We know the foodservice industry is a goldmine of stories and characters, and in the last few years creative filmmakers have put out some fantastic work. Next time you're back from a long day and collapse onto the couch, one of these films might be just what you need to unwind. They're available in various places on the Web to purchase/watch—but they all also happen to be available on Netflix. Jiro Dreams of Sushi This documentary profiles sushi chef Jiro Ono, an 85-year-old master whose 10-seat, $300-a-plate restaurant is legendary among Tokyo foodies. Four sommeliers embark on an all-consuming course of study for the prestigious (and nearly impossible to pass) Master Sommelier exam.  I Like Killing Flies Follows Kenny Shopsin, owner/head cook at a quirky Greenwich Village eatery serving 900+ items from his tiny, frankensteined kitchen—all the while dishing his profanity-laced "half-baked” philosophy. Celebrating the rebirth of cocktail culture, this documentary follows an injured Marine and a struggling pub owner as they pursue bartending dreams. 

This gastronomic documentary profiles three distinctive restaurants based in very different locales: Chicago; Chipotle is a company that broke all the fast food rules, turning a small eatery into an $11 billion, 1,400-store chain. Bloomberg television takes you behind the counter to see how this increasingly popular company keep customers lining up.  Sushi: The Global Catchsushi conveyor belt dfw This documentary traces the history of sushi from its origins as Japanese street food to its current status as an internationally popular cuisine.sushi making kit calgary Available from these sellers.jiro dreams of sushi production company Watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi instantly from withsushi oji online

Also available to rent on DVD from LOVEFiLM By Post Jiro Dreams Of Sushi [DVD]Man, Woman DVD (1994) Region Free DVD (Region 1,2,3,4,5,6 Compatible) Adrift in Tokyo [DVD] Actors: Jiro Ono, Yoshikazu Ono Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.) Number of discs: 1 DVD Release Date: 4 Mar. 2013 Run Time: 82 minutes 54,939 in DVD & Blu-ray (See Top 100 in DVD & Blu-ray) in DVD & Blu-ray > Documentary Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? Meet 85 year-old Jiro Ono, widely praised as the world’s greatest sushi chef. His tiny restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, is tucked away in a Tokyo subway station and only seats ten, yet bears 3 Michelin stars and has a month-long reservation waiting list. Jiro runs this culinary gem with a will of iron, deft fingers and his eldest son Yoshikazu. Their fascinating relationship lies at the heart of this wasabi-infused tale, as the apprentice struggles with the sometimes overbearing aura of the master.

David Gelb’s feature film début nimbly explores every facet of Jiro’s daily life, from his total commitment to the craft to his role as patriarch, making our mouths water along the way. See all 62 customer reviews See all 62 customer reviews (newest first) on Amazon.co.uk Less a food film, more a meditation on the human spirit. Absorbing, inspiring and (at times) amusing. I heard it was good. I was not expecting it be quite so compelling, considering it is about Sushi.I was hoping for a very passionate story about Sushi, but it's more like a news report. A must for all foodies . Incredible insight into the painstaking training and commitment of a Michelin starred chef. Beautiful film, it stayed with me years after first watching it. DVD & Blu-ray > English Subtitles DVD & Blu-ray > Movies Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?Salmon and sushi this week, also poor sex and De Niro on the skids: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Sheikh Muhammed of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen must have seen Lawrence of Arabia and then never forgot the Bedouin chief Auda abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn) bellowing, “I am a river to my people!” Egyptian actor Amr Waked is no Quinn, but he brings similar intensity to Muhammed, determined to provide his Yemeni people a dam, a new river, and even fish (salmon!) for the river. This Quixotic fantasy was first hatched in Paul Torday’s novel. Perhaps only a director (Lasse Hallström) who made My Life As a Dog and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape would make a film with this story and title. It is about the vision thing, and buying into it once the sheikh hires them are two searching souls: crisp, sweet English business consultant Harriet (Emily Blunt) and a henpecked, nicely dweeby scientist, Alfred (Ewan McGregor). Typical humor is when the camera, watching Alfred feud with his wife, settles down to the wet viewpoint from his beloved koi pond (like his life thus far, a closed and confining circle).

