Filmmaker Liz Lachman hadn’t planned on directing a documentary. But in 2009, when her wife, Food Network star and restaurateur Susan Feniger, was in the process of conceiving and opening her first solo effort, Hollywood restaurant Street, Lachman grabbed her camera and started shooting the process. The result, “Susan Feniger: Forked,” offers an intimate portrait of how there’s more to a restaurant’s success than popularity and stellar reviews. The film will have its West Coast debut on Oct. 17 at the Newport Beach Film Festival.
While “Forked” ostensibly hones in on the struggles of opening a restaurant, Lachman says her documentary goes beyond the challenges of industry enterprise. “How does one scrape themselves off the sidewalk? Because that’s the measure of success in life, how you deal with failure,” she says.
Street was hotly anticipated when it opened in 2009, and quickly gathered attention (the late critic Jonathan Gold described it as “halfway between a sophisticated cocktail party and a political act”), but by 2013 it had shuttered after “it didn’t do what it was designed or supposed to do,” says the filmmaker. Feniger adds, “I loved the food and I loved the team we created, because it was very small and intimate. Many people have come up to me (since it closed), like at Border Grill, and say how it was their favorite restaurant experience, ever.” To which she would jokingly reply, “Well you didn’t come enough, clearly.”
A decade later, Street’s model of global street food might draw comparisons to The Bear’s “chaos menu” (if you know, you know), or a wild collision of cultures. The film follows Feniger (who co-owned the short-lived restaurant with Kajsa Alger, also featured in the documentary) from the early stages of the restaurant’s construction on Highland Avenue to international locales for menu creation.
“We went to Vietnam, Shanghai and Singapore to do street food tasting,” says Lachman….
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