When Jon Favreau swung by “Top Chef” for a guest-judge stint last year, he found himself lacking in discernment.
“Everything the contestants were making tasted amazing to me,” he tells The Post. “To have the chefs that I got to eat with analyze the food as I sat there, I understood how certain dishes were more refined than others and I began to appreciate the complexity of it. It’s almost like the scene in ‘Ratatouille’ where he sees the flavors. You start to get a much more subtle read on things.”
The experience proved a major help for his latest movie, “Chef,” which hits theaters Friday. The film, which he wrote, directed and stars in, follows Carl Casper, a prominent LA chef who quits his job after being forced to serve the same old thing to a critic reviewing the restaurant. His life turned upside down, Casper heads to Miami and launches a new food truck and a new life.
For Favreau, the indie was a big change of pace from his recent ventures directing the first two “Iron Man” movies as well as executive producing those, “Iron Man 3” and “The Avengers.” But it wasn’t because he needed a break.
“It’s more that the script came to me. I haven’t written a script this quickly with such a clear sense of what the movie would be since ‘Swingers,’ ” he says. “So I knew that it should be a priority for me to do it.”
Favreau, now 47, broke out in Hollywood back in 1996 when he penned and starred in “Swingers” alongside a fresh, young Vince Vaughn. A Flushing, Queens, native, Favreau at one time delivered The New York Post before entering showbiz through the world of improv in Chicago. He eventually headed to LA , where he now lives with his physician wife and three kids, and launched a career with projects as varied as “Made” and “Elf”; up next is a live-action version of “The Jungle Book.”
He’s no novice at making movies, but making food was a different story. Favreau spent three months training under the LA-based star chef Roy Choi. In addition to sending Favreau off to formal training at a French academy, Choi had the actor go undercover on his Kogi BBQ truck.
The immersion allowed Favreau to appreciate the nuances.
“I asked one of the cooks I was working with [during training] if he had any advice for the movie I was making, and he said all chefs have burns on their forearms, so if you look in the movie, you’ll see all of us have burn marks on our forearms,” says Favreau. “It’s a little detail, but chefs catch it, and it shows we cared enough to get the details right.”
The training also enabled him to overcome a big hurdle.
“Because you can’t smell or taste the food, you have to get the visuals and the sound right,” he says. “The way a grilled cheese crunches when you cut it in half — you have to get all those things right to get the audience’s mouth watering.”
Even though the film is long done, Favreau’s cooking is not. His specialities are still what he grew up with — matzo brei on the Jewish side of the family, pasta e fagioli on the Italian half — but he’s branching out.
“The bug has bitten me,” he says, noting that he’s in the process of putting in a commercial kitchen at his house, complete with a wood-burning pizza oven so his family will stop ordering Pizza Hut.
“I’m a New Yorker,” he says. “I take my pizza very seriously.”