I love food movies. And cooking shows. And eating. In fact, I'm not sure I ever watched a food movie I didn't like (Think ones as diverse as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Fast Food Nation or Black Gold). Which isn't to say that the doc screening tonight at the Bloor is just another food flick.

May I suggest A Table in Heaven, a new doc about Manhattan's famed Le Cirque restaurant which screens as part of Hot Docs' excellent Doc Soup series. While it's certainly a story about the rise, fall and [rise, again?] of Le Cirque, the film is really much more than that.

In A Table of Heaven, director Andrew Rossi gets unprecedented access to Le Cirque founder Sirio Maccioni and his three sons, and follows them along the way as they decide to close the original Le Cirque location and open it anew in the Bloomberg Tower on Lexington Avenue. The camera gets lots of "behind the scenes" footage of key meetings (and decisions), family rivalries and disfunctions.

It's almost better than watching a Wes Anderson flick.

A Table in Heaven screens tonight (December 5th) at 6:30 and 9:15pm at the Bloor Cinema. Image from the New York Times