Kristin Scott Thomas is the British prime minister’s PR bulldog. She thinks Britain can boost its Middle Eastern profile by providing live salmon from Scotland, where the sheikh first fell in love with fishing. Scott Thomas could match her flint with Meryl Streep’s Iron Lady, though her snarkiness is rather rote. In England and Scotland, the film reaches for the quirky satirical vibes of the old Ealing studio comedies, which were big on absurd dreams and projects. In the rugged desert nation — Yemen, south of Saudi Arabia, is mostly known for sand and fanatics — the sheikh’s vision takes on the aura of a mirage made awesomely of cement. McGregor and Blunt are shy, subtle, and a touch fey, as if wishing they could grow gills and swim upstream. Fine though the stars are, it is the conviction of Amr Waked’s sheikh that keeps this whimsy reaching, with true charm, for its vision thing. That the hot bottom of the Arabian peninsula needs a big fish that swims up cold rivers to spawn is crazy, but the salmon streaks would surely have pleased Lawrence and Auda abu Tayi.

Early brilliance can cast a shadow. Trần Anh Hùng’s The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), an exquisite Vietnamese reverie shot entirely on French studio sets, was a revelation of exquisite mise-en scène (sorry, but sometimes a critic just has to use that term). The purity of its design made us feel privileged. Later, with Cyclo and Vertical Ray of the Sun, Trần maintained his grip of style but seemed narratively scattered. I have not seen his Hong Kong serial killer movie I Come with the Rain — whoever imagined him working with Josh Hartnett? For Norwegian Wood, Trần adapted Haruki Murakami’s novel. The cinematographer, Mark Lee Ping Bing, has also filmed superbly for Wong Kar-wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien. But our suspicion soon grows: that a therapy clinic outside Kyoto was chosen largely for the lush trees and photogenic fields, that Tokyo apartments were designed to serve the flowing camera moves, that student demonstrations are 1967 period markers choreographed to wrap like origami around the main character.

He is Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama), a student mourning his best friend, a suicide. He becomes fixated on his friend’s beloved Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi), whose sexual malfunction has curdled into tragic guilt. Watanabe is helpless with Naoko’s weepy, ambushing moods. Those lead to the therapy haven, where an older woman seems entranced by her. Watanabe must also contend with a female student whose manipulations include asking him for a porn film as she cries about her dead father. This is all meant to feel very internal and tuned in depth by the music of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and, of course, the title Beatles song. But the movie never lets us in. It is stuck with lovely surfaces and Watanabe’s remote, boring passivity. This is like a coffee-table book of a private diary that we can’t understand. Ingmar Bergman never reduced his stylized heartbreakers to the soap of, “Nothing can heal the loss of a beloved...whatever we learn will be of no help.” Paul Dano has the purest moon-boy gaze since the ’70s era of Bud Cort (Brewster McCloud, Harold and Maude).

When Dano stares at Robert De Niro in Being Flynn, his eyes say: This jerk is my dad. Although Nick (Dano) hasn’t seen father Jonathan Flynn (De Niro) in 18 years, numerous clues have told him what we soon see: the senior Flynn is a vodka drunk, homophobe, racist, and self-deluded fool. His unfinished novel is — so he avows, protests, screams! — an opus of Mark Twain quality. All relies on De Niro’s performance. Is Bob, at 68, relighting his Scorsesean furnace by driving (for a while) a New York cab like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver? He contorts his face into Bickle scowls and spits crazy invective (to a nice black woman: “You ape”). Or is his Jonathan only a more vulgar and grizzled Jack Byrnes from the Fockers series? Director Paul Weitz also did Little Fockers. De Niro has spent so many years chewing ham as cinema’s Mr. Grump that most viewers under 50 cannot recall his stunning youth. One hopes he remembers. At some point, even for great actors, the juices coagulate.

Weitz adapted poet Nick Flynn’s memoir Another Bullshit Day in Suck City (a title that shouts “Read this or I will kill you!”). Maybe that explains the fleeting presence of Flynn’s wife Lili Taylor, an excellent actor sadly wasted. But it never justifies the film’s literary loops and tricky time skips, the ironic parallels of father and son (Nick also aspires to literature), the anthropological slumming at a Manhattan charity hostel for homeless men, an upscaled version of the Oso Negro flophouse in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Nor do those bookish roots nurture Julianne Moore’s effort as Nick’s mom, whose drift from exhaustion into futility is barely graffiti. Honestly touching is pretty Olivia Thirlby, as a charity worker disgusted by Nick’s phase with cocaine. Finely photographed by Declan Quinn, the film seems to draw from gutter bard Charles Bukowski and Joe Gould’s Secret and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. This may be the most un-Republican movie of 2012, since it makes a case for the urban welfare net as necessary.