrimp, the man is actually aware of the fact that the family is thinking of ending their lives either way. The logical reason for Chef Paul to stop serving the soup seems to be that he doesn’t want his name or his team’s name listed as the reason for someone’s death. If the girl had died of allergic poisoning, the police would surely have tracked down Hunger, and Chef Paul didn’t want such legal trouble. But the fact that he was aware of what was going to happen to his clients and that he had agreed to such a job makes his character even more questionable and dark. Furthermore, his decision to serve them the cheap, ready-made soup, probably because the customers would never be able to tell anyone about it because they were dying, arouses suspicion in Aoy’s mind.
Finally, during their heated conversation at the gala party, Chef Paul really manages to show Aoy his true colors. Despite being against the idea of exclusivity regarding food and control over dining experiences as just part of an elite lifestyle, Chef Paul ultimately ends up becoming an ideal example of the same. Although he had started his own business to secretly ridicule the rich, the arrogance he had accumulated through the experience had made him an extremely self-centered and inconsiderate human being. When one of his sous-chefs admits to stealing some A5 Wagyu beef from the pantry, Chef Paul ridicules the man and openly insults him, saying that the only way he could afford such fine meat was if he could ever raise enough money to pay for the hire. Chef Paul. This is an example of the man practicing the very elitism that he supposedly wanted to mock and fight against. Similar tones and attitudes can also be felt in the gala party scene, where Chef Paul boasts of his importance to Aoy, suggesting that she is insignificant in front of him.
Although Chef Paul had been a great mentor to Aoy, he may not have done so on purpose. It was his comment about Aoy’s tastes not belonging to high society and elite culture that had pushed the woman even more to succeed in her life. Despite this, Aoy had never disrespected the man and had even visited the hospital to help the man after he had been stabbed. The fact that Chef Paul had no family hit Aoy, and she decided to give him a little support like any family member would. We see Aoy do the same for her own father and, despite knowing her apparent flaws, she may have given Chef Paul the same respect as a father figure or mentor. But the celebrity chef was unable to return the same respect and admiration, which not only led to his downfall for her, but also showed Aoy that no one in this business was selfless and genuine. Tos had gotten the man arrested just to help his own cause as a restaurateur and also to satisfy his own ego since Chef Paul had turned Tos down, something he’s not used to. Similarly, Tone also seems to have helped Tos just to make sure she would get noticed and get along with the man.
Both this and the fact that he had almost abandoned his family led Aoy to make the decision to turn down Tos’s offer. While it seems like a difficult decision to make, Aoy finds it all too easy as she walks back home that night, looking at ordinary people enjoying inexpensive delicacies and even those hoping for someone to provide them with just the basics. It is now clear to him that food and the practice of eating can be viewed from two very different perspectives depending on one’s social status. If on the one hand there is elitism and exclusivity in terms of culinary experiences, on the other is the simple and pure pleasure that any food made with love can offer the consumer. Always a believer in good food made with love, Aoy decides to leave the cutthroat world of upscale restaurants, which is really more of a business than a genuine act, and return to his family to revive his small but sincere diner.
